While generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) continues to roll out across platforms we access every day, enterprise leaders are looking at how to harness its benefits within their operations. Many businesses are, in fact, already using generative AI in marketing as a vital boost to their end-to-end processes, unlocking new opportunities for attracting leads and converting customers.

This is a technology that has the potential to reshape the way a business can connect and engage with its target audience—from hyper-personalized marketing messages to always-on campaigns—while also building a more streamlined approach to work. Let’s take a look at some of the use cases for generative AI in marketing and advertising, as well as the benefits it can deliver, and some of the challenges enterprises may need to overcome to fully reap its rewards.

What is generative AI in marketing?

Using generative AI in marketing refers to leveraging tools built with artificial intelligence to produce outputs that are specifically intended to help reach marketing objectives. Technologies such as GenAI can leverage the knowledge contained in large datasets and use it to generate content that’s relevant to marketing needs. With the right directions, this generated content can align with brand guidelines, take into consideration customer preferences, and be aimed at meeting strategic goals.

By combining analytics with creative content generation, GenAI can boost enterprise sales and marketing efforts. It can improve marketing workflows, strengthen market insights, simplify personalized content creation, and optimize resource use.

Generative AI use cases in marketing

Looking at the current market, we find a number of compelling use cases of generative AI in marketing. The versatility of GenAI has started marking it as a must-have technology for companies that want to increase both the efficiency and effectiveness of their marketing efforts.

The use of generative AI in marketing can be entirely transformational in some use cases, including the following.

Text content creation

Perhaps the best-known use of enterprise GenAI in marketing is as an aid for written content creation. If used wisely, generative AI models have the ability to streamline and speed up the content creation process.

Some of the key applications of generative AI for content creation include:

Producing tailored email marketing campaigns that include a large level of personalization. Everything from the subject line to the body text can be personalized for a specific audience or recipient.
Generating articles, blog posts, press releases, and social media posts. With the right prompt and guidance, these can accurately reflect a brand’s tone and voice, and be targeted at specific customer segments.
Creating unique and compelling product descriptions and advertisements. GenAI tools can quickly incorporate key product facts into a well-written text description that highlights the features and benefits of an offering.

Personalization and customer engagement

Generative AI can empower marketers to present highly personalized experiences that aid in creating a stronger, more engaged relationship with customers.

Examples include:

Providing reasoning AI agents and virtual sales assistants that can answer questions about products and offer customer support.
Using customer purchasing history to create personalized recommendations of goods and services in real-time.
Creating website content dynamically based on user preferences and known facts about a specific visitor, such as their demographics and historical search behavior.

Predictive analytics and campaign optimization

While predictive analytics have been key for marketing strategies for a while now, GenAI is enhancing traditional approaches. With the help of generative technologies, businesses are able to extract deeper market and internal insights to help enable smarter decision-making. For example, by:

Analyzing historical customer and sales data to forecast purchasing trends, supporting agile marketing decisions.
Automating the generation of variations of ad copy and creative content like images and video, optimizing them for different customer segments, and analyzing campaign performance.
Optimizing the placement of digital ads in real-time based on prior performance data.

SEO and content optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) has become a cornerstone of digital marketing. GenAI can help to streamline the SEO process in a number of ways:

Helping to uncover gaps in current content strategies so marketing teams can adjust tactics as necessary.
Generating quick outlines and performing automated research—such as analyzing keyword trends and competitor content—to help create articles and blog posts.
Assisting with keyword research and suggesting keyword-optimized titles, headings, and metadata.

Social media platforms are critical channels for brand communication. GenAI can be a useful tool for helping businesses manage and improve their social media footprint in a range of ways, including:

Analyzing historical audience engagement metrics to inform future social media campaigns.
Generating data-driven recommendations for the best time to post across social network sites, based on real audience activity.
Creating engaging social media posts and captions, which can be nuanced for the needs of different target audiences.

Event marketing and outreach

Generative AI streamlines sales event marketing, ensuring personalized and optimized messaging for attendees across the event lifecycle.

GenAI can help in ways such as:

Visualizing data related to attendee preferences, which can be used to personalize the event theme and ensure maximum impact.
Creating custom promotional materials specific to the event, such as flyers and brochures.
Generating personalized invitations and follow-up emails after the event.

Influencer marketing

Forming fruitful partnerships with social media influencers can be a good way for a brand to connect with niche audiences. GenAI can be used to optimize these relationships by, for example:

Automating or partially automating the creation of campaign briefs and collaboration contracts.
Analyzing the performance of different influencers in order to identify those which provide the best ROI.
Identifying influencers that could potentially align well with the brand's target customers in a specific niche.

