Generative AI is a powerful tool that enhances our capabilities, offering us new ways to amplify our work and tackle tasks with greater efficiency and creativity. Think of generative AI as an extra teammate – always available to discuss your questions, help you brainstorm and build on your ideas. In marketing communications, having this kind of extra support on hand can be a game changer.
The key to using generative AI successfully lies in leveraging its strengths and focusing our efforts where it falls short – like its lack of real-world experience and understanding of nuance. Think of it this way: today’s commercial airplanes are so advanced that they can practically fly themselves. Yet, we still rely on pilots for critical moments like takeoff and landing, where years of experience are essential to navigate the countless variables that technology alone can’t account for. While you might feel comfortable with the plane’s autopilot handling most of the flight—thanks to better tracking, more precise routes, and predictive turbulence avoidance—would you board a plane without a pilot? Probably not. The technology offers significant advantages, but it’s human expertise that ensures a safe and successful journey.
The same idea applies when we use generative AI in marketing and communications. Generative AI provides a deep bank of information, powerful analysis, and efficiency, but it’s the team with years of real experience that ultimately guide the strategy and execution that make the difference. Generative AI may is not a replacement for marketers, but when we layer in our knowledge of the craft while using it, tools like ChatGPT become a powerful supporting aid that complements our expertise and helps to achieve better outcomes.
Key Use Cases for AI in Marketing Communications
Here are three key areas where using tools like ChatGPT can be helpful in marketing and communications:
1. Research and Ideation
AI can sift through huge amounts of information, summarize it for you, and then ideate around that information with you. This synthesizes research more quickly and allows us to use more of our brain power on developing creative campaigns and optimizing strategies.
What it looks like when it’s working: You need to understand a complex topic fast. You have generative AI explain it to you in layman’s terms, break down specific details further, and answer follow-up questions. Once you’re comfortable with the topic, you have it help you think through ideas for applying the insights you’ve gained, sparking new ideas and opportunities.
What to watch out for: Don’t just rely on AI to give you all the answers – it can’t replace your strategic thinking. You still need your marketing expertise to turn AI-generated insights into successful campaigns.
2. Content Repurposing
The lifespan of large pieces of content is often cut short – getting dusty and forgotten after one round of initial promotion. AI can help you get more ROI out of these rich assets by assisting you in repurposing it into different formats to continually push across multiple channels over a longer period of time to maximize reach and impact.
What it looks like when it’s working: Think about a detailed research report your company created. AI can take that asset and guide you in breaking it down into a series of blog posts, infographics visualizing data points, social media posts highlighting key findings, scripts for a videos, and more. Now, you’re able to continually re-promote that report and its insights in new and compelling ways to capture the attention of a wider audience.
What to watch out for: Without guidance and oversight, AI can produce repurposed content that is repetitive, disjointed, and unlikely to engage your audience. Carefully develop and iterate on each piece of repurposed content alongside AI rather than letting it fully take the wheel.
3. Editing Partner
We’ve all felt our stomachs drop after sending a “final” document, only to discover typos or mistakes afterward. While AI is often criticized for being too robotic or rigid in its writing, it’s these characteristics that make it excel as a technical editor. It’s great for running reviews specific to grammar, spelling, active vs. passive voice, brand guidelines, and more.
What it looks like when it’s working: As you develop a blog post, use generative AI to review each draft for mistakes before sending it to another team member for editing. This reduces the effort spent correcting small errors and frees up more time to layer in the team’s unique perspectives and insights. Before publishing, use AI to optimize the post for keywords and SEO strategy. Then, as the blog post ages, use AI to weave in new data points to keep it fresh and relevant to your audience.
What to watch out for: Don’t let AI take over your team’s writing or editing. It’s a great second set of eyes to aid the content review process, but it can miss or strip away the subtle nuances, language, and creativity that makes your brand voice unique and compelling.
Essential Building Blocks for High-Quality AI Outputs
Using generative AI effectively all boils down to your prompts. Low quality, generic inputs lead to low quality, generic outputs – garbage in, garbage out. To achieve high quality responses, you need to:
1. Understand Your Desired Outcome: Without some expertise in marketing and communications, it would be challenging to get AI to produce outputs that support your work. Leveraging your knowledge of the craft is a key part of writing effective prompts. Think through how you define high quality marketing and communications work and the processes it takes to deliver those results. Use that to guide how you direct your AI tool and iterate on its responses.
2. Supply Additional Brand Information and Resources: ChatGPT has essentially ingested the internet and summarizes it, providing an average of what it read. You can’t expect it to produce tailored outputs for your brand and audience without providing constraints to help it narrow its focus. Provide your AI tool with these key assets to help it craft responses that better align with your brand:
- Clear Voice and Brand Guidelines: Having well-defined voice and brand guidelines in place and ready to share is crucial. These guidelines ensure that any AI-generated content remains consistent with the brand’s identity and messaging.
- Writing Samples: Upload examples of what is considered good and what is bad. This helps AI understand the standard of writing you are aiming for.
- Deep Audience Understanding: Inform the AI tool about whom you’re trying to connect with, including their preferences, pain points, and interests by providing it with thorough audience research and detailed personas.
If you plan to upload sensitive or proprietary brand information, use a paid version of the AI tool and review its data usage policies carefully. Paid subscriptions often include enhanced privacy and security features, ensuring your confidential data stays within your control and isn’t shared beyond your interactions. This added protection is vital for safeguarding your brand’s unique assets and strategy.
Keep a Human in the Loop, Define Your Policy, and Stay Curious
Generative AI can be a powerful teammate when paired with the right expertise. By embracing it as a supportive tool and thoughtfully collaborating with it, you can amplify your team’s capabilities and results.
As you incorporate AI tools, it’s crucial to define internal guidelines to avoid issues like misinformation and plagiarism. Establishing a clear policy on how generative AI will—and will not—be used ensures that your work remains ethical, accurate, and aligned with your brand values and standards. Remember, the most effective AI-driven marketing strategies are built on a solid foundation of human expertise, strategic guidance, and a deep understanding of your audience.
