Simple Steps to AI Proficiency for Marketers
As a seasoned marketer who's devoting countless hours to studying AI's impact on marketing, I'm sharing 6 foundational steps to infuse generative AI into your marketing strategy. Watch for more in the coming weeks.
Professor Ethan Mollick of Wharton forecasts that 80-90% of all business documents will start as machine-generated drafts. In the realm of marketing, if you're not utilizing AI for at least half of your consumer-facing content first drafts, you're falling behind.
Here’s a 6-step blueprint to expedite your team's mastery of generative AI. Read the below and score yourself and your team to assess how far along you are in this journey.
🔍 1. Decipher Your Brand's Voice with AI
Instruct your strategy and brand teams to use conversational AI tools for insights into your brand voice and to generate alternative taglines. Have them input anonymized customer behavioral data into AI analytics tools to identify and segment audiences. Make sure they share the AI prompts that guided these analyses.
📝 2. AI-Driven First Drafts
Urge each marketer to generate a first draft of a deliverable—be it a headline, ad copy, image, article, or email—using an AI tool. Request to see the original draft, the prompts used, and understand the subsequent refinements made. This is not an outsourcing task for your agency partners; it’s an in-house exercise.
📈 3. Experiment with AI on Ad Platforms
Establish ghost accounts on major advertising platforms (Google, Meta, Amazon, TikTok, etc.) with an experimental budget. Direct your growth marketing teams to utilize every AI-driven automation feature, from copy creation to creative optimization and bidding that these platforms offer. Benchmark these results against your current campaigns.
📱 4. AI-Enhanced Social Media Calendar
Ask your social media team to use AI tools to generate alternative copy for each planned post, aligned with your brand voice and adorned with AI created captivating headlines and visuals. Assess the AI-created content as potential augmentations or enhancements to the content in your existing calendar.
⚖️ 5. Addressing AI Bias
Collaborate with your legal team to draft guidelines for identifying and mitigating bias in AI-generated content. Offer internal training sessions to equip your team with the skills to spot and combat bias, and identify AI tools that can aid this process.
🤝 6. Agency AI Capabilities
Proactively engage with your agency partners to understand their AI roadmap—what they offer today, future investments, and their partnerships. Examine how their AI capabilities could enrich your joint projects.
By following these steps, you're not just staying afloat in the AI revolution—you're surfing its waves, positioning your brand for unparalleled growth and most importantly, taking your team on an exciting AI journey with you.