How to Use Generative AI in Marketing Effectively
Could generative AI be the next step toward smarter marketing? Read on to find out.
While Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around for years, it’s the new applications such as ChatGPT and DALL·E 2 that have recently renewed discussions about the AI Revolution. Accordingly, marketing professionals have been quick to look into the tool to see if it can improve their performance. Max Kraynov, group CEO at FunCorp, focuses on how companies can use generative AI to empower more effective marketing initiatives.
Simply put, AI refers to smart machines capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. Many of us have already interacted with AI when talking to voice assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri, although typically limited their use to setting up kitchen timers or checking weather forecasts.
With the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT (generative pre-trained transformer) in November 2022, however, the capabilities of AI tools accessible to the general public dramatically increased. The tool is capable of providing text responses to nearly any request under the sun, from explaining math theories to summarizing a Simpsons episode in the style of Shakespeare.
How Can AI Assist With Your Marketing Efforts?
First of all, ChatGPT can help you reduce the time you spend drafting marketing materials. It’s capable of providing lengthy responses within seconds – far faster than any human could type. It is also quick to provide answers to questions you might have, and unlike Google, which provides links to the existing online materials, ChatGPT analyzes existing data to provide a summarized response.
In a way, ChatGPT also eliminates any scope for human error when it comes to spelling and grammar. The machine doesn’t make typos and is capable of providing well-structured text, meaning marketing professionals don’t need to ask their colleagues to proofread texts and instead can simply ask a machine to proofread any copy they wrote themselves. If a message has to cater to a certain user age (“explain it to a 5-year-old”), this can be done with just one extra request clause.
The machine doesn’t mind fulfilling mundane tasks, such as writing a high volume of short texts, for example, product descriptions for an ecommerce website. What could be a time-consuming and challenging exercise for a human, a machine completes with ease.
Finally, while AI is not yet renowned for its creativity, it can still help you to brainstorm marketing ideas based on other people’s extensive past efforts. All that’s required is for a marketing professional to learn how to ask the machine the right questions.
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Is ChatGPT The Perfect Marketing Tool?
The answer is not 100% clear, as there are certain drawbacks when it comes to using ChatGPT and other AI tools in marketing.
The key disadvantage of AI in its current state is its inability to be truly creative, which we have already touched upon. Machines are still not yet able to think like humans or even make us laugh.
Let’s play a little game. Below you see three memes. Some of them were created by humans (from the Yepp app), while others were suggested by ChatGPT (and transformed into images using DALL·E 2 – a text-to-image AI art generator that was also developed by OpenAI).
Can you guess which ones were created by real people? (See the end of the article for the answers).*
The more you use ChatGPT, the more you see how its responses are emotionless and formal. They often fail to inspire and therefore have limited use in marketing. By using AI to generate your marketing messages, you lose the opportunity to use your own brand voice, which customers should feel affiliation and loyalty to. Furthermore, if everyone were to employ ChatGPT in brand and social media marketing, it would result in a situation where every brand has the same tone of voice and no unique brand identity. When everybody is perfect, nobody is perfect.
Today’s customers value a personalized approach and human touch, which is – by definition – not possible using AI (at least, not yet). If customers were to discover a brand was using AI tools to generate their marketing messages or social media content, that brand could quickly lose customer trust and ultimately risk a PR scandal. And there are already tools that can detect if ChatGPT was used to write a text.
Speaking of human touch, AI might be good at analyzing data, but it fails to understand your customers as well as your marketing team does. While sentiment monitoring, tracking, and keywords are all tools in the AI marketers arsenal, it’s often the case that instances of sarcasm, wordplay, or colorful language can affect the accuracy at which AI ascertains tone. And right now, people understand other people and have a sense of nuance, tone, and context in a way that AI has yet to catch up to.
Unlike Google search, which provides you with links to webpages, ChatGPT generates its own responses based on the data it collects. Can we be sure this data is always 100% correct? Unfortunately, not. While it might sound persuasive, AI could use incorrect data to provide misleading information. Even ChatGPT’s responses are only as good as the body of information it has consumed during learning; a few rotten eggs here and there may spoil the result.
Finally, an unavoidable fact of life is that the majority of AI work is done behind the scenes by humans. It is primarily data markup that has to be done by low-paid laborers. This sometimes raises ethical concerns. For example, there are reports that OpenAI used outsourced Kenyan laborers, earning less than $2 per hour, in its development and that in general, “AI often relies on hidden human labor in the Global South that can often be damaging and exploitative.”
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What Are The Best Ways To Use Generative AI In Marketing?
While AI has its flaws and for now, cannot completely replace a marketing professional, it is still nevertheless capable of helping them.
To use just a few examples, AI can help generate a high volume of simple texts, such as product descriptions for an online retailer or movie summaries for an online cinema. It can also help to cut down on time spent proofreading, providing grammatically correct and well-structured pieces in a short time span.
AI is also capable of helping marketing teams with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO helps companies to increase the visibility of their websites and increase the traffic they receive from search engines. Since search engines are also machines, it’s only natural that AI could be helpful in finding the secret sauce to success here by suggesting efficient keywords to be inserted into your website content.
Finally, AI is good at analyzing large data sets. Marketing teams can therefore ask ChatGPT to analyze customers’ feedback to find common patterns that could later help them address certain concerns. AI can also analyze specific market trends and help position your business or product in a more effective way.
See More: The Year Ahead: Why Marketers Should Embrace Virtuous Advertising
Ushering in an Era of Collaboration
Note that due to the drawbacks of the AI described above, a human needs to carefully review all materials prepared by the machine.
While AI cannot (yet) replace humans or entire marketing teams, it is certainly capable of helping out with certain tasks. Just remember to review everything ChatGPT, or similar tools, produce before sharing it with the world.
However, when it comes to creativity – one of the most fundamental aspects of marketing – humans are irreplaceable, at least for now.
*Answer to the meme test above: the first and third memes were suggested by ChatGPT and visualized using DALL·E 2.
*Internal Image Source: Image generated by DALL·E 2, Yepp app.
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Image Source: Shutterstock
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