How AI Marketing has the tools to change your approach to communication
I was asked recently to serve on a panelist for a Public Relations Society of America webinar on social media trends. As a writer and a communicator, I offered my expertise on the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it can impact marketing efforts.
Our agency has been working with AI for several years, particularly in ways that are implemented in chatbots and automated response systems to help the client’s audience get an answer faster and easier. In particular, we have focused on ways that this communication approach can help individuals and families who are managing a mental health or addiction crisis.
AI Marketing has three components:
- Learning
- Creating
- Engaging
If you compare these three components to a traditional customer service experience, the learning phase is comparable to listening to requests and understanding trends. For example, if ten customers walk into a grocery store and nine of them ask where the milk is, you can identify that the milk either needs a better placement or better in-store signage. In AI Marketing we get this information in website data, chatbot conversations, form submissions, and text responses.
The engaging component measures whether your AI solution was able to provide a result that served you and your audience is a mutually beneficial way.
But the creation phase is a doozy. To prove the point, I did an experiment with Jarvis, one of the leading AI content generation. Jarvis allows you to provide a seed for the content you want and the tone, and it writes it for you.
To sample this, I gave Jarvis a fictional scenario to write: I was presenting a webinar on marketing when I slowly started turning into a gummy bear (à la
The Metamorphosis). I asked it to output three story beginnings. Here is what I got:
Output 1
“Kurt walked up to the podium and looked out at his audience. He had such a great idea for an intro that he was sure they’d be hooked before he even spoke. His mind raced with all of the things he could say in order to engage them, but when he opened his mouth, nothing came out. He tried again and this time a small word slipped out: ‘Hi.’
He saw one person in the back raise their hand and wave it around enthusiastically; Kurt needed more than that. The silence continued as people began to whisper quietly amongst themselves. There was no way Kurt could make eye contact with any of them without freaking himself out so instead, he turned towards his computer screen which displayed what should have been a slideshow full of”
Results: Awkward and weird, but okay—I see where the AI was headed. Probably not usable for a best seller. And, yes, it ended with “a slideshow full of….”
Output 2
“Kurt was slowly turning into a gummy bear. He couldn’t stop turning, his arms were shrinking and he felt like he was getting smaller every second. The only thing that seemed to be growing in size were his teeth which protruded from his mouth when they should have been retracted inside of him. His coworkers noticed too, but didn’t say anything about it for fear of scaring the children in the audience or driving away customers who had signed up for this webinar via an email campaign. When Kurt got to the Q&A section at the end of his presentation, one child asked why Kurt looked so different than before? That’s when all heck broke loose because everyone knew what was happening with Kurt except for him!”
Results: Nothing in this one set the scene, but the description of the transformation is almost brilliant. And where did these children come from?
Output 3
“Kurt had to present a webinar on marketing. His office was running low on staff, so he knew that he would have to do it himself. He set up the projector and got everything ready for his presentation. Kurt looked in the mirror at his reflection and saw what looked like a light colored gummy bear with brown hair staring back at him. At first, he shrugged off the idea of being turned into one as just some strange result of poor lighting or tired eyesight but soon realized that this might be very real when he noticed that during his presentation, he was slowly turning into a gummy bear himself! Terrified by this discovery, Kurt quickly shut down the computer and gave up on presenting altogether.”
Results: This is the best of the three attempts. It brings together the scenario, the transformation and the resulting action. It is still no masterpiece, but it would give me something to work with.
To summarize with completely AI-generated content:
Artificial intelligence marketing content generation is imperfect, but it can provide inspiration and starting points in fractions of the time that it would take to write it.
- AI-generated content can help you brainstorm new topics and get your creative juices flowing.
- While the results may not be perfect, they can help you get started on creating high-quality content quickly.