Could marketing with AI help you gain a competitive advantage?
By Robyn Sachs, President & CEO of RMR & Associates, Inc.
Everyone’s talking about it! Generative AI: an emerging, disruptive technology already affecting the way you do business. Can AI immediately help you gain a competitive advantage when it comes to marketing, PR and media relations? Let’s examine that question.
Generative AI can be a valuable tool for creating and generating new, customized content such as text, images and music. It can tell stories and even craft jokes. In marketing, AI involves training machine learning models to recognize patterns in your data. Then it generates new content that has a similar style and structure. Sometimes the resulting content can be leveraged as is. Other times the content is more suited to be a starting point to help your employees become more efficient and creative. This article, for example, was written after research using AI tools, but the piece came together better written by a person.
In marketing, PR and media relations, companies are racing to find or develop solutions that will help both their customers and their own businesses. AI can increase your operating efficiencies by raising the top line, finding cost savings, automating work to eliminate repetitive and mundane tasks and freeing up human beings to do much more creative work. It can assist with creative design, client contact, developing a marketing strategy and crunching financial numbers. And chatbots or virtual assistants can extend the customer experience by providing 24/7 support: AI never gets sick or tired.
AI for reputation management
One area where AI-powered tools can greatly assist is reputation management. AI can monitor social media platforms for posts about your product or service. If there is positive feedback, customer responses can be curated as testimonials on your website. On the other hand, if a customer expresses negative sentiment in a review, a customized response can be sent in the form of a text message or e-mail, and action can be immediately taken to mitigate the problem.
Another powerful use of AI is marketing videos. AI-powered tools can streamline the editing process by analyzing raw footage and deciding which clips to keep and which ones to discard. Transcriptions of spoken content can be quickly generated, and closed captions or subtitles can be added in an automated fashion. AI can also improve conversion rates by using customer data to tailor marketing videos to a variety of target audiences.
Many AI engines are completely free to use, although there are often limitations such as usage quotas and restrictions that are imposed during peak periods. These problems can be alleviated by purchasing “credits” with an AI engine or by investing in a subscription plan. Doing so can also allow for faster response times and priority access to new features.
Potential downsides of AI
The use of AI does come with three significant downsides that should be carefully considered.
First, there are issues with bias and fairness, for example, when an AI engine is tasked to be a writing tool. Since they use algorithms instead of thought, generative AI tools can produce pieces that magnify stereotypes as opposed to the considered approach a person takes when writing. Second, AI engines are only as good as the data they are trained on. And third, the inherent lack of human judgment means that the generated results should be reviewed by a real person before putting your reputation on the line with any content.
Conclusion
Don’t be left behind in the AI opportunity: if you desire a particular task, like analysis of recurring data or development of content that reflects prior pieces, but it does not seem to exist yet, an AI solution can be trained to accomplish that mission or the functionality can be built out by a software development firm. Use AI to drive innovation for your clients. You’ll be glad you engaged with professionals who can help you navigate this uncharted territory.
Now that the AI revolution is here, it’s time to investigate how to put it to work for your business and customers. For more info on how AI can be leveraged for your organization, contact me for a FREE ASSESSMENT for your organization.
Read more of Robyn’s articles in the Washington Business Journal Leadership Trust:
https://www.bizjournals.com/washington/news/leadership-trust/robyn-sachs