You might be nervous about using artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace, given everything you’ve heard about this new technology coming to take everyone’s jobs away. While it’s true that AI will change how people perform jobs across all industries, most experts agree that your best strategy to deal with AI is not to fight it, but to harness its considerable power.
If you’re in the field of digital marketing, you’re actually one of the lucky ones. AI sometimes seems like it was made for digital marketing: AI tools analyze data, automate processes, personalize experiences, and optimize marketing strategies. They help businesses enhance customer engagement, increase efficiency, and improve campaign performance. Think of it as your personal assistant, not as your boss! Below, you’ll find tips and advice on how best to use AI in digital marketing.
Different Ways AI is Used in Digital Marketing
Let’s look at how a digital marketer can use AI in nearly every step of the marketing process.
Content Marketing
AI can enhance content marketing by automating content creation, optimizing strategy, and personalizing engagement.
- Content creation: This is the low-hanging fruit, and the aspect you’ve most likely already experimented with. AI tools can generate blog posts, social media content, and ad copy quickly. It can also create charts, data visualization, videos, graphics, and infographics.
- SEO: AI can optimize your content by identifying keywords and rewriting text for better rankings. It can also help you come up with SEO-friendly headers. You can refresh old content with AI-suggested improvements instead of always creating new material.
- Content personalization: AI can tailor content to different audience segments for better engagement. It analyzes user behavior by tracking their activity on the site, and suggests personalized recommendations for further reading, products, or newsletters they can sign up for.
Predictive Analytics for Customer Insights
AI predicts content trends and recommends topics that will perform well in a couple of useful ways:
- By analyzing historical data, audience behavior, and competitor performance, AI can identify patterns and suggest high-engagement topics tailored to specific audiences.
- AI can refine content recommendations over time by continuously learning from user interactions, ensuring that the suggested topics align with evolving interests and industry shifts.
Chatbots
Chatbots get a bad rap, but they’re much more sophisticated than they used to be, and much better at guessing what the customer wants in fewer steps. AI-powered chatbots can make digital marketing easier by doing the following:
- Interactive engagement, even with a bot, keeps users on the site longer.
- They help siphon the most frequently asked questions, automating the straightforward ones and determining which need human intervention.
- They collect user data.
Social Media
Social media management is both an art and a science. No matter how brilliant your social media manager is with the former, AI can always help with the latter:
- Optimized posting times: AI evaluates user activity and engagement patterns to recommend the best times for posting, ensuring maximum visibility and interaction.
- Automated scheduling and consistency: AI-powered tools help schedule posts across multiple platforms in advance, ensuring a consistent content flow without manual effort.
- Content generation and hashtag suggestions: AI can craft compelling captions, recommend trending hashtags, and even generate image or video content ideas that align with audience interests. It can also optimize the posts, depending on the venue. For example, I asked ChatGPT the following: “Boylston Farmers’ Cooperative, a collection of Massachusetts-area farms, is going to start offering baked goods. What is the best social media text to use for posting in X, Instagram, and LinkedIn?” (Note: Boylston Farmers’ Cooperative is a fictitious business.) This was its reply:
Here are platform-optimized social media posts for X (Twitter), Instagram, and LinkedIn:
X (Twitter):
🚨 Exciting news! 🚨 Boylston Farmers’ Cooperative is now offering freshly baked goods made with locally sourced ingredients! 🥖🍪 Stop by and taste the difference. #SupportLocal #FarmFresh
Instagram:
🌾🥖 Big News! We’re bringing freshly baked goodness to Boylston Farmers’ Cooperative! 🍞✨ From rustic breads to delicious pastries, every bite is made with love and local ingredients. Come taste the farm-to-table difference!
📍 Find us at [location or website]
🛒 Shop fresh, eat local! #BoylstonFarmers #FarmFreshBaking #SupportLocal
LinkedIn:
Boylston Farmers’ Cooperative is expanding our offerings! In addition to farm-fresh produce, we’re now baking up delicious, locally sourced baked goods for our community. From hearty breads to sweet treats, everything is crafted with care and the finest ingredients from our Massachusetts farms.
We’re excited to share this new chapter with you—stop by and experience the taste of fresh, farm-to-table baking! 🍞🌾 #FarmFresh #LocalBaking #SustainableFarming
Not bad, right?
