AI and Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is artificial intelligence (AI)?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a field of computer science that works towards creating intelligent machines that can complete activities that generally require human intelligence. The benefit of AI to digital marketers is that it aims to create systems with human-like thinking skills. These skills include the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from experience.

Full sentient AI hasn't been created (yet!). However, there are a number of task-based automations that were once handled by humans that are now being controlled by machines, with inputs from humans. The efficiencies and opportunities that machine-actioned tasks can bring to digital marketing is significant. And by letting AI handle these tasks, it frees up marketers for more cerebral tasks, like making strategic decisions for the course of action on a campaign, and for more creative tasks, like writing a creative brief.

How AI can help digital marketers

Here are some of the ways that AI can impact and assist digital marketing strategists:

• Boost productivity: AI assists in automating a variety of jobs, meaning that a digital marketer’s own time and efforts can be redirected to more difficult, creative, and strategic tasks. In a recent global survey of senior marketing leaders, the DMI noted that over 90% of respondents reported either moderate or significant boosts to productivity on their team following the adoption of AI tools. 
• Drive efficiencies: AI can easily handle menial and repetitious activities such as data input and sorting through huge amounts of data.
• Unearth insights: AI can assist organizations in eliminating guesswork. Because AI can help them analyze data and unearth insights, organizations can make data-driven decisions. Many analytics tools have an automated insights section. They can help marketers understand new and emerging trends in their data.
• Open new marketing opportunities: Because AI can quickly analyze massive data sets, it can help identify opportunities that might otherwise lie hidden in the data. And finally…
• Increase ROI: By increasing efficiencies, reducing costs, and opening new sales opportunities, AI tools can help increase an organization’s return on investment (or ROI). 

The release and rapid adoption of generative AI tools has had a significant impact across digital businesses with marketing teams often being among the earliest adopters. Generative AI algorithms are designed to create new data that resembles a set of given data. Unlike traditional rule-based algorithms that execute specific tasks, generative AI algorithms take data and generate new outputs that weren’t part of the original data set. This is why it is referred to as generative AI: it generates new outputs rather than just re-assembling existing inputs. 

The role of the human 

AI-driven tools can assist organizations in their marketing work. It offers new ways to complete tedious and repetitive tasks. 

However, there are some tasks that a computer will simply struggle to complete. For example, AI can struggle with effectively teaching new employees or with creativity. And it may not be tuned into the nuances of content or branding. So these tools still need inputs and direction from humans to deliver on marketing goals. 

After all, many of the AI-centered tools won't have the same contextual understanding of an organization or consumers that humans have. The tools only have access to the digital data that they are connected to. Because they can't see or use the insights that an organization has access to, the tools need to be fed with inputs to help get the results required.

That being said, AI continues to advance at a remarkable speed, and is becoming more creative. For example:

• Open AI’s Chat GPT can write screenplays and articles
• DALL-E can create its own unique art, images, and photos

However, at this stage of its development, much of the AI used in digital marketing is for more mundane or labor-intensive tasks. In fact, a lot of the technology is machine learning, which is a subset of AI typically requiring human input for successful execution of tasks.