AI in Marketing: 7 Areas Where Your Agency Can Increase ROI
AI in marketing…Is it a godsend for your agency’s productivity and profits, or is it a ticking time bomb of a robot uprising?
It’s the question on everyone’s mind, and for good reason: AI is advancing incredibly fast, and no one knows what the future holds .
The good news is, there are tons of opportunities to take advantage of the AI boom—as long as you’re using the right methods to adapt.
If you want to stay on top of your game and improve your agency’s capacity and productivity, there are endless areas of your business that AI can help you with.
In this article, I’ll go over:
- 7 key areas of your business AI can help you streamline.
- 26 specific use cases for AI that can improve your agency’s productivity and performance.
- The best AI tools you can start using right now.
Let’s dive in.
Why You Should Be Taking AI in Marketing Seriously
With how quickly AI has developed, it can be difficult to believe the hype. After all, AI has been promised for years, and for many of those years, the expectation was for something far more advanced than our current reality. Remember when the year 2000 was supposed to have flying cars?
However, we’re finally getting to a place where AI technology is starting to deliver some serious value in all areas of business, including marketing.
Most businesses who have adopted AI technology in recent years have seen substantial growth in productivity and profits. At AutoGrow, we’ve personally been able to double our team’s capacity by integrating AI tools to help us create deliverables for our clients, and we aren’t alone.
According to Oberlo, 9 out of 10 leading businesses are investing in AI technology in some way or another. Additionally, 61% of employees say using AI helps them improve their work productivity, while 44% of organizations have reported saving costs from implementing AI.
So if you’re not using AI, you’re simply missing out on massive opportunities to streamline your processes, improve your productivity, increase your client capacity, and improve your business from essentially every angle.
7 Areas of Your Agency AI Can Assist You With
So what does all this mean in terms of actual actionable steps you can take — not in some distant sci-fi future but right now? What are the areas where AI technology can actually make a difference for your agency?
Here are 7 everyday areas of your business that AI can help your agency with, along with some suggested tools.
1. Design
At this point, most people are using AI art tools like DALL⋅E 2 to create memes or “for fun” images based on creative prompts. But you can use tools like this to make useful design elements for your clients and improve your designer’s productivity levels.
A DALL⋅E 2 image generated from the prompt “a dog scuba diving alongside a person who comes across a field of underwater banana trees". Pretty cool, right?
Here are some specific use cases of AI in marketing for design:
Graphic Design
AI tools such as Adobe Sensei and Design Wizard can help agencies create professional-looking graphics and designs quickly and easily. These tools use AI algorithms to generate design ideas based on a set of parameters, allowing agencies to customize and fine-tune their designs to fit their specific needs.
This is in contrast to the more “high-art” style of AI tools like DALL⋅E 2 or Midjourney — although you can certainly prompt these to create usable graphics if you wanted to as well.
A DALL⋅E 2 output from the prompt “A logo with a lightbulb for a marketing agency named ‘Innovative Agency.’” The words could obviously use some work, but the graphic isn’t too bad of a starting point.
Website Design
If you’re trying to look at the bigger picture rather than a single graphic or logo and want to design an entire website, AI can help you with that too.
AI tools such as The Grid (now on hiatus) and Wix ADI can help agencies design and build custom websites more efficiently. These tools use AI algorithms to analyze a company’s branding and content to create a unique website design, allowing agencies to focus on other aspects of the website development process.
User Experience Design
Many user research and user testing softwares are starting to incorporate AI technology into their systems to help agencies optimize the user experience of their websites and marketing campaigns without having to spend hours crawling through data.
These tools use AI algorithms to analyze user behavior and provide insights and recommendations for improving the design and functionality of websites and campaigns so your designers are well equipped to understand what is and isn’t working about a client’s website.
#2. Content and Copywriting
One of the biggest and most well-known impacts of AI in marketing is its ability to improve content and copywriting processes. Since many AIs are chat-based, the logical extension is to use them for copywriting and content creation.
Although AI can’t perfectly substitute for a human writer, there are many parts of the writing process it can expedite, including:
- Research
- Generating content ideas
- Headlines and titles
- Writing long-form paragraphs or articles
When this is combined with human talent, putting together website copy, a blog article, a social media post, or anything else can become a lot faster and easier.
