How AI is Transforming Digital Marketing
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of digital marketing and daily life, assisting with tasks ranging from workplace support to personal activities like organizing meal plans and analysing data. Among these AI tools, ChatGPT, a large language model developed by OpenAI, has been particularly impactful in enhancing productivity.
AI tools may have the capacity to save workers an average of 1-2 hours per day (Adecco Group; People Matters Global). As AI technology advances, it opens up new possibilities across various industries, including digital marketing. In the digital marketing space, AI-powered tools are transforming the way businesses interact with customers, create content, and optimize campaigns. As AI develops its abilities will only grow – let’s explore how your business could benefit from AI.
What is AI?
An AI application is a tool or platform which uses artificial intelligence, either partially or fully, in order to automate responses and carry out tasks. AI is essentially a large machine which sets out the goal of thinking how a human would.
With their ability to analySe large datasets faster than ever before, and use this information to assist future actions. ChatGPT can read, digest and analyse large chunks of text and use this to predict the formation of future text. The more information fed to an AI application the smarter and more powerful it becomes!
Generative AI vs. Artificial Intelligence
There are two key differences between Generative AI, and Artificial Intelligence (AI), Artificial Intelligence is the automatic generative process, meaning the machine works without human intervention. It is a combination of machine learning, neural networks and deep learning. Alternatively generative AI is a crucial subset of AI, whereby the goal is to produce new content based on user input. This is possible due to large language models (LLMs) and extensive machine learning models which are trained on large datasets, allowing them to produce images, text and even code!
Digital Marketing and AI: A powerful pairing
“51% of digital marketers currently use AI, with 22% planning to use it in the future”
How can AI assist your digital marketing efforts?
- Make decisions faster
- Brainstorm Ideas
- Improve content
- Identify patterns and trends
- Customer service
What application is right for you?
When considering the power of AI, and how multifaceted these applications are. Thinking about the goal of using AI can allow us to determine the correct application and approach to take.
When choosing an AI application, there are several factors to consider, such as the cost, the functionality of the specific application, your location, its scalability alongside your business, and potential integrations.
So once you’ve considered these factors, let’s explore the capabilities of these applications.
AI for SEO:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is essential for any business, but it’s not always easy to navigate, and LLMs have changes the way people search. Fortunately, AI is finding smart ways to help simplify and support the process.
Blog articles are a key point for success when thinking of SEO, but when you have multiple blogs and large chunks of text it can often become overwhelming to meet all the SEO requirements. One thing ChatGPTforSEO can aid with is meta titles and descriptions; with its rapid ability to consume large texts, the time saved here could be a game changer.
Looking Beyond ChatGPT for SEO:
However, when we look beyond ChatGPT for SEO we unlock multiple platforms which can make SEO even simpler:
- Surfer SEO is great for generating the best headings and keywords to use.
- Semrush is an amazing tool on the AI market, with the ability to provide an SEO writing assistant, and meta-description creation.
- AliAI uses a more complex approach to analyse the code on the website and optimise individual pages, or site wide optimizations
- YoastSEO, although not a fully fledged AI tool the application uses AI to point you to direct key points to improve your SEO, and is an amazing tool if you’re new to SEO.
- GooglePageSpeedInsights analyzes existing data sets and your web pages to recommend improvements for optimizing your website’s performance.
Recently we ran an SEO case study on our own website, with the assistance of YoastSEO and ChatGPT for SEO. With these ease of use tools, we were able to identify key areas of improvement across blogs and pages and can see our traffic thank us for it.
Training your own ChatGPT model for client strategy:
A new way we have been exploring using AI for digital marketing is for strategy purposes. As we know with AI the more information you give it the more accurate, and informed answers it can provide.
Recently we worked at training our own ChatGPT model on, publicly available, client data and goals; providing it with the website, social media data, and context; this allowed ChatGPT to use a goal orientated mindset to provide a strategy with detailed targeting personals for each campaign. A real game changer for media buying plans and designated KPIs.
AI for content creation and copywriting:
Generative AI is the ability to produce content, images, graphics and even audio, without getting your camera out, but by simply prompting an AI model.
Often you may have it expressed that ChatGPT can ‘sound a bit AI’, however by unlocking the multiple different applications out there this has been thought of and tackled.
So… instead of ChatGPT for copywriting why not try:
- Bard, generated by google,
- Perplexity.AI uses the web to further inform up to date copy and responses
- Paragraph rewriter, can take the copy you’ve been working on and level it up!
Data Gathering and predictive analytics:
AI now has the ability to take the data you give it and identify trends to provide predictive analytics.
This unlocks a whole new game for scaling opportunities!
Currently, Google Analytics (GA4) uses predictive AI analytics to help you learn about your customers and access more accurate targeting.
The Best Practices for Using AI:
How detailed is the information you’re giving AI?
You get what you put in with AI, if you provide detailed instructions, questions, and data, your AI will have access to the tools it needs to give you the answers you’re looking for. Don’t be afraid to ask follow up questions, and ensure you have understood the answer given and agree that the information is correct.
Some Top Tips:
- Be direct and give specific instructions.
- Split up the information you want into groups, focus on specific chunks and you’ll get more detailed holistic answers.
- Specify the voice and tone – who are you speaking to? And how would you like it to come across?
- Specify the country the question applies to, this will allow for location context, (currency, laws, guidance, etc.) to be added to the response.
- Ask those important follow up questions.
Fact Check the Content!
As we’ve talked about, AI can be super powerful and full of information—but it’s not perfect. It’s always a good idea to double-check the facts and do your own research to make sure everything holds up. ChatGPT’s ability to fact-check has been analysed, and studies have found that nearly half of the information it provides can be inaccurate or incomplete (Poynter).
We’ve discussed how powerful AI is so how does it make these errors?
The information given to AI can come from anywhere and anyone, there’s no requirement to confirm the information provided is correct, complete, or unbiased so the machine learns from this information, and may then later provide false information.
Falling short when it comes to fact checking can have serious implications to your SEO, if you fail to comply with E-E-A-T guidelines, this could mean your page is demoted or even removed!
Tip: Fact check your AI responses!
Be Aware of Limitations, and Prepare Ahead:
Although AI can contribute to some serious heavy lifting, there are areas where it falls short.
Current it can’t:
- Show Empathy
- Think Creatively
- Offer Critical Thinking
- Operate Fully Without Human Intervention
Staying aware of some of the limitations of AI, can allow you to pre-plan and give detailed prompts, and understand the knowledge AI provides.
However, we are seeing some improvements in these areas. Whereby, Auto-GPT is able to use the GPT API, and function autonomously without human intervention. It may be worth trying Auto-GPT for things which require continuous updates like debugging or coding.
Concluding Digital Marketing and AI:
AI is ever evolving and learning from the information we provide, some worry that AI may make jobs replaceable. However, we’ve demonstrated some key areas where AI falls short and human cognition comes into the equation. It’s important we know the benefits and short-comings of AI so we can save time and work more efficiently.
If you want to stay up to date with AI advancements and how this changes day-to-day, articles like AI News and AI Magazine are great ways to think ahead and keep your knowledge fresh.
