AI Marketing: Everything You Need to Know [Use Cases, ChatGPT, and more]

Movies like The Matrix and the Terminator franchise made us think of artificial intelligence as this scary thing — angry, indestructible machines waging war against humanity.

Fast-forward to 2024, and the machines have not waged war against us … just yet. Instead, we are working WITH artificial intelligence to make our lives easier — how ironic !

The most recent step in our union is AI marketing — a suite of artificial intelligence software that can accelerate marketing output if used correctly. Read on to learn how marketing managers like you use artificial intelligence to beat the creative block, win clients and launch exciting digital marketing video campaigns.

What is AI Marketing?

AI marketing means using artificial intelligence tools to significantly speed up marketing execution.

These tools have a range of applications. For example, Jasper and Writer auto-generate content for emails, blog posts, and landing pages; Peak.AI automates customer segmentation; and Midjourney creates images and illustrations.

Savvy marketers treat artificial intelligence tools as marketing sparring partners — assistants that complete tedious tasks with impressive pace and efficiency. So they can focus on the creative aspects of digital marketing that they actually enjoy. Say you are writing a blog post; you can create a first draft with Jasper to reduce your content production time.

AI marketing is a game changer for marketing teams that want to scale their efforts without growing headcount at the same pace. By strategically incorporating these tools into their workflows, small marketing teams can amp up execution to the level of or even surpass larger teams with bigger marketing budgets.

How to use AI for Marketing

Consider this scenario: You ask a newbie marketer on your digital marketing team to transcribe a 30-minute expert interview. So, they get to work — listening to the audio repeatedly to make out the right sentences and write them down. Needless to say, the process is tedious, takes a lot longer than thirty minutes due to the constant back-and-forth, and the final result has several errors.

A better way to complete this task is to use transcription software like Rev or Otter.ai. The newbie marketer simply uploads the audio interview to the AI software and it does the work for them, saving many billable hours.

Automated transcription is just one of many ways to use AI for marketing campaigns. We spoke with some marketing managers to better understand how they integrate AI into their tool stacks.

1. For marketing strategy ideation

Bridget Greenwood, the founder of The Bigger Pie and The200BnClub, helps first-time founders create killer marketing strategies with AI.

“We have developed several AI prompts to guide our founders’ go-to-market strategy ideation processes,” explains Bridget.

“These prompts help them maximize the potential of ideation tools like ChatGPT. They can hone their brand’s tone of voice, understand the psychology of their target market and choose the best content creation channels seamlessly.”

Borrowing a leaf from Bridget’s team, we tried brainstorming customer research survey questions with ChatGPT.

What we got were basic questions based on customers research that still required expert input. They were a great start, but we could not send them to survey respondents as they were. We had to finetune the AI output to match our business context. Nevertheless, ChatGPT had hugely helped with question ideation and cut the task time in half — making this experiment successful based on the associated data.

Bridget shares a similar opinion based on the use of ChatGPT :

“You have to be careful when using ChatGPT for ideation. It is your assistant, not a replacement. Learn how to use it properly. Layer and refine your prompts until you get outputs that match your business and customers needs. The quality of output can also change depending on the tool's capacity and demand levels at the time you are using it. Rely on your judgment and expertise in your field of knowledge.”

Want to learn how you can use ChatGPT to help you for video marketing campaigns ?

Get our 30 ChatGPT ready-to-use prompts and rediscover the power of video and AI.

2. For customer data analysis

AI tools can help you quickly uncover unique insights hidden in a sea of customer data.

Most businesses have hit a data saturation point — meaning there’s too much customer research and feedback lying dormant. And marketers do not have the time to manually sift through large volumes of information to find “aha” moments that transform how they interact with customers.

Enter AI — an easy way to extract qualitative and quantitative information from customer data.

Let’s say you want to break video testimonials into bite-sized clips for distribution. You can use Laudable to help you finding high points from customer testimonials and automatically extract them into video format.