Brand and PR management

Marketing isn’t all about lead generation and sales; it also covers other concepts, such as brand and reputation management. Generative AI can fill multiple roles in this use case, such as:

Automatically monitoring the sentiment of comments and reactions to social marketing efforts, highlighting any pain points that need to be addressed.
Creating brand-aligned content for reputation management and trust-building.
Generating responses to negative feedback in real-time to assist with mitigating the effects of a public relations crisis—or just a bad review.

Training and upskilling marketing teams

Not all of the use cases of generative AI in marketing revolve around analytics and content generation. GenAI can also be leveraged to train marketing staff, including:

Generating feedback and actionable insights based on the measured performance of the marketing team.
Providing interactive training scenarios using realistic but synthetic data to simulate an entire marketing campaign.
Providing AI-driven learning tools tailored to a marketing team's skill gaps.

How to use generative AI in marketing to achieve greater growth

Generative AI in digital marketing has the ability to transform workflows and increase productivity. However, when combined with large language models (LLMs) that can leverage retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), further opportunities can be found. Let’s look at some of the ways that GenAI with a RAG system can fuel marketing growth.

Workflow automation

Generative AI can be used to automate repetitive marketing tasks to help improve workflow efficiency. For example, AI tools can be used to evaluate content drafts for alignment with brand values, grammar, and tone. This alone can deliver substantial time savings when compared to manual editing.

Tasks such as creating reports, data entry, and task scheduling can all also be passed off to GenAI to some extent. The addition of RAG architecture with tools can empower AI solutions to access up-to-date information from other connected systems, such as CRMs. This kind of integration can reduce operational bottlenecks and streamline the marketing process.

Advanced segmentation and targeting

Another way that GenAI can help boost growth through marketing is in its ability to intelligently enhance audience segmentation. Generative AI can analyze historical data to identify patterns and recommend new or refined customer segmentation strategies.

Results of marketing campaigns based on this segmentation can also be fed back into the model, enabling data to be revised and tweaked iteratively. A more advanced use case would be monitoring the impact of segmentation on a campaign in real-time and using the output to continuously enhance results.

Real-time decision-making

GenAI can provide support to marketing teams in making informed decisions by leveraging predictive analytics. Actionable insights can be extracted and visualized using historical data, and predictive models can help identify emerging market trends.

These insights can be directly applied to existing or planned marketing campaigns and used to adjust messaging based on predicted performance. They can also be used to, for example, adjust bidding on ad space or other paid digital advertising channels.

Enhancing creativity

So far in this section, we’ve looked at how GenAI can help with boosting growth based on analytics insights, workflow automation, and improved decision-making. However, GenAI can also help turbocharge the more creative aspects of marketing.

Marketers can use AI tools to brainstorm content ideas, knock up prototypes, and produce rough drafts. These can then become the seeds for the final content.

Additionally, GenAI can be used for certain content tasks such as resizing or upscaling images that would traditionally be much more time-consuming to undertake. GenAI can sit between stakeholders and content creators as an intelligent sidekick for quickly drafting up content to test new ideas.

Aligning with sector-specific needs

Even though marketing concepts remain pretty constant across sectors and industries, the approaches can differ. Some sectors have very specific challenges to overcome—such as the heavily-regulated healthcare and finance industries.

GenAI can be trained on sector-specific datasets, known as fine-tuning, to ensure generated responses are more accurate and compliant. The model can then be used to generate fresh, compliant content, or check older content for compliance. Additionally, this kind of sector-specific knowledge can be used to create laser-targeted marketing messages in niche markets.

Benefits of generative AI in marketing

Generative AI has the capability to transform traditional marketing efforts into a more agile, streamlined, and efficient set of workflows. Let’s recap some of its main benefits for marketing teams.

Greater efficiency through the automation of repetitive tasks such as writing emails or scheduling social media posts.
Comprehensive personalization of marketing materials, tailoring content to individual customers to enhance engagement.
Agile content production, which helps enable enterprises to adapt more rapidly to emerging market trends.
Reduced operational costs by shifting simple, repetitive tasks over to GenAI; this can require only minor human oversight instead of intensive human labour.
Reinforcing a unified and recognizable brand identity by ensuring the consistency of marketing materials across all channels.
Enabling companies to deal with a rapidly-expanding customer base, ensuring that the responsiveness of sales and marketing teams remains high.
Better informed decision-making based on real business insights derived from historical data, as well as external sources, especially in the case of RAG-enhanced AI tools.
Improving the power of predictive analytics, visualized in an easy-to-understand way, helping teams to fine-tune marketing efforts.
Fostering an environment based on creativity by providing tools to boost brainstorming and the rapid prototyping of ideas.
Strengthening competitive advantage by delivering optimized campaigns that showcase products and services in the best light.