AI in Digital Marketing: Pros/Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Enhanced personalization. | May noticeably lack the human element. |
| Automation and efficiency. | Data will sometimes need double-checking. |
| Data-driven decision-making. | Privacy concerns. |
| Improved customer support. |
Benefits of Implementing AI in Digital Marketing
As with any disruptive technology, AI should be approached with both optimism and caution. In order to make it work for you and not against you, it’s wise to be cognizant of both what it can and can’t do, from a digital marketing perspective.
Enhanced Personalization
- AI analyzes user data to deliver highly personalized content to catch user attention, improving engagement and conversion rates.
- AI can also predict future customer behavior and preferences, allowing marketers to proactively tailor campaigns to anticipate customer needs.
Automation and Efficiency
- AI automates repetitive tasks like email marketing, chatbots, and ad placements, saving time and reducing costs.
- It streamlines workflows by scheduling and managing social media posts, A/B testing, and campaign tracking, without manual intervention.
Data-Driven Decision-Making
- AI processes large datasets quickly, providing valuable insights for optimizing campaigns and predicting trends.
- It identifies patterns and correlations in customer behavior, enabling marketers to make informed, real-time adjustments to strategies.
Improved Customer Support
- AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants offer 24/7 support, enhancing user experience and response times.
- They can handle multiple queries simultaneously, providing instant solutions and freeing up human agents for more complex issues.
Leverage AI to maximize performance with realize:
Drawbacks of AI in Digital Marketing
Lack of the “Human Touch”
- While AI can generate quality content, it can often read as generic and boring. This is why it’s important to think of AI-generated content as a rough draft created by a competent and efficient — but not imaginative — employee.
- AI is so powerful that it’s easy to forget that it completely lacks emotions, including empathy. Sometimes, AI-generated content can come across as impersonal and even offensive.
Dependence on Data Quality
- There’s an old saying dating back to the earliest days of computer programming: GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out). AI’s effectiveness depends on high-quality, accurate data, meaning that poor or biased data can lead to incorrect insights.
- “Hallucinations”: AI is still in its early days, and it has plenty of kinks to work out. One of the most mocked glitches are “hallucinations” — instances where generative AI tools like ChatGPT and DeepSeek give answers that either don’t make sense or are simply factually incorrect.
Privacy Concerns
- AI relies on mining user data for insights, raising concerns about data privacy, security, and compliance with regulations like GDPR.
- AI-driven tools often track and analyze user behavior across multiple platforms, raising questions about transparency. A site might promise, “We won’t share your data with anyone,” but this is a vow that’s become increasingly harder to keep.
Real Examples of AI in Digital Marketing
Netflix
“Today’s Top Picks for You”: Your Netflix home page will contain several different categories of suggested content. Some are simply different genres — action, sci-fi, romance — but others are more granularly tailored to your own tastes. These will fall under headings such as “Today’s Top Picks for You” or “Because you watched [show X].” These suggestions are based on its top-secret AI algorithm that stores all your previous actions — not just which shows you watch, but where you paused, which scenes you watched more than once, and what you watched immediately before and after.
Also worth discussing is the “Bandersnatch” Experiment: This is one of the most famous recent examples of interactive storytelling. Back in 2018, season five of the popular dystopian series “Black Mirror” included a much-hyped episode that allowed the viewer to choose their own adventure at various points in the story. At one point, for example, you could decide whether the point-of-view character Stefan should “throw tea over computer” or “shout at Dad.” Each decision leads to a different branch of the story. A technology policy researcher at University College London looked into Netflix’s motivations, and published his findings on X (formerly Twitter). He discovered — no surprise here — that the streaming giant was storing away your Bandersnatch choices for future use.
Amazon and Walmart’s Dynamic Pricing
Have you ever noticed while shopping on the Amazon or Walmart sites that the prices seem to fluctuate, and some seem to be arbitrarily marked down? This is due to a practice known as dynamic pricing, whereby an item’s price can depend on real-time supply and demand and the user’s own purchasing or browsing history. This practice is highly controversial. In fact, in 2024, U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, wrote open letters to the CEOs of those two companies, criticizing them for using customer data to adjust prices.
