If you spend any time on social media, you know that rarely does a day pass without reading about some new, shiny AI tactic.
“Hey, marketer, did you know that AI can analyze your content and produce 100 headlines in 2.5 seconds?”
While tactics often dominate the AI discussion, we’d argue that AI success is more about leading with strategies. That’s where the true power lies, right? It helps you break free from time-consuming tasks and focus on higher-level strategic thinking and planning.
We recently caught up with our internal content marketing expert, Matt Sailor, to answer the question: How is AI changing digital marketing? He also shared six ways that marketers can use it more strategically to support growth.
1. Create more A/B strategies to test
Like many marketers, here at Act-On, we’re constantly testing our email programs. For example, we recently added a new call to action to an email promoting an upcoming webinar. This small change increased click-through rates and resulted in much higher conversions. However, those results wouldn’t have been possible if we hadn’t taken the time to ask: What changes could make a difference?
A lack of time often stands in the way of asking these questions. You’re busy, and if you don’t have time to strategize and test your ideas, opportunities for new growth are limited.
“Let’s say you have a top-of-the-funnel lead nurture sequence,” says Matt. “Maybe you’ve run that sequence for some time, and it performs decently, but you believe it could do better. You could use AI to create different subject lines, calls to action, and other variables to test. Since you’re not doing all the manual work of creating that content, you’re free to focus on strategy and implementation.”
As a human, you create high-level strategies and ideas, but then you use AI to support you with the implementation.
2. Free up time for thought leadership strategies
Creating thought leadership is important for growth and awareness, but it’s also very time-consuming. For each piece of content, you need to define the individuals you want to interview, conduct the interview, write the content, refine, publish, and promote. Every marketing team has limits, and because creating this type of content is so time-intensive, those limits are easy to reach.
“With thought leadership, it’s about using AI to handle tasks that interfere with the deep thinking required to create the content,” says Matt. “Maybe you need more time to interview experts, but you’re tied up writing a bunch of new email sequences. If you let AI draft some of those sequences, you can speed up the process and free up time for those interviews.”
You can also use AI to help with the promotion and distribution of your thought leadership content. For example, AI can review a piece of thought leadership content, pull out the main ideas, and write the first drafts of the social posts you’ll use to promote the piece. Your marketing team can then review, edit, and finalize the posts.
“AI is a quantity game,” says Matt. “You can use AI to get part of the way, like creating first drafts of social posts, but you need a human to bridge the gap from quantity to quality.”
3. Find gaps in your brand guidelines and strategies
With every technology tool, there are strengths and weaknesses. One of AI’s strengths is its ability to review and interpret large amounts of data. This capability can support higher-level tasks, such as creating and refining brand guidelines.
“You can feed AI samples of your content and ask it to analyze elements like tone, style, and messaging,” says Matt. “It can then review all your content samples and suggest guidelines to include.”
This capability is helpful for establishing new brand guidelines but also for updating your existing ones. For instance, you could have AI analyze content, identify guidelines to include in the document, and then review it against your current brand guidelines to spot gaps. If your sample content consistently uses humor to engage the audience, but it’s not mentioned in your voice and tone section of the guidelines, you could add it to make sure future content is consistent.
4. Become more present during strategic meetings
How many meetings are on your calendar this week? And if you’re being honest, are you mentally present for all of them? Maybe you are, but one thing that can help you be even more present is delegating certain tasks, such as note-taking.
“Applications like Zoom can automatically take notes for you with its AI assistant,” says Matt. “Other platforms offer similar features and can even annotate and provide some structure to help you process and organize your notes.”
Eliminating the need to document every detail during a meeting allows your mind to focus more deeply on the discussion. AI can also help with deeper preparation before meetings.
For example, remember the thought leadership we discussed earlier? You often need to prepare questions for those meetings, and marketers typically aren’t experts in every topic they cover. That’s why we tap subject matter experts, right?
You can use AI to help you brainstorm questions and consider new angles that you might have missed when preparing for meetings.
5. Back up your social strategies at scale
We’ve already suggested using AI to break down longer content pieces, like thought leadership, into social media posts. But you can also use it to support your distribution strategy further.
Many marketers aim to have their internal teams, such as sales and leadership, actively posting on social media. However, these teams are often busy and may not see themselves as writers. These challenges can prevent them from distributing your content.
“You can ask AI to brainstorm 40 posts for your SDR team, and then say, ‘Hey, we came up with these post ideas for you,’ and then allow them to decide which ones they want to use,” says Matt.
You can repeat this process for all of the internal personas you want to post social content for, eliminating the typical barriers that hold them back, such as lack of time and uncertainty about what to write.
6. Use AI to upskill faster
Marketers are constantly learning new skills. For example, consider the crazy fact that two decades ago, iPhones didn’t exist. A decade before that, the internet was still in its early stages, and now we’re experiencing the AI boom. You might be asking, How is AI reshaping marketing? One answer is that it’s providing the ability to upskill.
The reality is that many marketing departments don’t have as many internal and external resources as they need. And that leaves your team pulling double duty, doing some tasks they haven’t fully learned yet. As a result, getting over that learning curve quickly is important.
“We have an AI platform [Riverside FM] that can take a video conference and give us a pretty functional edit,” says Matt. “We can then take that footage and make the fine adjustments, but at the same time, we’re learning a new skill. The AI tool is getting us part of the way and saving time during that learning process.”
Matt also notes that using these types of tools doesn’t eliminate the need for experts like video editors. You still need that human to move you from “quantity”“ to a “quality” result.
Choosing AI plus human … over AI minus human
As marketers ask, How is AI changing digital marketing? and sort through the many potential use cases, Matt recommends staying focused on strategy first. He also suggests keeping a close eye on accuracy, as AI can be inconsistent.
“We’ve all heard the horror stories about Google’s first AI search results telling you to mix bleach with vinegar to clean a washing machine, which would create a potentially deadly combination,” says Matt. “This is an extreme example, but the point is that AI needs human oversight, and you always need to question what it creates.”
That’s why Matt advocates “AI plus human” rather than “AI minus human.” This allows you to focus more on strategy and to delegate the drudgery to support you in reaching your marketing goals.
Want more ideas for balancing AI with a human touch? Check out our unscripted interview with top revenue marketing leaders as they discuss the modern buyer’s journey and how to use AI to drive B2B success.