AI in Marketing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is sometimes praised as a magic wand to solve all your issues, which it is not. It’s also not a human sized robot that can think, like the Terminator. 

It’s a tool. A really, really useful tool when you use it right, and a really, really embarrassing one when you don’t. You know those LinkedIn posts that start with “In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing”? ChatGPT wrote that. And everyone can tell. Because AI, left to its own devices, defaults to the most bland, corporate, soul-sucking version of whatever you asked for. 

When you actually learn to collaborate with AI, it stops being a threat and starts being a superpower. It handles the heavy lifting so you can focus on the stuff that actually requires a human. AI can write you 50 ad headlines in three seconds. It can’t tell you which one will make your specific audience actually feel something. That’s still you.

The marketers winning right now aren’t the ones resisting AI or blindly trusting it. They’re the ones treating it like a junior team member. Someone who is capable and fast, but in serious need of direction, editing, and a strong cup of human oversight. 

“I treat AI like an infinite amount of work experience placements. This helps me ensure that I am using it responsibly and not sharing any information that would be dangerous. I would never give someone on work experience sensitive or financial information, and I’m not putting that into an AI LLM either” – Hannah Moody.

And honestly? The businesses that will thrive are the ones who understand that AI doesn’t replace human connection. It amplifies it. If you use the time it saves you to actually talk to your customers, create work that means something, and inject personality into places that used to be filled with generic filler.

What even is AI?

AI can be broadly classified into three categories.

Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) refers to AI systems designed to perform specific tasks. Examples include virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, and recommendation algorithms used by platforms like Netflix and Amazon. 

This kind of AI has been in tools for years, and isn’t anything new. It’s just before the AI boom, we didn’t care that it was ‘AI’, we just wanted to know what the features are and how they helped us. 

Then, we have the future. The AI that people are referring to when they say “AI is scary”. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) this represents AI systems that can understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a broad range of tasks, much like human intelligence. It is not yet a reality, but remains the ultimate goal of AI research. 

In marketing, AGI would enable machines to adapt to new situations, learn from experience, and autonomously develop strategies, making it a game-changer for the industry.

How are customers using AI? 

AI is transforming the way consumers search for information. There has been a significant shift from traditional search engines to AI-driven platforms, this underscores the importance of integrating AI into marketing strategies. Brands that fail to adapt risk being left behind as younger generations increasingly rely on AI for their decision-making processes.

Marketers Using AI efficiently 

Today’s marketers juggle multiple roles, from content creation to analytics, often overseeing several campaigns simultaneously. AI has been a game-changer, significantly reducing the time spent on manual tasks. The right tools can help marketers save hours each day, effectively doubling their productivity and enabling them to dedicate more time to high-level strategy.

However, this is NOT the case currently. 

While 80% of marketers feel pressure to adopt AI, only 6% have fully embedded it into their workflows. This gap is creating what they call a “productivity squeeze,” where AI increases output but also raises expectations, making jobs harder as time savings are immediately reallocated to more complex work.

AI Tools for Marketing

AI has been integrated into various marketing tools for years. The hype has picked up more recently, but popular tools like Grammarly, SEMrush, HubSpot, and Salesforce have had AI elements improving user experience and efficiency for a long time.

Generative AI tools have been making waves in content creation, allowing marketers to generate content in a fraction of the time. However, the rapid creation has led to a decensorisation in audiences when it comes to AI slop. Putting more pressure on marketers to not just use these tools but to make sure they know how to use AI tools correctly, otherwise, you’ll save time but lose your audience in the process.

Ways to Use AI in Marketing

AI offers numerous applications in marketing, from brainstorming and research to data analysis and content generation. Here are some practical ways you can incorporate AI into your work processes today:

Quality Assurance

Use AI tools to summarise what a document you’ve worked on is about, to ensure it is covering all the points you want it to. For example, you can upload a blog or PDF to a platform like Google Drive and use AI to extract key insights, ensuring your content is comprehensive and aligned with what you have created it to cover.

Data Analysis

AI can help marketers interpret complex data sets, such as large tables of cost-benefit analysis. By leveraging AI, you can quickly identify important trends and insights, allowing you to make informed decisions.

Objective Reading

AI can provide an unbiased analysis of text, evaluating tone, sentiment, and other factors. This is particularly useful when reviewing content that you’re already familiar with, to ensure it resonates with your target audience.

