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 who is 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 AI successfully is only leaning on it for tasks that play to its strengths, and reserving the majority of your time and expertise for work in the areas where it falls short, like applying nuance or drawing from lived experience. Think of it this way: today’s commercial airplanes are so advanced that they can practically fly themselves, but we still rely on pilots for critical moments like takeoff and landing, where lived experience is essential.
The same idea applies when we use generative AI in marketing and communications: AI can support processes with its deep bank of information, powerful analysis capabilities, and efficiency, but it’s the team with years of built-up expertise are needed to guide the strategy and achieve relevant and credible outcomes.
Best Ways for B2B Marketers to use Generative AI
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, and ideate around that information with you. This allows us to synthesizes research quickly and spend more time 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: AI can’t replace your strategic thinking. It’s great for getting you started, but don’t rely on it to turn insights into successful campaigns. That is where marketing and communications expertise, audience understanding, and creative judgement is required.
2. Content Repurposing
Large pieces of content often have a short shelf life, becoming dusty and forgotten after one round of promotion. AI can help extend the ROI out of pieces of content by helping you repurposing them into additional formats that can be shared across multiple channels over 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’s insights in new and compelling ways to keep capturing new attention.
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 spot a typo or mistake afterward. While AI is sometimes criticized for sounding robotic, it’s this quality that makes it a strong technical editor. It’s great at reviewing for grammar, spelling, formatting consistency, brand guidelines, and even tone issues like passive voice.
What it looks like when it’s working: As you develop a blog post, use AI to review each draft and catch mistakes before sending it to a teammate for deeper edits. This reduces time spent correcting small errors and frees up more time for your team to focus on layering unique perspectives and strengthening structure. Before publishing, use AI to optimize the post for keywords and SEO strategy. Then, use AI to weave in new data points over time to keep it fresh and relevant to your audience.
What to watch out for: Don’t let AI take over your team’s editing process. It’s a great second set of eyes, but it can miss or strip away the subtle nuances, language, and creativity that makes your brand voice unique and compelling.
How to Guide AI to Reflect Your Brand and Strategy
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 strong, useful 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 and similar AI tools generate responses based on vast sets of training data and live web browsing. Without clear direction, the’ll default to answering in a generalized way. To get AI tools to produce outputs that are tailored to your brand and audience, you need to provide guidance and constraints to help it narrow its focus. Here are a few key resources and inputs to layer into your prompts:
- 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: Attach 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: Brief your AI tool on who you’re trying to connect with, including their needs, pain points, preferences and interests. Attach audience research and detailed personas if they’re readily available.
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 conversations and the information you input aren’t shared externally.
Final Thought: Keep a Human in the Loop, Set Smart Boundaries, 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 AI becomes more integrated into marketing and communications workflows, it’s critical to establish clear guardrails to protect brand quality and credibility:
- Never publish AI-generated content without human review
- Fact-check all AI-generated outputs
- Use vetted AI tools with strong privacy controls
- Be transparent about how AI is being applied (internally and externally)
The most effective uses of AI for your company’s marketing program won’t be built overnight. They’ll take shape through consistent, strategic use of AI tools, and fine tuning over time to best align with your brand’s voice, values, and the audience you’re tryng to reach.
Start small with a few intentional experiments, and let early wins guide how you grow and optimize from there.
