This is a tired line at this point, but It’s nearly impossible to avoid AI today — especially in marketing. Our industry seems to be an early and increasingly avid adopter of AI tools. But how has artificial intelligence, specifically Gen AI, changed the way we work? And overall, is it for better or worse?
Read on to explore how AI has changed — and will continue to change — digital marketing as we know it, as well as a list of top AI tools to consider if you’re yet to fold any into your workflows.
How AI Has Changed the Digital Marketing Landscape As We Knew It
The proliferation of AI has changed the marketing landscape in many ways. There are lots of folks who would argue it’s been for the worse but an increasingly large amount are also singing its praises. Yes, AI offers many advantages, but it also introduces real challenges that are important to address.
The Pros of AI In Marketing
AI in general has been invaluable for automating tedious tasks. In marketing, it works wonders for tracking and reporting on digital marketing campaign metrics — which has been a thing long before generative AI came around. But speaking of Gen AI, tools like ChatGPT now have a role to play in content creation.
Both of these benefits of AI tools allow marketing teams to focus more on strategic initiatives that could help them move toward enhanced business outcomes and even drive revenue growth.
Challenges AI Has Introduced To Marketers
Benefits aside, it’s equally important to talk about the challenges Gen AI has brought to the tables of marketers and the industry as a whole:
- Overreliance On Marketing Automation (Hampering Creativity): If you’re not careful, dependence on AI-driven tools can lead to cookie-cutter marketing and advertising campaigns. This can ultimately stifle creativity among teams and put personalized storytelling at risk, which are both crucial for unique brand positioning.
- Quality Control Concerns: AI-generated content or campaigns might lack nuance, context or cultural sensitivity, leading to inaccuracies or missteps that could harm brand reputation.
- Ethical Issues: The use of AI in marketing raises concerns about data privacy, transparency and manipulation, particularly when algorithms exploit user data without explicit consent.
- Job Displacement: As AI tools take over repetitive and analytical tasks, there’s a risk of reducing demand for marketing jobs, which brings uncertainty about the future of the industry.
Top AI Marketing Tools To Support Your Marketing Strategy
There are plenty of AI-powered tools out there these days — way too many to try them all. That said, some are just too good at what they do to ignore, so I’ve gone ahead and compiled a list of some of the top AI content marketing and analytics tools by category to help make your choice a bit easier.
AI Systems and Tools For Content Marketing and Creation
contentmarketing.ai
The brainchild of veteran content marketers, contentmarketing.ai supports you during every step of a marketing or advertising campaign journey — from target audience briefing to building content, distributing, project management and more.
The platform is designed for marketers who want to elevate their content strategies, expedite production timelines and maintain high-quality outputs with fewer resources.
By combining AI technology with Brafton’s established content marketing expertise, the platform offers a reliable and familiar feel that’s both easy-to-use and intuitive. Pre-built tools reduce the learning curve associated with AI adoption, allowing marketing teams to enhance their strategies effectively and responsibly.
Grammarly
This cloud-based, AI powered typing assistant is in many marketers’ toolbelt already — and for good reason. No matter where you’re typing, Grammarly helps enhance written communication by identifying and suggesting corrections for various language issues, such as:
- Grammar, Spelling and Punctuation Checks: Detects and corrects errors in grammar, spelling and punctuation to ensure accurate writing.
- Clarity Enhancements: Offers suggestions to improve sentence structure and conciseness, making writing clearer and more understandable.
- Tone Detection and Adjustments: Identifies the tone of the text and suggests modifications to align with the intended audience, ensuring appropriate delivery.
While Grammarly does use generative AI, it’s different from other tools in its category in that it doesn’t write the content for you, but helps make the content you write better.
AI Tools For Marketing Automation
HubSpot Breeze AI
HubSpot Breeze AI is an integrated artificial intelligence suite designed to enhance marketing automation by streamlining tasks, enriching customer data and providing actionable insights. It’s comprised of three key components that make it great at what it does:
- Breeze Copilot: An AI-powered assistant to boost productivity across marketing, sales and service teams by aiding content creation, research and even summarizing CRM records.