AI for SEO

What even is SEO?

Typically, when people talk about SEO, they are still talking about traditional search. AI LLMs can be used to help with keyword research, topic ideation, question mining, and so much more. 

Intelligent Keyword Clustering (Not Just Lists)

The old way: Export a list of 5,000 keywords from a tool, sort by volume, and write separate articles for each.

The AI way: Use AI to group keywords by search intent and topic, then create one authoritative pillar page that answers multiple related queries.

Question Mining from AI Search Patterns

The old way: Manually scraping questions from a few websites. Alternatively, mass exporting from a website (like AlsoAsked, Answer the Public, Frase) but humans can only review a handful due to time limitations.

The AI way: Prompt tracking tools pull thousands of prompts in one second. Mass exporting from a website and AI summarising the questions for a human to review.

Competitor Gap Analysis with AI

The Old Way: Manually open 10 competitor pages in separate tabs. Skim each one. Try to remember what they cover that you don’t. Miss 80% of the gaps because human working memory is limited.

The AI Way: AI compares your content against top-ranking competitors and delivers a precise gap analysis: topics you’re missing entirely, questions you answer poorly, and structural differences that affect AI extraction. Get a prioritised list of what to add, not a vague feeling that competitors are “doing more.”

AI for GEO

What even is GEO?

This is a new term, which means Generative Engine Optimisation. It is the practice of structuring content to be easily understood, cited, and recommended by AI-powered search engines (like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity).

Since the launch of AI LLMs, the way people search online has changes. This means that the way you are found online has also changed. You may not be found on a SERP, it may be in the answer on an LLM. You SEO best practicies will help your GEO, however to ensure you aren’t losing visibility there are a few things you may want to stop doing:

Stop Producing Thin Content at Scale

The Old Way: Publish 50 shallow blog posts per month. More content = more rankings.

The AI Way: LLMs were trained on the web—they’ve seen your low-quality content and discounted it. Fewer, deeper, better-sourced pieces outperform volume plays.

Stop Treating Structured Data as Optional

The Old Way: Schema markup is “nice to have.” Skip it to save developer time.

The AI Way: Schema is hygiene in 2026. If your pages don’t have it, you’re making AI systems work harder to understand your content—and they’ll take the path of least resistance to a competitor who made it easier.

Stop Measuring Only Traffic

The Old Way: Google Analytics is your north star. If traffic drops, SEO is failing.

The AI Way: Zero-click is now the norm for informational queries. Measure brand mentions and citations in AI-generated answers. You can win visibility without winning clicks—and that visibility drives future traffic.

AI for Advertising

Many advertising platforms already have AI tools built into them, these are the tools that they keep shoving down your neck whenever you go into any campaign manager. As many of these tools are built in, there isn’t much action to take for optimising. However, you need to know which platforms have which tools so you know where to spend your budget.

Audience Creation & Expansion

Upload your customer data once. AI automatically generates dozens of high-propensity audience segments based on behaviour, not demographics. Continuously discovers new audience clusters humans would never find (e.g., “people who browse at 2 AM on mobile and abandoned cart twice”). Dynamically expands and contracts segments based on real-time performance.

Meta Advantage+ Audiences, Google Optimized Targeting, Amazon Audience Builder

Budget Allocation Across Channels

AI allocates budget and programmatic display in real-time across. Spend shifts to the best-performing channel at the hour level, not the month level. Automatically reducing spend when performance dips and increases when signals are strong. Respects hard budget caps you set.

Google, Meta, TikTok, Amazon

Campaign Structure Automation

This isn’t currently featured in any major campaign builder, however it’s where the industry is heading. Tell AI your goal (e.g., “acquire new customers for under $30 CPA with a $10k daily budget”). AI automatically determines optimal campaign structure: how many campaigns, ad groups per campaign, ads per ad group. Generates naming conventions and tracking parameters. Sets up experiments automatically. Setup time: 10 minutes instead of 8 hours.

The Future of AI in Marketing

From AI-driven ad campaigns to automated customer service, the possibilities are endless. However, with this potential comes the responsibility to use AI ethically and transparently, ensuring that it enhances rather than replaces human creativity and decision-making.

By embracing AI, marketers can unlock new levels of efficiency, creativity, and insight, driving growth and success in the digital age.

AI Digital Marketing

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