How marketing agencies can leverage AI

Whatever you think about Artificial Intelligence (AI), the fact is it’s here to stay, and it’ll change the way marketing agencies work in all kinds of ways.

Its applications range from predicting consumer behaviour to optimising ad spend, offering new levels of efficiency, precision, and personalisation.

Traditional tasks that often relied on a lot of manual work, can now be automated using AI, allowing agencies to focus on the activities that are more likely to serve them and their clients instead of being bogged down by productivity killers.

Is there anything not to like?

Well according to Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI, “It will mean that 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly, and at almost no cost, be handled by the AI”.

Will that really happen, or will a more likely scenario be one where the agencies that leverage AI are able to allocate more time and brainpower to the decisions that require human thought?  

Rather than AI replacing every element of their business, chances are that it’ll become part of their day-to-day work, improving efficiency and effectiveness in a multitude of areas.

So how can agencies use AI?

In a recent survey of over 200+ marketers about the tasks they think will be automated and what the impact will be on their marketing function, more than half were confident that AI wouldn’t be able to replace them. What the data did show was which tasks marketers believed were most likely to be replaced by AI. 

In AI and Account Management 

The relationship that a good account manager has their clients and their business comes from real experience gained through a series of regular interpersonal conversations, strategy sessions, planning and collaborations with both the client and their stakeholders over time.

While that’s all stuff AI doesn’t have, where AI will help account managers is by making them more efficient and effective. AI tools can support them in writing emails faster and more efficiently, creating reports in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take, and managing budgets with a more accurate understanding of variables and influences. 

AI and Marketing Strategy

Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly pivotal when developing comprehensive plans to achieve specific business objectives for clients such as market analysis, goal setting, deciding tactics, studying customer data and supporting the development of execution plans.

But while AI can offer support in deciding strategy, you can’t yet depend on it to offer approaches you would agree with. 

AI and Creativity

AI tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are making it very easy to create visuals and images from nothing. The problem with the creation of graphics, photographs, mock-ups, designs, and logos using AI is the fact that AI doesn’t understand human taste.

Agency creatives need to appreciate this when aiming to develop visual material that will appeal to their customers and audience.

Content creation can now also be quickly produced by AI tools such as HubSpot’s Free AI Blog Writer, whereby blog posts can be generated in seconds, reducing research time to create content more frequently without hiring extra resources.

What this will do for the quality of content creation is anyone’s guess, though it would make sense if AI supported the development of a brief and a framework, and then human writers, subject matter experts and editors shaped it for publication.

Google Overviews

AI Overviews can take the work out of searching by providing an AI-generated snapshot with key information and links to find out more.

You’ll find AI Overviews in your Google Search results when Google’s systems determine that generative AI can be especially helpful – for example, when you want to quickly understand information from a range of sources.

AI and Public Relations

It’s hard for AI to replicate personal relationships, whereas outreach is something that AI can support pretty effectively, with tools that can help PR professionals conduct mass outreach with the kind of personalisation not previously possible.

For example, AI can create a series of emails communicating a story to a list of journalists, following up with an AI-generated email script.

AI and Data, Analytics and Tech

According to Scott Guthrie of Microsoft, 40% of the code found in GitHub Copilot is AI-generated, which is why an increasing number of developers are using AI to support their projects.

AI Analytics also gives marketers the opportunity to gather insight from data faster than ever before.

One example is that in HubSpot, agencies can now use AI to create reports based on their data with just one click. What used to take 20–30 minutes to complete can now be done in a fraction of the time.

Then again, when working with a spreadsheet to understand the ROI of a project or a certain marketing channel, AI can now enable marketers to have every spreadsheet function at their fingertips in just seconds. 

The Future of Agencies and AI

Altogether, marketing agencies will undoubtedly see the enormous advantages of using AI to augment their day-to-day work to make them more efficient and effective. They’ll learn to blend human activities with AI functions to create faster comms, more strategic decisions, and more creative outputs. Who knows where this human/AI collaboration will lead?