Here are a few AI tools that can be used for writing:
Copy.ai
Copy.ai is an AI tool that helps users generate copy and content ideas based on a set of parameters. It can be used to generate product descriptions, website copy, social media posts, and more.
Jasper
Similar to Copy.ai, Jasper was created specifically to help with copywriting, and comes with preset templates for popular copy formats, such as emails, blog posts, and headlines. It also comes with the ability to include keywords to meet SEO requirements.
Articoolo
Articoolo is an AI tool that helps users generate written content based on a set of keywords or topics. It uses machine learning algorithms to analyze a large data set of text and generate original content based on the user’s input.
Wordsmith
Wordsmith is an AI platform that helps users create and optimize written content for a variety of purposes. It can be used to generate reports, summaries, and other written materials, and includes tools for analyzing and improving the quality of written content.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is one of the most advanced, well-known AI chat programs. While it doesn’t have built-in templates or organizational tools for writing copy, it can greatly assist in research and generating paragraphs to insert into things like blog posts or social media posts.
#3. Development
AI doesn’t have to be limited to completely creative work like writing and design. In fact, AI can be even better in work that involves more objective “yes” or “no” answers, such as coding and web development.
If your agency’s offerings include more technical, back-end things, there are many AI tools that can assist you with:
- Troubleshooting and suggesting solutions
- Research
- Identifying problem areas
- Generate code, especially for more basic functions
Here are some tools that can help your programmers and developers create websites and apps more efficiently:
The Grid
As we mentioned before, The Grid is an AI platform that helps users design and build custom websites. It uses machine learning algorithms to analyze a company’s branding and content and create a unique website design, allowing your development team to focus on other aspects of the development process.
DeepCoder
DeepCoder is an AI tool that helps users write and optimize code. It uses specialized machine learning algorithms to analyze a user’s code and suggest improvements or modifications to make it more efficient. This can save a lot of time when your developers know there’s a bug, but can’t pinpoint exactly where the problem is.
Swagger Codegen
Swagger Codegen is an AI tool that helps users generate code based on a set of input parameters. It can be used to generate code for a variety of programming languages, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Python.
Swagger is particularly useful for generating boilerplate code quickly in many different language options, so you don’t have to waste time rewriting code for basic functions yourself.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is useful for researching how to write certain functions or troubleshooting problems in your code. It can be viewed as a more shorthand, efficient version of scouring a search engine or coding forums for an answer.
#4. Social Media Management
Social media is one of those things that sound fun but quickly becomes tedious when you have to do it every day. Between scheduling posts, coming up with content, and engaging with followers, managing just one client’s social media can be a full-time job.
Fortunately, AI can automate a lot about the social media management process. In addition to helping with content generation by creating graphics and copy, AI can also streamline many other social media processes, including:
Scheduling Posts
AI algorithms can be used to schedule social media posts in advance, allowing agencies to save time and plan their social media strategy more efficiently.
Responding to Comments and Messages
AI tools can be used to automatically respond to comments and messages on social media platforms, saving time and increasing efficiency. Some tools can even be set to automatically like comments or engage with other accounts.
Analyzing Social Media Conversations and Trends
Certain AI programs can be used to analyze social media conversations and identify trends, providing valuable insights for crafting effective marketing strategies and content campaigns. With their ability to scan large swathes of content at once and perform complex calculations, they can tell you what’s trendy much more easily and quickly than a human can.
Optimizing Social Media Campaigns
AI can help agencies optimize their social media campaigns by analyzing data such as the performance of past campaigns, user demographics, and other factors. This can help agencies target their efforts more effectively and improve the results of their campaigns.
Some tools that incorporate AI to provide social media insights or automations include:
#5. SEO
AI may change the way searching for information online works, but for now, we’re still using Google, which means SEO still matters. Here are a few ways AI can help you improve your clients’ SEO, whether it’s on a website, article, or advertisement:
Analyzing a Website’s Performance
AI algorithms can analyze a website’s performance, including its ranking on search engines, and provide recommendations for improving its SEO. Many classic SEO tools, such as Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz are beginning to offer more advanced website auditing powered by AI to do this.