Customer Loyalty Programs
From Starbucks to Target to Marriott, big companies discovered long ago that customer loyalty programs are the gift that keeps on giving. Not only are they effective in retaining customers — who wouldn’t want a 10% discount, after all — they allow for easy data collection, which is then used to suggest other products and services. For example, someone who books a hotel room in Aruba will probably start to get special offers on hotels in St. Croix.
Campaign Setup and Management
You might not know it, but many SMBs are also using AI to help set up, manage, and optimize their campaigns. Abby by Taboola — an industry-first generative AI technology — works to guide marketers and advertisers through the process in a helpful, conversational way, answering questions and providing guidance on budgeting, strategy, image and caption creation, and more.
What Are the Most Common Skills Used in AI-Driven Digital Marketing?
To excel in AI-driven digital marketing, professionals need to develop certain skills to harness the power of AI while crafting impactful campaigns, such as:
Data Analysis and Interpretation
The ability to collect, analyze, and interpret large datasets is crucial. Marketers must understand how to use AI tools to extract actionable insights and make data-driven decisions.
Technical Proficiency with AI Tools
Familiarity with AI-powered platforms like Google Analytics, HubSpot, or Jasper AI is essential. Marketers need to know how to use these tools to automate tasks, optimize campaigns, and generate insights.
Strategic Thinking and Creativity
While AI handles data and automation, marketers must think strategically to design campaigns that resonate with audiences. Creativity is key to crafting compelling content and innovative strategies that stand out in a competitive landscape.
AI Digital Marketing Tools
Below are a few solutions from the list of the best AI marketing tools out there, designed to help marketers automate tasks, deepen customer insights, and ultimately drive better results.
Social Marketing AI: Hootsuite
While primarily known as a social media management platform, Hootsuite’s AI-driven features can suggest the best times to post, curate content, and even provide sentiment analysis for better community management. It’s ideal for marketers looking to streamline social media workflows and measure ROI.
Content Marketing AI: ChatGPT
Offering advanced generative text capabilities, ChatGPT can serve as a versatile copywriting tool for marketers. You can leverage it to quickly generate draft copy for email campaigns, ads, or blog posts. ChatGPT’s SEO plugin by SERPstat is particularly useful for investigating keywords, domain metrics, and backlink data.
AI Automation: Marketo and Adobe Sensei
Embedded within the Adobe suite of marketing tools, Adobe Sensei delivers predictive analytics, automated insights, and personalization features. It can automatically tag and categorize assets, predict ad performance, and help segment audiences. Marketo’s impressive analytics and reporting features, meanwhile, are helpful for optimizing your campaign and adjusting your strategy based on the available data.
Key Takeaways
From automating repetitive tasks like email marketing and social media scheduling, to delivering hyper-personalized customer experiences, AI helps marketers save time and improve engagement. That said, AI works best as a complement to human creativity and strategic thinking, not a replacement. AI offers many benefits, but it lacks emotional intelligence and can produce generic or impersonal content. Additionally, privacy concerns and data security remain significant challenges.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):
Is AI going to replace digital marketing?
No, AI is not going to replace digital marketing. Digital marketing is still all about anticipating and meeting customer’s needs, which requires human judgment. While AI can automate tasks, analyze data, and optimize campaigns, human creativity, empathy, and strategic thinking remain essential for crafting compelling messages and building genuine customer relationships. The more you know how to harness the power of AI, the more empowering it will be for you.
How do you start AI digital marketing?
To start AI digital marketing, familiarize yourself with AI tools like Google Analytics, ChatGPT, and Abby. Learn the basics of data analysis and machine learning, and experiment with automating tasks like email campaigns, social media scheduling, and content personalization. Begin small, test strategies, and scale as you gain confidence.
What is the best example of AI in marketing?
As mentioned above, one of the best examples of AI in marketing is Netflix’s recommendation engine. By analyzing user behavior, viewing history, and preferences, Netflix delivers highly personalized content suggestions, significantly improving user engagement and retention. Netflix reports that in recent years, viewers have watched nearly 100 billion hours on its platform during a six-month period, so they must be doing something right when it comes to using AI analytics to anticipate their customers’ behaviors.
