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Superpower Your Marketing Strategy with AI

Superpower Your Marketing Strategy with AI

This blog is part of a three-part series on the potential uses of AI in B2B content marketing. Accelity team members are currently exploring available tools and how they can help us best serve our clients.

For as many articles as there are raising alarms about the dangers of AI, there are just as many mocking how bad AI still is at executing many tasks. When it comes to marketing, AI still isn’t ready to draft final versions of copy on demand or generate images of fingers.

Where AI really shines in marketing is its role as a strategy tool. AI works best when it’s used as a jumping-off point that helps marketers take an idea and move it forward. If you know the right prompts, AI can give you myriad insights into your brand, competitors, audience and more. 

It’s like having a coworker to bounce ideas off of, but that coworker was trained on data models capturing decades of information. And also doesn’t steal your lunch in the breakroom. 

We asked our Marketing Account Manager Stephanie Roland for her input on how she’s using ChatGPT to generate new insights, validate hypotheses, and brainstorm concepts for her clients. 

A note on ChatGPT—AI tools that help marketers have existed for years, but the conversation really took off when OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022. When this freemium chatbot launched, it became the fastest-growing app in the history of the Internet. While there are other tools available, such as Taskade, we’re going to focus specifically on ChatGPT and its reinforcement learning model to discuss how it can help with brainstorming and marketing strategy.

4 ways marketers can use AI for campaign strategy

1. Idea generation 

The responses ChatGPT generates—ranging from boringly traditional to wildly hilarious—make it a fun tool for brainstorming. By punching in details about your target audience, goals, and objectives, ChatGPT can offer a variety of concepts and campaign angles to explore.

Strategy consultant Julian Cole recently held a webinar that featured tons of awesome prompts for using ChatGPT for strategy. One of our favorites? Asking ChatGPT to generate r/showerthoughts about a topic, industry, brand or product. 

2. Audience analysis

Buyer persona research is a huge part of building a successful marketing strategy, and it takes a lot of time. ChatGPT can summarize information about target audiences and uncover new personas to gain a broad understanding of who you’re marketing to. Plus with the handy chat model, marketers can ask follow-up questions about customer demographics, preferences, and behavior to better understand their audience and tailor their campaigns accordingly.

Here is the incredibly thorough buyer persona profile it created for our example based on a super simple prompt:

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

Name: Sarah Techwell

Background Information:

  • Age: 35
  • Gender: Female
  • Education: Holds a master's degree in computer science
  • Work Experience: Has 10 years of experience in the tech industry, including working for established companies and startups.
  • Family Status: Single, no children
  • Location: Based in a tech hub city like San Francisco or Austin

Demographics:

  • Occupation: Founder and CEO of a tech startup
  • Industry: Technology
  • Company Size: Currently the only employee

Goals and Motivations:

  1. Building a Successful Tech Startup: Sarah is driven by her desire to build a successful technology startup from scratch. She wants to create a product or service that disrupts the industry and gains significant market traction.
  2. Solving a Problem: Sarah is motivated by identifying and solving a pressing problem in the market. She wants her startup to provide a unique and innovative solution that improves people's lives or business operations.
  3. Autonomy and Independence: Sarah values the freedom and autonomy that comes with being an entrepreneur. She enjoys having control over the decision-making process and being able to shape the direction of her own company.
  4. Financial Success: While not the primary motivation, Sarah is aware of the financial potential that comes with running a successful tech startup. She wants her hard work to be financially rewarding and hopes to secure funding or achieve profitability in the long run.

Challenges:

  1. Limited Resources: As the only employee, Sarah faces the challenge of limited resources, including time, manpower, and financial capital. She must be resourceful and efficient in managing all aspects of her startup.
  2. Wearing Multiple Hats: Sarah is responsible for various roles within her startup, such as product development, marketing, sales, finance, and customer support. This requires her to have a diverse skill set and the ability to switch between tasks quickly.
  3. Competing with Established Players: Sarah's startup is likely to face competition from established players in the industry. She needs to differentiate her offering and find a unique value proposition that sets her apart from the competition.
  4. Scaling and Growth: Sarah must navigate the challenges of scaling her startup, including hiring and managing additional employees, expanding the customer base, and securing funding or investment to support growth.

Psychographics:

  1. Ambitious and Driven: Sarah is highly ambitious and has a strong drive to succeed. She is willing to put in the long hours and hard work required to build a successful startup.
  2. Risk-Taker: Sarah is comfortable taking calculated risks and embracing uncertainty. She understands that entrepreneurship involves inherent risks and is willing to face them head-on.
  3. Innovative and Creative: Sarah values innovation and embraces creative problem-solving. She thrives on finding unique and out-of-the-box solutions to challenges.
  4. Tech Enthusiast: Sarah has a deep passion for technology and keeps up with the latest trends and advancements in the industry. She enjoys exploring new technologies and incorporating them into her startup's offerings.

3. Messaging and positioning

Developing the perfect brand messaging statements can take hours of finding exactly the right words. Marketers can use ChatGPT to rework and refine their messaging and positioning strategies. By discussing the unique selling points of a product or service, target audience needs, and competitive landscape, ChatGPT can provide suggestions and help optimize marketing messages for maximum impact.

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

Brand Messaging Statement for MediConnectPro:

"At MediConnectPro, we believe in simplifying healthcare through innovative technology. Our mission is to empower healthcare organizations with a comprehensive and user-friendly platform that streamlines communication, enhances collaboration, and revolutionizes data management. With MediConnectPro, healthcare professionals can focus on what truly matters – providing exceptional patient care. Join us in embracing a future where healthcare is efficient, interconnected, and driven by the power of digital transformation. Discover a new era of healthcare with MediConnectPro, where communication meets excellence."

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.