Suppose you want to identify churn risks in your customer base. In that case, Dialpad can run real-time sentiment analysis during sales calls to know how a particular customer feels about your brand.

Ollie Whitfield, Demand Generation Team Lead at VanillaSoft, explains how AI tools helped him get up to speed in his current role.

“One of the first things I did in my job was using a call recording software which uses AI to map out how sales calls between us and our prospects went. It gave me an insight into how differently certain topics or words were being used by our target market. And how much they talked about one thing versus another. That's a massive help.”

Ultimately, you will do better marketing if you rely on actionable insights to understand how your customers think and act — not guesswork.

3. For content generation

Every marketer we spoke with mentioned automating some aspects of their content creation process with artificial intelligence.

These tools do the heavy lifting for time-consuming and repetitive marketing content tasks. For example, Tom Bourlet, Head of Marketing & Social Media at Fizzbox, uses AI writing assistants to create ad copy variations for PPC campaigns quickly.

“When working on our social media PPC campaigns, we have to create ads that have 15 headlines and four descriptions. Much of our time is spent trying to think about how the copy should be written. However, tasks like this can be made much quicker by using AI to come up with potential headlines and descriptions.”

How to use AI for content marketing generation

When used right, AI is a force multiplier for content creators. It cannot handle your entire creative process — and you should not outsource this in the first place. But it can support different content creation stages, including:

1. Research

AI research tools like ChatGPT can quickly compile and present important information about a particular topic in one place. It saves time that you would have spent researching the subject from scratch.

Adelina Karpenkova, a freelance content marketer, says this method saves her 1–2 hours of work.  

“As a writer, I take screenshots of interfaces, workflows, amazing ads, and other outstanding examples all the time. But if I cannot find something in my folder, I will ask ChatGPT 4 to help me out. It is particularly good for finding information on the changes you cannot trace easily on the web (e.g., interface updates). Also, I used to spend hours drilling down the G2 reviews, trying to figure out the app’s strengths and weaknesses. Now, I start by asking ChatGPT to summarize opinions, and only then do I go to G2 — to make sure there's truth in those words.”

Like Adelina, you can use AI to gather industry stats, third-party reviews, and unique examples that improve your marketing content quality.

As a test, we asked ChatGPT for the top five video marketing stats — here is what it said:

This gave us a great headstart on our research, even though we had to verify the data independently.

2. Creating images and illustrations

How often have you seen stock images like the one above? At least more than once. You have probably used them a few times too.

No thanks to lean budgets, time constraints and barely-there graphic design skills, many digital content marketers rely almost entirely on bland stock images that add little value to their blog posts or social media posts.

But things are changing with AI.

Thanks to tools like Midjourney and DALL-E, anyone can now create unique feature images for landing pages and blog posts with just a few prompts. You input a prompt into the software, and the algorithm generates images based on it. The more specific your prompt is, the better the image you get — as with everything AI.

Here are some of our attempts:

Using AI to generate images is fast, cost-effective, and helps your AI marketing content stand out from the rest. And the customers usually love them.

3. Content formatting

Content formatting is everything you do to get an article ready to publish, like:

• Writing personalized alt texts for images
• Drafting meta titles and meta descriptions for SEO
• Adding personalized headings and bullet points
• Writing social media ads

After spending time and energy to write the actual article, completing these seemingly small tasks becomes difficult — and that’s where AI tools come in with all their data.

Using writing assistants like Copy.ai, Jasper, Copylime, and even ChatGPT, you can quickly generate alt texts, meta information, and headlines for your articles and hit your publishing deadlines.

For example, we used Copylime’s headline tool to come up with multiple headline variations for a sample blog post in just a few seconds thanks to the data of the AI tools.

It is a game-changer for writers.

Lana Rafaela, Founder of Cherry Red Content, says,

"As a content marketer, I used to be wary of AI. However, these days I use it to streamline repetitive tasks like headline ideation, meta description creation, and formatting. It's been great at helping me create briefs for writers too. My team also often uses AI to format clients' data into bullet points and takeaways.”