Identifying and Analyzing Competitors
AI tools can analyze the performance of a marketing agency’s competitors and identify opportunities for improving the agency’s own SEO efforts. Moz and Semrush both offer tools for this.
Creating and Optimizing Content for SEO
Many copywriting AI tools, such as Copy.ai and Jasper, have built-in SEO technology that can help you optimize your writing for search rankings and generate SEO-driven content. Surfer SEO has a particularly in-depth interface that allows you to measure many different SEO factors, including primary keywords, MLPs, backlinks, and more.
Analyzing User Behavior
AI algorithms can analyze user behavior on a website and provide insights into how to improve the user experience, which can in turn improve the website’s SEO. Many tools you’re probably already using to conduct analytics incorporate AI, even if you don’t know it.
For example, Google Analytics uses AI algorithms to analyze the traffic and user behavior on a website and provide insights into how users are interacting with the site. Hotjar and Crazy Egg use AI algorithms to create heatmaps and other visualizations that show how users are interacting with the website.
#6. Ad Targeting
Ad targeting has come a long way since the old days of guessing what people want to see and hoping for the best. These days, artificial intelligence can help you automate ad targeting and improve your conversion rate by analyzing user behavior and drawing appropriate conclusions.
Here are a few use cases for how AI can help your agency with ad targeting:
Audience Segmentation
Tools such as Google Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager use AI algorithms to analyze data on user demographics, interests, and behavior to identify specific audience segments that are most likely to be interested in a particular product or service.
This can help marketing agencies target their ads more effectively and improve your ROI on your ad campaigns — without needing to spend hours combing data and brainstorming ways to improve on your own.
Predictive Analysis
Tools such as Adthena and BrightEdge use AI algorithms to analyze data on past ad campaigns and user behavior to predict how users are likely to respond to future ad campaigns. This can help marketing agencies tailor their ad campaigns to better meet the needs and preferences of their target audience.
Optimizing Ad Spend
Think it’s all about the content and audience of your ads? Think again because AI can also help with your finances.
Tools such as Opteo and AdEspresso use AI to analyze data on ad performance and user behavior to identify which ad campaigns are most effective and optimize ad spend accordingly. This can help you identify areas for improvement in your budget and maximize your ROI.
Personalization
Personalization is incredibly important for capturing attention and getting clicks, but doing it manually can drive you crazy. Fortunately, tools like Acquia CDP use AI algorithms to analyze user data to create personalized ad experiences for individual users. This can help you increase the relevance and effectiveness of your ad campaigns.
#7. Strategy
With its ability to analyze data, generate insights, and automate repetitive tasks, AI can be a great tool to improve your marketing strategy and make your strategists’ jobs easier.
In addition to many of the use cases mentioned above, here are some ways AI tools can help improve your marketing strategy on a more big-picture level:
Marketing Automation
Strategists are one of the most important pieces in ensuring a campaign goes smoothly, but too often, they’re bogged down with repetitive tasks when they could be focusing on solving bigger problems.
AI algorithms can be used to automate these repetitive marketing tasks, such as sending email campaigns or posting on social media. Tools such as Marketo and Pardot can be used for this purpose.
Lead Generation
AI algorithms can be used to identify potential customers and generate leads for both your agency and your clients. For example, Leadfeeder works by tracking the behavior of visitors to a website and collecting data on their demographics, interests, and behavior.
This data is then analyzed by AI algorithms to identify visitors who are most likely to be interested in the products or services offered by you or your client.
Predictive Analytics
AI algorithms can be used to analyze data on customer behavior and predict which customers are most likely to make a purchase, allowing you to focus your efforts on high-value customers. Tools such as Adverity and Segment can help you automate these processes cleanly and efficiently.
Conclusion
AI technology is rapidly advancing, and it can be a great tool for marketing agencies to improve their targeting, optimize ad spend, personalize campaigns, and more. To get the most out of AI in marketing, it’s important to understand:
- What aspects of your workflow can be improved using AI.
- What tools you have available to accomplish these goals.
- How to use these tools properly.
What do you think? Have you gotten on board the AI train and used any of these tools? What were your results?
Let me know in the comments below.
Keep AutoGrowin’, stay focused.
