This article is part of “Built it,” a series about digital technology trends disrupting industries.
Generative AI is on the tip of people’s tongues this year and marketers are eager to adopt it. In a Salesforce survey, 51% of marketers say they use generative AI, while 22% say they are considering doing so. The benefits could be significant: McKinsey predicted that generative AI could increase marketer productivity 5 to 15%, for a total value of $463 billion per year.
The financial benefit of adopting generative AI in marketing and sales is pushing businesses to adopt it quickly. Understanding how AI works and how to deploy it is now a priority for many marketers.
The goal is driven by the desire to deliver more personalized messages that encourage consumers to purchase. Self-preservation is also a motivation: developing AI proficiency could help boost job security, as some marketers fear the technology will replace them if their expertise doesn’t evolve.
“For those who jump on the bandwagon and really understand that this works, it gives them a competitive advantage,” Tom Krutilek, chief marketing officer of fintech marketplace InvestHub, told Business Insider.
AI can enable personalization at scale
InvestHub, founded in 2021, aims to help startups raise capital by connecting them with investors. Although the goal is as old as the markets themselves, InvestHub is taking a fresh approach: It’s building an AI-driven platform designed to use data about startups, such as the industry of a company and the size of investment it needs, to connect them with worthy investors. It also works in reverse, helping investors find startups that match their interests. “Customization is important to us,” Krutilek said.
Krutilek also uses AI internally to conduct market research that could help the company attract customers and fine-tune its marketing for different audiences. “We have to ask ourselves, how do we talk to the CTO or the person in charge of revenue operations?” he said. “It’s different from how we talk to a venture capitalist.”
This is not to say that InvestHub uses AI to generate marketing content and ships it as is. Krutilek described AI as a “starting point for our team.” She can suggest an effective marketing message, but her team still needs to “add a human touch” by determining whether the AI’s suggestions are suitable and deciding which marketing strategy to pursue.
“If AI can reduce what would take three or four months to a few days, then all of a sudden it will change the economics of my business.”
Bob Hutchins, the founder of Human Voice Media
Marketers can also use the efficiency of AI to deploy personalized messages at scale. Bob Hutchins, founder of AI marketing consultant Human Voice Media, said long-tail marketing content, like product description pages, or PDPs, was ripe for disruption.
PDPs are an essential part of modern e-commerce marketing strategies. If you search for a product on Google or Bing and then click a link, or if you click on a product recommendation on Instagram or TikTok, the page you land on is likely a PDP.
Ideally, PDPs should be personalized; A recently retired 65-year-old in Arkansas will likely have different priorities than a 20-something college student in Spain, and a product page should reflect that. But in practice, this type of customization is cumbersome, since it involves creating numerous iterations of the same product page. Many ecommerce sites find this task more than even a well-equipped marketing team can handle, but AI could change the equation.
“If I want to add 5,000 products next quarter, who’s going to write that? Who’s going to make sure it meets brand guidelines?” Hutchins said. “If AI can reduce what would take three or four months to a few days, then all of a sudden it will change the economics of my business.”
As marketers become more experienced in using AI, Hutchins said, more companies will be able to leverage real-time analytics and personalization that present customers with purchasing suggestions based on their purchasing history with the company.
Authenticity with AI means using it in the right place and at the right time
AI’s promise of effectiveness is clear, but marketers often find their attempts to deliver personalized messages hampered by industry demands. Most Prolific Buzzword: Authenticity. While marketers dream of AI-driven personalization, consumers say they love brands that seem more human.
Uber Eats found itself on the wrong side of this issue in December. One in of thick, breaded pastries filled with strange meats.
But Greg Kihlström, owner of marketing consultancy The Agile Brand and instructor at the Association of National Advertisers’ School of Marketing, is skeptical that authenticity will be a long-term barrier. “Consumers are pretty pragmatic about a lot of things,” he said.
“Top marketers are less worried about losing their jobs, but they are worried about reduced headcount.”
Greg Kihlström, owner of The Agile Brand
Kihlström and Hutchins argued that if brands ensure their AI results are accurate and follow the brand’s marketing guidelines, consumers are unlikely to object to AI or, in many cases , even notice it when it is used.
Research seems to support this belief. A study published in December found that even trained linguists had difficulty distinguishing AI-generated text from text written by a human. Other studies have shown that, in many situations, people can’t distinguish AI-generated images from real photos.
While Kihlström advised marketers to remain attentive to the nuances and limitations of AI, he said that “if it meets a practical need, I don’t think most consumers, in a year or two , will care.” But he added that there are still “many years” before AI can create something like a sentimental Super Bowl ad.
Will AI replace marketing professions?
While some marketers wonder how consumers will respond to AI, many are worried about something closer: their jobs.
Kihlström said industry professionals are concerned that AI could reduce or eliminate the need for certain roles — fears that go hand in hand with the technology’s promise of efficiency.
“Marketing executives are less concerned about losing their jobs, but they are worried about downsizing,” he said. “Because their bosses are saying, ‘If 30% of jobs can be replaced by AI, let’s cut 30% of the workforce.'”
Marketers with creative tasks might be the first to feel this pain. “The low-hanging fruit is obviously content creation,” Hutchins said. He recommended that companies looking to get started with AI in marketing carefully consider repetitive creative tasks, like writing and editing ad copy, that generative AI could handle.
Opinions vary, however, and Krutilek is optimistic about the future of marketing. “I don’t think it’s going to change the number of jobs,” he said of AI, while adding that he believed marketers with experience in AI would have a set of essential and advantageous skills.
Krutilek said AI has radically changed the way it integrates market research to position InvestHub against its competitors. He said he can now complete a competitive analysis in a matter of hours that once took a solid week of research.
It’s not just analysts who benefit. He said AI tools allow members of creative teams to more quickly imagine and iterate on assets such as graphics for a marketing campaign. The time saved could be used to consider more creative assets or to review a creative strategy.
“Before AI, we asked ourselves: ‘How can I minimize? I only have X employees, X capacity and X budget,’” Krutilek said. “But it allows me to really determine what tactics will work for us and how we can improve them.”
