What You Should Do When AI Marketing Tools Don’t Work with Your Business

Around 150 years ago, skilled artisans and makers were needed to make things. Now, flexible, computer-driven, and automated manufacturing systems are used. The same thing will happen in marketing in less than 50 years, as AI completely changes the way marks work. But marketers can easily lose the productivity gains that AI brings if they don’t change how they do marketing generally.

We’ll talk about the history of marketing systems, how AI flips these systems on their heads, and some new ways to do marketing in the AI era.

What marketing tools have left behind

Today’s marketing often works like an apprentice system, where people learn their trade through a mix of formal schooling and on-the-job training under the watchful eye of more experienced professionals who give them advice, feedback, and guidance. People with a lot of experience in copywriting, design, and managing media are needed in marketing to make projects that work and bring in business.

To make sure quality and consistency, most marketing systems are set up with multiple levels of review, from the mentors to the apprentices (think senior copywriter to junior copywriter). It is thought that each specialty has its own skills that can be used in the marketing work, so workflows are set up so that they can pass from one specialty to another. They worked fine in a world where things were mostly done by hand and things moved more slowly.

When marketing automation and digital marketing came along, they started to automate the delivery of some marketing assets. However, the assets and marketing tools were still mostly made in the old-fashioned way.

How AI changes the way marketing works

But as AI makes marketing more automatic, old systems that require multiple handoffs and approvals by hand slow down productivity gains. If it still takes a week to get approvals, what good does it do for a graphic artist to make pictures 10 times faster? What do we gain if every test and change to the budget needs to be approved by management?

In the same way that the assembly line greatly sped up and improved the quality of making cars, AI might also greatly speed up and improve the quality of making marketing materials.

Repeated jobs like making ads and content will be automated and tested on a scale that has never been seen before. It will be possible to collect, process, and examine data almost in real time. Using feedback loops that are always open, machine learning will keep improving ads.

Marketers no longer have to spend hours arguing about where and what color buttons to use. Instead, they can now test many options in real time. Templates and programmatic brand standards make sure that quality and consistency are maintained, so there is no longer a need for multiple levels of approval. Flows of work are automatic.

Leaders in marketing need to think about how to boost productivity and use technology, as well as the whole marketing system and how it will affect people, processes, and jobs.

Effects on how the marketing team is organized

Most marketers are interested in the power of creative AI right now because AI is still new to marketing. On the other hand, the top researchers in the field are moving beyond generative AI and are now using AI to run processes and feedback loops. Some companies, like Tomorrow.io, have managers who are in charge of more than one thing, like social media, email, and events. This is leading to the rise of the marketing generalist, who is an expert in more than one area.

To begin with, it will be up to these marketing AI experts to put together different AI solutions into a process. As the marketing team gets smaller, people with a wider range of skills will be needed. Marketers will need to improve their data and technology skills.

The focus of marketing teams changes to managing streams of automation, streamlining processes, and running tests to get better results faster. It is now normal to work together with data teams, quality teams, and marketing ethics and policy teams.

When AI tells the marketing team about a new plan to try, strategy and execution will start to fall apart. As soon as marketers agree with that plan, AI puts it into action.

MasterCard’s Digital Engine, for instance, looks at billions of online talks to find new small trends. This lets the marketing team know, and they use current content to make ads and social media posts that are more relevant.

In a few years, AI could let the marketing team know about the chance and, if accepted, choose which assets to use from the content library or even create content that is highly personalized on the spot.

How jobs in marketing are going to change

What does this mean for the marketer’s job? A lot of different kinds of jobs have changed because of automation in production. The same things will happen in marketing. Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput write in their book “Marketing Artificial Intelligence, AI, Marketing and the Future of Business” that future marketers will need to know how to use data, technology, and conversation well.

In the future, marketers will need to know a lot about technology, be able to solve problems, and be able to see how to make processes run more smoothly. Leaders in marketing need to be aware of these changes and make sure that there are places where people from different departments can work together and keep improving.

A lot has been said about jobs that are going away. But AI will open up new possibilities in marketing. Conceptualizing, building, managing, and maintaining automations all need to be done within a strong set of rules and standards. In marketing, AI technology needs to be picked out, put into use, and kept up to date.

What to do now and in the future

Companies like Netflix, Nike, and Amazon have already shown how to react. At the moment, Nike uses AI to look at the emotional intelligence and personality traits of different groups of people in order to come up with stories that are most effective and give them the best return on investment. How do they do it?

Small groups work together to meet goals that have already been set using pre-defined measures. The teams try to find ways to combine tasks or make them run automatically. Leaders try to find ways to spread out decision-making while still following clear policy guidelines. Teams are given AI ideas and told to act on them.

If you’re just starting out, look for ways to automate your work by putting AI tools together. Start thinking about how to make the review process run itself. Think about how it will affect other processes, such as how technology can be used to make processes more efficient.

If your company is advanced, you should start looking for more ways to use your data and automations to make feedback loops that keep improving until you reach your goals. The goal is to agree on common goals with other teams and set up the processes to work best for those goals.

In any market that changes quickly, you should stay flexible, expect the unexpected, and keep your choices open.

People, processes, and jobs are changing because of AI and the marketing ecosystem.

When you’re excited about the newest AI-powered way to make content, it’s easy to forget that marketing works in a system. The way marketing is done now is mostly done by hand, with one person passing work to another.

In this day and age of AI marketing, these routine tasks might stop AI from making things more productive. When marketers plan their workflows through the system, they should keep automation in mind, just like how manufacturing has automated many tasks that used to be done by hand.

To use the real-time decision-making and quick execution that AI allows, marketing leaders need to think about the basic ways that work is done, such as the people, processes, and jobs that are involved.