9 minute read
Why AI Won’t Replace Your Professional Marketers & SEO Experts in 2024
I want to talk about AI uses in marketing. The good along with the bad to save small to medium-sized business owners time, money, and aggregation chasing every little shiny object across all the marketing channels you are trying to leverage.
My name is Chris Taglia. I’m the marketing director at Tag Marketing and I want good business owners to kill it in 2024!
So to start, I simply asked ChatGPT, “is AI the best new marketing tool.” Its response…
“As technology continues to advance, it’s not hard to see the positive impact of artificial intelligence on various industries. Marketing is no exception. AI technology allows marketers to access a vast amount of data faster than ever before and make predictive analysis, creating more personalized and effective marketing strategies.
The use of AI in marketing can also eliminate the tedious and time-consuming tasks, like sending emails or analyzing data, allowing marketing professionals to channel their focus on creative and strategic work. However, while AI may be an asset to the marketing field, it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. It’s important to understand the pros and cons of AI in marketing and how it can be used to enhance campaigns, rather than relying solely on its capabilities.”
As you just read, the AI knows its strengths and weaknesses. It is good at collecting huge amounts of data to help improve marketing strategies and it’s good at taking over small tedious and time-consuming tasks so a professional marketing agency and SEO expert can focus more of their time and energy on the creative and strategic work.
It is not a one-size-fits-all marketing solution because various AI software exist for different tasks such as Dall-E2 is good at designing graphics, Synthesia is good at video creation, Adext is good to use for optimizing pay-per-click ads, and Jasper is a good tool for writing content for SEO purposes.
While these platforms may be rated well, they still require a skilled human or team of humans to put out an effective campaign that hits goals and maximizes your return on investment (ROI).
What is AI?
AI is software that enables machines to mimic human capabilities. In the early stages of development, it was a matter of “data crunching,” analyzing patterns to model human decision-making, for example in a chess game. Advancements in machine learning and deep learning are how AI can literally learn, again based on huge aggregates of data, to project likely probabilities.
So-called weak AI is the application of this decision-making to a specific limited task, for example, self-driving cars, Siri or Alexa voice commands to do web searches. Strong AI is the attempt to completely replicate human intelligence, like the “droids” in Star Wars, which remains very much something that exists only in the movies.
A type of weak AI is generative AI, in which algorithms produce content (text, video, audio images) in response to a prompt. This is what a chatbot is on an eCommerce site. It is also ChatGPT, which a lot of high school students are attempting to use to write their assignments instead of actually doing the work themselves. And it is what some argue is about to replace artists, writers and creative people in general. Indeed, the use of AI was one of the key points of contention in the recent Hollywood writers strike.
How Shiny is AI?
A “shiny object” is a term used to describe something new that receives undue attention until the next new thing takes its place. If you’ve got shiny object syndrome, it means you keep chasing the latest trend, but then something else replaces it that you chase instead, resulting in the inability to actually accomplish anything or start new projects.
So is AI a shiny new object with unlimited marketing uses in 2024? Well, given all the attention it is getting in the news and industry, the answer is it could be. If you are thinking AI can become (or replace) your copywriter, graphic & web designer, marketer, and SEO expert all wrapped into one neat package, you are focusing your attention and efforts on something that is going to disappoint you.
How Good is AI in Sales and Marketing Right Now?
AI is great at automating repetitive tasks, such as answering basic customer questions that are expressly defined in FAQs and product guides. AI can also analyze vast amounts of data to provide insights into customer behaviors and buying patterns.
So, sure, AI has its uses in marketing right now. It can even write basic emails and in limited situations employ natural language processing to interact with customers. The keywords here are “basic” and “limited.”
The so-called infinite monkey theory postulates that a monkey randomly hitting a typewriter keyboard (a metaphor for a computer generating random strings of text) eventually can write a Shakespearean play if allowed to continue, well, almost forever. Maybe it can eventually write effective marketing copy and improve your website’s search engine optimization ROI.
