AI is changing marketing: What works and what doesn’t

If you work in marketing, chances are AI has already changed the way you work. Whether it’s helping brainstorm campaign ideas, analyze customer data, or create content, artificial intelligence has quickly become part of the modern marketer’s techstack. 

Let’s explore how AI is being integrated into marketing today and how you can use it effectively. 

AI and hyperpersonalization

Think about the last time a brand seemed to know exactly what you were looking for. Maybe Netflix recommended a show that matched your interests, Spotify created a playlist based on your listening habits, or an online store showed you products that were similar to something you had recently viewed.

Personalization drives marketing, and AI is helping brands take it even further.

AI hyperpersonalization goes beyond the traditional means by analyzing customer behaviour, preferences, and interactions to create experiences that are curated to each individual customer.

This means you can use AI to better understand your audience and deliver the right message at the right time. AI can help you create more targeted email campaigns, recommend relevant products, customize experiences, and deliver advertisements based on customer interests. Instead of mass marketing to everyone in the same way, AI allows you to create experiences that are aligned with the individual customer.

Imagine someone visits your website, spends a few minutes reading blogs about SEO, downloads a SEO marketing guide, and then leaves without contacting you. Instead of sending them generic emails, AI can recognize their interests and automatically recommend related content, ads about SEO services, and personalize emails with content they're most likely to engage with. 

In this way AI can enable marketing to feel more personal. When used effectively, AI-powered personalization can help you build stronger customer relationships and improve engagement.

Automating marketing workflows

Let's face it, marketing involves a lot of behind the scenes work.  AI can take care of many of these repetitive tasks, giving you more time to focus on strategy, creativity, and building stronger customer relationships.

Whether it's scheduling content, organizing customer information, generating campaign reports, managing CRM updates, or automating email journeys, AI can help simplify your day-to-day workflow. That means less time spent on manual tasks and more time for strategic tasks. 

AI in predictive analytics 

Reviewing data can be time-consuming. Instead of spending hours sorting through reports and spreadsheets, AI can help identify trends, summarize performance, and highlight areas that may need attention. This allows you to gain insights in real time and even make adjustments instead of waiting until the end of a campaign to evaluate results.

We've talked before about how predictive analytics can help you make smarter marketing decisions by identifying trends and understanding customer behaviour. (You can read more about that in our previous blog on predictive analytics.) 

AI-driven content generation 

We've explored the idea of being human-led, AI-fed before, and that message still rings true. AI can be a valuable tool for speeding up the content creation process.

But it's important to know where AI adds value, and where you need to step in. While AI can help brainstorm for ideas and overcome creative blocks, your unique experience and understanding is what captures the audience and customers. Before you hit publish, make sure you're refining the messaging, and adding the personality and perspective that make your brand stand out.

Where AI can fall short

Consumers today are quick to spot AI generated content whether it's a blog post, a social media script, an image, or an advertisement. Content that feels generic, repetitive, or lacks authenticity is often skipped past, as audiences continue to value genuine human story telling. 

A good example is the Toys "R" Us AI-generated ad, which recreated the story of founder Charles Lazarus using generative AI. Viewers felt the ad looked unnatural, lacked emotional connection and nostalgia that people associate the brand with. 

For marketers, this is an important reminder that storytelling and creativity still sit at the heart of great marketing. AI can be a powerful tool for improving efficiency and generating ideas but it cannot fully replace the human insight needed to create ads or campaigns that truly resonate with audiences. 

As AI becomes more integrated into marketing, we must learn to question its usage and evaluate its output. Ultimately, creativity, judgment, and cultural understanding are your unique strengths that AI cannot replicate. So, use AI as a tool to support creativity, rather than to substitute it.

How are you adopting AI to enhance marketing?