Superpower Your Marketing Strategy with AI

This blog was originally published in 2023 and has been updated regularly; the last update was June 2025. At Accelity, we’re always testing new tools to help us work smarter and better serve our clients.

For every think piece warning about the dangers of AI, there’s another mocking its inability to handle what humans consider basic tasks. And fair—AI still can’t crank out final-ready copy or generate an image without at least six fingers involved.

But here’s where AI does shine: strategy. It’s not your replacement—it’s your brainstorming buddy. It’s a catalyst that helps marketers move from concept to execution. With the right prompts, it can surface sharp insights about your brand, your competitors and your audience—all before lunch.

It’s like having a coworker to bounce ideas off… if that coworker was trained on decades of data and didn’t steal your leftovers from the breakroom.

We asked our Strategic Brand & Marketing Director, Stephanie Roland, how she uses ChatGPT to leverage insights, validate hunches, and spark fresh ideas for clients. 

A note on ChatGPT—AI tools for marketers have existed for years, but the conversation gained momentum with OpenAI’s ChatGPT release in November 2022. This freemium chatbot became the fastest-growing app in internet history. While other tools like Perplexity are becoming all the rage, we’ll focus on ChatGPT, its reinforcement learning model and how it specifically supports brainstorming and strategy.

4 ways marketers can use AI for campaign strategy

1. Idea generation 

ChatGPT's responses range from boringly traditional to wildly innovative, making it a hilariously fun tool for brainstorming. By providing details about your target audience, goals, and objectives, ChatGPT can offer a variety of concepts and campaign angles to explore.

Strategy consultant Julian Cole shared a wealth of insightful prompts for using ChatGPT in campaign development during his webinars. 

One of our favorites? Asking ChatGPT to generate r/showerthoughts about a topic, industry, brand or product.

These responses won’t go viral on LinkedIn as-is, but they can get the wheels turning to help you come up with a new post idea for growing your personal brand.

2. Audience analysis

Building a solid buyer persona strategy starts with knowing who you’re marketing to—and the research can be a time suck. ChatGPT helps speed things up by summarizing audience info and even uncovering new personas, giving you a broader view of your target market. 

Thanks to the handy chat format, you can ask follow-up questions about customer demographics, preferences, and behavior to better understand your audience and tailor campaigns accordingly.

We wanted to test it out. Here’s a snippet of the impressively detailed persona it created for us based on a super simple prompt.

Prompt: Create a buyer persona for the founder of a tech startup where they are the only employee.

By outsourcing your personas to AI, you can begin with a foundation that you tweak and evolve over time, rather than starting with a blank page.

3. Messaging and positioning

Here’s the brand messaging statement ChatGPT wrote for MediConnectPro, a fake healthtech it also created earlier in the chat:

4. Competitive analysis

Yes, you can go to each competitor’s website and spend time clicking through all the pages, reading their content, and checking their social (and you should still do that, too). But ChatGPT can synthesize what it knows about competitors quickly to help you get a high-level overview of the competition. You can even ask follow-up questions to find opportunities to outperform in areas where the competitor brand is lacking. 

When NOT to use AI for campaign strategy

The common refrain when using AI is to proceed with caution; even ChatGPT now has disclaimers at the end of some of its responses, reminding people that it isn’t always accurate.

When asked about the benefits of using ChatGPT for campaign strategy, it added this caveat:
It's important to note that while ChatGPT can provide valuable insights and recommendations, it's always advisable to combine AI-generated suggestions with human expertise and critical thinking to create well-rounded marketing campaign strategies.

See? Even the robot agrees: AI works best with human expertise. 

With that reminder, it’s important to note that AI shouldn’t be your only tool. Here’s why:

• AI cannot develop the campaign for you. You know the client or brand much better than AI. You’ll need to add the human element—empathy, humor, culture, etc.—to make the campaign successful. 
• AI isn’t “set it and forget it.” First, you need to verify that the information ChatGPT provided is accurate. You’ll also need to continue to test and optimize what you found in the brainstorming stage. 
• AI doesn’t have the most up-to-date information. If your competitor is relatively new, or you want to build a campaign around a new product, ChatGPT likely won’t be useful as its models were trained in 2021. 

Kickstart your strategy with the help of AI

When it comes to brainstorming and uncovering new ideas, ChatGPT’s wacky responses are an advantage. Bouncing ideas off of the robot can help you think about a problem or solution in a totally different way, uncovering the seed that will eventually become your super-effective strategy. While marketers should always make sure to verify and monitor AI outputs, the ideas it can generate will help unlock insights you might never have imagined. 

Want to bounce your ideas off a team of (human) marketing experts? ;) Hit us up here.