Discover how businesses can leverage AI to transform their marketing function.
The integration of Generative AI (GenAI) into marketing holds tremendous potential, yet its adoption remains limited. Highlighting both its opportunities and risks, this article outlines how AI can transform marketing through enhanced customization, creativity, connectivity, and deliver reduced cognitive cost benefits. Clarion, a software solution company adopted a methodical approach prior to integrating AI in its operation. Throughout the process, the team evaluated 250+ AI tools and platforms across creativity, quality & originality. Noteworthy integrations at Clarion, such as ALLI AI for SEO, ChatGPT for content creation, and ChatSpot by HubSpot for CRM, and few other tools underscore the significant competitive edge and operational efficiencies AI brings to the marketing landscape.
However, the recent March 2024 Google Core Update has reshaped these dynamics, emphasized high-quality, original content and penalizing low-effort, AI-generated material. This has impacted organizations, prompting strategic shifts to balance AI-driven efficiency with enhanced human creativity and oversight.
Generative AI is new and proliferating quickly across various industries. 45% of businesses plan to reinvest savings generated by generative AI into innovation while 43% intend to use the technology to improve operations. However, a recent McKinsey survey revealed that only 10% to 14% of companies were consistently deploying GenAI solutions to scale their marketing and sales initiatives. Generative AI helps business leaders effectively manage teams and improves information accessibility.
With such significant advantages delivered, the question arises: “What’s stopping the increased adoption of GenAI solutions worldwide?”
Creativity and customer engagement are the cornerstone of digital marketing. Generative AI integration is useful, however, many marketers don’t know how and more importantly when to make the switch from traditional strategies and augment GenAI benefits.
According to Harvard Business Review, there are four areas where generative AI holds the greatest potential for marketing and risks. Here’s what leaders need to know about them.
Customization is a major advantage, where AI enables the creation of unique consumer experiences on a large scale. For example, Carvana used AI to produce over a million unique "joyride" videos for their customers, each personalized with details like the car’s model and cultural events from the purchase location and time. This level of hyper-personalization, achieved in just a few hours, shows how AI can significantly boost customer engagement.
In Creativity, AI's role is transformative. It helps create content and improves the quality and originality of the outputs. A recent experiment with 453 professionals who regularly generate written output as part of their job, including marketers, showed that using ChatGPT raised output quality and originality by 18%. Likewise, another study showed that having access to generative AI increased a writer’s creativity significantly, with improvements of up to 26%.
Connectivity through AI offers new ways to deeply engage with customers. A great example of this is Coca-Cola’s “Create Real Magic” initiative. Consumers were invited to take part in an image-generation contest using a bespoke tool enabling consumers to create image from prose.
Finally, Cost of Cognition is significantly reduced by AI, making it easier and faster for marketers to perform cognitive tasks. Consultants using AI, for example, have seen faster task completion and better-quality work, showing that AI can lead to major productivity improvements.
Four risks particularly pressing and pertinent for marketers are Confabulation, Consumer Reactance, Copyright, and Cybersecurity. They are as follows:
Confabulation: Generative AI is prone to creating inaccurate content, biases, and produce business outcomes that could negatively impact a brand’s reputation.
Consumer Reactance: Generative AI applied to consumer-facing applications like customer service chatbots, promotional materials, and other AI-driven products can spark negative sentiments.
Copyright: Using AI-generated content increases the risks of getting lawsuits due to copyright issues and lack of trademark protection.
Cybersecurity: Cyber criminals can use advanced Gen AI tools to launch sophisticated threats and increase the risk of “prompt injection attacks” to successfully extract sensitive information.
Through the strategic use of these AI tools, organizations not only optimize their marketing operations but also gain a significant competitive edge. The integration of AI leads to more targeted marketing and precision in customer segmentation; it enhances user experiences. These advancements have potential to derive measurable benefits such as increased customer engagement, higher conversion rates, and ultimately, significant ROI improvements.
Clarion Technologies underwent a very stringent process where the company evaluated over 250 tools across sales and marketing. After a comprehensive review process, Clarion ranked AI marketing tools based on what will deliver maximum value to the clients. Post complete evaluation, the organization integrated (and planning to integrate) those most suitable of these tools into their operation.
ALLI AI is employed by Clarion to refine SEO tactics and optimize content for better search engine rankings. Key features include automated keyword research, SEO recommendations, and content planning tools, which significantly streamline the process of content creation and optimization, leading to improve organic search visibility and user engagement.
ChatGPT has been integrated to handle content development and optimization. ChatGPT assists in generating dynamic content for blogs, social media, and marketing campaigns, significantly enhancing content engagement and customer satisfaction.
ChatSpot, an extension of HubSpot, utilizes AI to automate and personalize marketing communications aiding in lead generation, nurturing campaigns, and provides analytics that helps to understand customer behaviors and preferences.
The reliance on AI for content generation has been growing, driven by its efficiency and ability to scale content production. However, Google's new update challenges this approach by emphasizing content quality and human oversight.
In March 2024, Google introduced a significant update to its search algorithms and policies, targeting low-quality and spammy content. Key components include algorithmic enhancements to reduce low-quality, unoriginal content by 40%, alongside the introduction of stringent new spam policies targeting manipulative content practices.
This shift may result in a reduced role for purely AI-generated content unless it meets high-quality standards. This change is expected to reduce the prevalence of low-effort and spammy content, challenging marketers to invest more in creative and original content development.
With latest update, new and unique challenges, particularly how AI-generated content is perceived and ranked came to the forefront for organizations. Algorithm changes rolled out in March 2024 led to companies experiencing a decline in domain authority (DA), reduced traffic, and lower content rankings due to AI-generated content, thus indicating a need to focus on high-quality and original content.
Clarion through its meticulous evaluation process found out the right approach to utilize AI in their organization. The organization relied on a mixed approach that celebrated human creativity and insights, while simultaneously benefitting from time & cost savings generated by AI. A key step that Clarion follows and which can benefit other organizations is to rely on AI for content enhancement rather than content creation.
The march of AI in marketing is unstoppable, offering unmatched opportunities for innovation and efficiency. Yet, as the landscape evolves, particularly with stringent new standards like Google's 2024 update, marketers must navigate these changes wisely. The key to continued success lies in leveraging AI responsibly and creatively, ensuring that human insight and oversight guide AI applications to maintain quality and compliance. This balance will not only safeguard against the risks but also maximize the vast benefits AI promises in the realm of marketing.