Common risks of AI in marketing – and ways to mitigate

The use of generative AI in marketing is not without its risks, though. There are some challenges that any business looking to leverage GenAI needs to overcome—both for marketing and across the wider organization. Those risks, and ideas for mitigating them, include the following.

Bias in data

Risk: Biases in training data or external data sources can lead to unfair, discriminatory, or non-compliant marketing strategies. This could have a negative impact on brand reputation.
Solution: Models should be trained on large, diverse datasets and further fine-tuned after initial training. AI responses should be audited regularly to identify any model bias, with steps taken to rectify any issues found through a re-training program.

Lack of transparency

Risk: AI is often seen as a “black box”, meaning that it can be tricky to explain why a model produced a specific response. This lack of transparency can lead to a loss of trust from stakeholders.
Solution: Use AI tools that can make the decision-making process more transparent, such as through the use of RAG and inline citations. Implement human oversight at strategic touchpoints.

Over-reliance on automation

Risk: Relying too heavily on AI tools can lead to a loss of human creativity and critical thinking at key stages of a campaign.
Solution: Balance the use of GenAI with human-driven insights and oversight. Encourage marketing teams to use generative AI as a tool and not a crutch.

Data privacy concerns

Risk: Generative AI may have been trained on or have access to sensitive or private data, which could lead to data breaches or compliance failures if this data is exposed.
Solution: Put processes in place that monitor responses to make sure that they are safe, secure, and compliant with all applicable legislation. Work with models that are built as secure AI from the outset and have public security frameworks.

Quality control

Risk: Using purely AI-generated content in marketing campaigns could lead to problems with quality and incorrect messaging due to hallucinations.
Solution: Build a workflow that incorporates auditability, including human review of outputs before they are pushed live as part of a marketing campaign.

Best practices for AI in marketing

The use of generative AI in marketing can clearly deliver some incredible benefits, including enhancing consistency of deliverables, intelligent decision-making, and real-time feedback.

However, there are inherent risks, and these make it important for any business looking to use generative AI in marketing and advertising to plan their approach carefully. Here are some guidelines to consider at the start:

Define objectives first. Define the goals and desired outcomes for the organization’s GenAI deployment.

Start with something manageable. Before rolling out generative AI to the entire marketing team, choose one aspect of the marketing workflow that could benefit the most and use it as a test project.

Keep AI tools up to date. The AI landscape changes rapidly, with new and more advanced tools regularly becoming available. It’s vital to keep abreast of and evaluate new offerings to maintain a competitive edge. Or, build your own suite of AI products with your own privately deployed and customized model so you are able to control the environment.

Invest in people. Be sure to provide adequate training to all applicable staff. Make sure your training doesn’t only focus on GenAI as it applies to marketing, but also includes safe and ethical use of AI in general.

Maintain human oversight. GenAI needs to be combined with human input and oversight to ensure consistent responses.

Monitor continuously. Continuous evaluation of AI systems' performance will highlight any fresh challenges and allow action to be taken at the right time.

Foster trust. Be transparent about the goals of your generative AI deployment, its expected impact on the enterprise, and how it will be used in practice.

Use diverse datasets. When training or fine-tuning a model for generative AI in marketing, make sure to use large, diverse datasets. In some cases, this may require the generation and use of synthetic data.

How will companies be using generative AI in marketing in the future?

As generative AI in marketing and advertising continues to evolve, its applications are likely to expand. Imagine a marketing organization that can:

Create fully-automated end-to-end marketing campaigns strongly supported by AI.
Gamify marketing by delivering highly interactive, AI-generated content such as quizzes, games, and interactive videos in real-time.
Personalize customer-facing, in-store buying experiences using AI-driven insights into customer preferences.
Enhance conversational marketing through advanced AI-driven virtual assistants.

The use of generative AI in marketing has the potential to enhance traditional marketing campaigns. It can provide an entirely new range of opportunities and capabilities, and marketers should learn how to harness these to their advantage. After all, generative AI in marketing will only continue to become more important to business operations as the technology evolves.

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