If you want to grow your business and increase your sales, you don’t have until forever. Or even eventually. This is why you can’t rely on AI to completely take over your marketing and sales efforts.
Granted that AI is good for certain tasks. But it can’t write content that provides useful, relevant information about your products and services and at the same time increases SEO results. The reason it can’t is the same reason why English teachers can figure out when students are using ChatGPT to write papers or, even worse, plagiarizing from sources. Because you can tell, the same way you can tell the difference between what I’m writing, and what ChatGPT did on the subject of whether AI is the best new marketing tool in 2024. It’s just not very good at that and it doesn’t really understand the difference between junk and reliable sources of information.
It has to be trained by professionals and used by professionals who know what they are doing to get a great result. It’s a tool, and like all tools, the quality of work mostly depends on the person using it.
What AI is good for is generating ideas and gathering great amounts of data in little time. Its best applications are in software, reports generation, data scraping, lists generation data analysis, and performance of routine repetitive tasks. It’s a tool for experienced professionals to help them achieve the best results, as efficiently as possible, maximizing your ROI and minimizing costs. But it’s not a tool that replaces real people with real experience who can talk to you about your business the way real people can relate.
11 Best Uses of AI When Marketing Your Business in 2024
- Customer service chatbots on websites and social media platforms
- Data analytics to help businesses make informed decisions and allocate resources
- Competitive research for keywords
- Inventory management of your ecommerce website
- Fraud prevention for ecommerce transactions and pay-per-click ad platforms
- Brainstorming ideas for topics to write about, article titles, and meta-descriptions
- Segmenting target audiences for paid ads and email campaigns
- Determining the best time to send an email promotion or newsletter
- Identify new opportunities in SEO
- Predictive market trends
- Marketing automation such as automated workflows that send out emails after an event is triggered
Don’t get caught chasing the shiny new object – don’t get fooled by the hot term that some marketers use to get conversions to their own businesses. If anyone tells you they can set up a marketing and SEO campaign just by employing their AI bots, ask them to see a sample of a campaign written by their AI and the results of it. Then come talk to us to see how much better real human writers and SEO experts can get the results you need to grow your business.
5 Worst Uses of AI When Marketing Your Business in 2024
- Emotional intelligence understanding customers or clients
- Creative tasks such as innovation, designing, and writing
- Complex decision-making that requires intuition and experience-based judgment
- Understanding context, sarcasm, figurative language, and cultural relevance
- Physical interactions
Real-world Examples Where Humans Are Better Than AI in the Marketing Game
In many cases, human marketers outperform AI in terms of creativity, empathy, and understanding of the consumer. Here are some fascinating real-world examples that demonstrate the power of human marketing over AI.
When it comes to picking better matches for your audience, humans get the W. The streaming giant Netflix tested a human-curated section called “Max’s Picks” which provided personalized recommendations to some viewers and the users loved it as it outperformed their AI recommendations.
Burger King tested out AI for an ad campaign featuring a 15-second commercial that Google Home devices to recite the Wikipedia entry for its signature Whopper. However, this campaign backfired quickly when viewers changed the Wikipedia entry to include negative comments about the burger. While the concept was innovative, it ultimately showed the limitations of AI uses and the importance of human oversight in marketing campaigns.
H&M, the Swedish fashion retailer, wanted to create an innovative marketing campaign to promote their autumn collections. They decided to launch a chatbot on the Kik messaging app, which would help users build outfits based on their style. However, instead of using AI to generate the responses (which produced negative results in the past), H&M hired a team of real people to respond to users’ messages. The result was a chatbot experience that felt authentic and personal, leading to a significant increase in engagement with the brand.
Combining AI Intelligence with Experienced Human Intelligence
At Tag Marketing, we apply affordable, creative, growth-driven digital marketing strategies for small to mid-sized B2Bs and B2Cs to attract new leads, close new customers, nurture your contacts, and increase revenue. We use the right tools for the right job, combining AI with a team of experienced humans who live and breathe marketing and SEO.