Marketers must exercise the utmost caution when utilizing generative AI in their marketing efforts
Generative AI is revolutionizing marketing, enabling businesses to connect with customers in new ways. This technology, with its ability to generate content, design ads, and even predict consumer behavior, is not just an innovative tool—it’s a game-changer. By harnessing the capabilities of generative AI, marketers can transcend traditional boundaries and unlock new realms of innovation.
To fully capitalize on the potential of GenAI, marketers must carefully assess their strategies and identify areas where this technology can make a substantial impact. It is essential to recognize that GenAI thrives on high-quality data, as it serves as the fuel for generating valuable insights and accurate predictions. It has the potential to significantly impact three areas of marketing and sales: customer experience (CX), growth and productivity.
So, how is GenAI making a difference in marketing right now?
At first glance, there are numerous applications for GenAI in the world of marketing. GenAI’s powerful algorithms can be used to create highly-tailoredhighly tailored content for specific audiences. Already, marketing strategists, copywriters, designers, coders, and photo and video editors, are using AI tools that can simplify their day-to-day tasks and reduce workload. GenAI can also draft and personalize emails and create slide presentations – features demonstrated by both Microsoft Corp and Alphabet Inc’s Google, in recent product announcements. All of these things are currently imperfect though and should be considered as ‘first-draft’ content to be reviewed and worked on by experienced marketers.
Tailored storytelling
ChatGPT has demonstrated that GenAI can help with storytelling – it creates stories that align with a customer’s particular needs. GenAI’s natural language processing (NLP) algorithms generate narratives tailored specifically to an individual persona, rather than relying solely on predetermined templates. This allows brands to create more valuable stories for their target audience whilst remaining authentic to their brand identity. But, any interaction with GenAI can impact a company’s image and reputation if it’s not fully understood, monitored, and audited, based on company policies.
Search engine optimized (SEO) content
GenAI can also produce content designed to target SEO rankings. By leveraging machine learning algorithms, it can identify keywords and phrases more likely to generate higher Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rankings (the pages displayed by search engines in response to a Google search). This can allow brands to generate more organic traffic from those searching online.
One example is ‘Jasper’, a marketing-focused version of GPT-3, that can produce blogs, social media posts, web copy, sales emails, ads, and other types of customer-facing content – it frequently uses A/B testing and ensures content is optimized for search engine placement. This can free up time for marketing teams to spend on content strategy, and give writers more time for research, ideation, and strategy.
Marketers using GenAI must keep a few things in mind
Generative AI is expected to have a significant impact on the marketing industry, with 35% of respondents in an IBM survey recognizing its potential. However, marketers must use this technology responsibly. While generative AI can automate certain aspects of campaigns, it should not replace the creativity and human touch needed to deliver compelling campaigns. If used incorrectly, it can mute the personality of a brand which, in turn, can negatively impact customer loyalty, engagement and brand perception.
The Harvard Business Review raises the question of what constitutes original and proprietary content. While GenAI providers would argue that they belong to their prompt creators, it is derived from previous text and images used for training the models. But “they are clearly derivative of the previous text and images used to train the models.” This necessitates careful consideration of copyrights, patents, trademarks, and other proprietary rights to avoid infringement.
Chief Marketing Officer,
Synechron, UK
Marketers have expressed concerns about the redundancy of content produced by GenAI. Writing generated by AI, although factually accurate, is repetitive and simplistic. Consequently, significant editing and refinement are required to enhance the material. Another concern is the potential for unfair bias in AI-generated content, especially concerning sensitive attributes such as race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, income, disability, and political or religious beliefs. There is a genuine risk of inadvertently creating offensive and inappropriate content.
That’s why the use of disclaimers should be introduced for marketers using GenAI for their asset creation. As we’ve noticed, ChatGPT can devise a first draft, but it should never be considered final.
Generative AI is only as good as the data it’s using
The effectiveness of GenAI relies on the quality of the input data it receives, and the prompt or request given. Additionally, the data pool used by the AI may contain opinions and falsehoods that need to be carefully filtered out due to the unreliable nature of internet information. Therefore, marketers must exercise the utmost caution when utilizing generative AI in their marketing efforts.