- Breeze Agents: These AI-driven tools automate end-to-end tasks. For marketers, the Content Agent generates high-quality content like landing pages, podcasts, blogs and case studies, tailored to the brand’s voice and informed by CRM data. The Social Media Agent crafts posts based on company details, audience insights and industry best practices.
- Breeze Intelligence: Enhances the Smart CRM by enriching company and contact records, identifying buyer intent from website visits and optimizing form conversion rates through data enrichment and form shortening features.
Zapier
Zapier is a leading automation platform that connects users to thousands of web applications to facilitate seamless data flow and task automation without coding. That’s right, you don’t need to be a tech genius or software engineer to reap the benefits of Zapier. For marketers, there are tons of ways to create custom “Zaps” to streamline tasks. For example, you can connect various marketing tools, such as CRMs, email marketing platforms and social media apps, to create a unified system that enhances efficiency and reduces manual data entry.
AI Marketing Tools For Data Analysis
IBM Planning Analytics & Watson Customer Experience Analytics
One of Watson’s successors, IBM Planning Analytics is an AI-infused business performance management solution that integrates planning, forecasting and reporting functionalities. It enables organizations to automate data collection, consolidation and analysis, providing real-time insights into business performance. But why is it great for marketers? I’m glad you asked:
- Holistic Campaign Planning: IBM Planning Analytics allows marketing teams to integrate strategic plans with external market factors, providing visibility into customer purchasing trends that enable data-driven decisions regarding new products or marketing mix adjustments.
- Advanced Market Segmentation: The platform facilitates granular market segmentation and SWOT analyses, empowering marketers to plan, track and analyze campaigns in real-time, and to understand performance metrics against benchmarks for ongoing optimization.
Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence and data visualization tool that allows users to connect, analyze and visualize data from various sources. It’s another tool for enhancing data-driven decision-making, but it’s from Microsoft and works tremendously with other popular apps from the company — many of which you may already be using. Some features include:
- Interactive Dashboards: Users can create visually engaging dashboards and reports with drag-and-drop functionality, offering a user-friendly experience for non-technical users.
- Advanced Analytics: Power BI integrates with Microsoft tools like Excel and Azure Machine Learning to offer advanced analytical capabilities, including predictive modeling.
For Personalization and Enhanced Customer Experience
involve.me
Have you ever needed interactive content such as forms, quizzes, surveys or calculators? involve.me is a no-code platform that enables businesses to create just those — and to personalize them on a granular level by generating individualized responses and feedback based on user input:
- Hidden Fields: This feature allows the incorporation of existing contact details into interactive content, enabling personalized greetings and tailored user experiences without repeatedly asking for the same information.
- Logic Jumps: This functionality enables the display of different content based on user responses, allowing for customized user journeys that align with individual preferences and behaviors.
Klaviyo
Klaviyo is a marketing automation platform that enables businesses to deliver personalized experiences across channels such as email, SMS and mobile push notifications by centralizing customer data and leveraging AI-driven insights. How? Mainly because of its robust Customer Profiles feature:
- Comprehensive Customer Profiles: Klaviyo consolidates data from various sources, creating detailed profiles that include behavioral and transactional information. With such a holistic view of that customer-level data, precise segmentation and personalized messaging comes much easier.
- Personalization Tags: Klaviyo supports the use of personalization variables, or tags, in marketing messages. These tags can be incorporated into emails, SMS/MMS messages and push notifications to customize content for subscribers.
The Future of AI In Marketing
According to Gartner, 30% of outbound marketing messages from large organizations will be synthetically generated by next year (2025). To ensure this shift is a positive one, humans will need to continue playing a role in regulating AI, and supervising and moderating its output.
Ahead of trying any of the tools covered here, Gartner says you should identify relevant risks to your organization beforehand. And Brafton says once you start streamlining, to keep your eyes on honesty and integrity. Use AI absolutely, but use it responsibly.