Now that you’ve learned how AI can speed up your content creation process, let's talk about the tool on every marketer’s lips: ChatGPT.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a freemium AI-powered bot launched by OpenAI in November 2022. It runs on GPT-4 — an advanced Natural Language Processing Technology that enables it to generate unique, human-like query responses. In other words, it talks like a human.

Unlike traditional search engines, ChatGPT has a standard chat interface — similar to what you’ll find in instant messaging apps like Telegram and social media sites like Facebook.

You type a prompt into the chat bar to start a new conversation with the bot. Within a few seconds, you will receive a response like you are speaking with a friend. ChatGPT also remembers previous prompts given to it in the same interaction, which helps it personalize its responses — as you will notice in our brief conversation below:

1. We asked ChatGPT for an introductory video creation lesson.

2. Then we asked it to share examples of B2B videos.

In our third and final prompt, we used a one-word query. Yet, ChatGPT understood the context of our personalized question and provided the correct response with the data.

ChatGPT has more advanced use cases — like creating personalized workflow automation, drafting video scripts, and writing code.

Despite these fantastic features, the AI-powered bot is far from perfect. Its data-base stopped in 2021, so it cannot provide up-to-date responses on current issues. And sometimes, ChatGPT is just plain wrong — like when it failed a basic arithmetic test.

Nevertheless, we can’t argue that ChatGPT doesn’t work. You just have to be careful and always credit-check your answers before you take its word. If used correctly, ChatGPT can save you time, money and become your personal assistant.

30 video prompts for ChatGPT

Prompts are the queries you input to ChatGPT to generate responses thanks to the knowledge data. Examples include:

• Write me a poem.
• Teach me how to play Squash.
• What is video marketing ?

These queries directly impact the quality of responses from the AI-powered bot. So, they must be clear, contextual, personalized and open-ended if you want relevant and specific output data. Digital Marketers are teachers. If the AI tool doesn't make it well, you have to correct it.

Prompts are especially important in video creation, where executing the wrong idea can result in big consequences and potential financial loss. Poorly-produced text can still be edited or reused. But if your video production goes south due to a terrible AI-generated script, it is hard to salvage the final clips.

The cheat code for writing a great prompt? Ask ChatGPT!

“Like with any collaborator, it is good to know what ChatGPT needs as input before you start asking for output,” says Jakub Grajcar, Head of Marketing at ZenPilot.

“So, instead of asking ‘write me a landing page about X,’ I like to start by asking: What are the elements of a good landing page? What input do you need from me to create one? That way, ChatGPT itself will teach you about the factors and variables it takes into consideration when it creates text for you. It will allow you to write much better prompts, and you will get much better output in return.”

We tried out Jakub’s advice:

1. First, we asked ChatGPT for the elements of a good video script.

2. Then we asked what it would need to produce a good video script.

3. Next, we shared this prompt.

The result was a highly-personalized script that we can easily tweak to match our brand voice and customers' requirements.

Compare the script in the above image to this. Here, we gave ChatGPT a vague prompt and what we got back was a generalized response that did not address our audience's pain points.

At this point, you are probably thinking, "Great, another time-consuming task to add to my never-ending-to-do list." But that's not the case because we compiled a list of 30 plug-and-play ChatGPT prompts to support your end-to-end video creation process. 

On our list, you will find prompts to upscale your: 

• Video plans and research 
• Video ideation
• Video promotion
• Storyboarding and scripting 
• Content repurposing 
• Trends content ideas

The machines are coming.

AI will not replace marketers. Instead, marketers who use AI will replace those who don’t.

So you do not need to stack up machinery for a Matrix-like end-of-the-world battle against artificial intelligence. Embrace the rise of the machines and all the opportunities they bring. Understand the strengths of these tools, and learn how to use their data to your advantage.

Your future marketer-self will thank you, your customers too.

Enjoyed reading this article about AI for marketing? Discover the 14 types of videos every B2B business should prioritize in its digital marketing strategy.