Digital Marketers and AI: Friend or Foe?

Digital marketers and AI appear to be going head to head. In the exciting yet unpredictable age of digital AI, it is tempting to feel a slight twinge of concern regarding the future of the digital marketing space, mainly if you’ve been in the industry for a while. Or maybe you are already happy to embrace this as an opportunity to explore new ways in which you can drive value. It is, after all, like this industry to be open to new experiences, tech, optimisation methods and strategies. 

How Do Digital Marketers and AI Benefit Each Other?

Sitting in either camp has its advantages, and we’ll explore ways in which AI requires us to shift our focus and change our perspective to enhance our skills as marketers rather than negate them. 

You’ll Have More Time

Manually changing bids or modelling data for hours only to find that there isn’t enough conclusive outcome to make a particular decision can be quite frustrating. It is also no way to condition your strategy and lateral thinking muscles. In some cases, a person may not know how much data is enough to decide, depending on their experience level.

AI can look at innumerable different data points multiple times a minute… even a second. As marketers, we guide what those points should be, question the outcome, and test if we aren’t sure. 

This allows more time for you to look at the bigger picture, test more, help scale client campaigns, learn and innovate. This ensures you are at the forefront of what is best for your client or brand. The key is to ensure that appropriate time is dedicated to setting up the right frameworks for AI to drive value. 

Explore Additional Opportunities 

AI allows us to test multiple scenarios or identify many opportunities. But we have to guide the way forward by adding the human element, which is variable, to say the least. Yes, there are patterns and specific outcomes that are pretty standard. For example, most businesses want to make money; how do we help them do that? However, the context and the approach differ. 

AI’s computational thinking can get us where we want to go, but we still need to guide the way without being tempted to follow the data blindly. 

More Data, More Insight

You are responsible for communicating valuable outcomes and insights to your client or brand relationship. You’ll know they are helpful because you know the client, their product, and their history. 

AI in digital marketing can look like many different things, such as 

• Copywriting
• Ad delivery platform
• Ad optimisation platform
• Creative ad format

However, there might also be other tools that can help drive insights. These could help a business scale by exploring new audiences you didn’t think would be interested in a product or service. Perhaps even discovering drastic changes in user behaviour that could impact the business’s bottom line. 

Hone Your Practical Skills 

Even with fantastic reporting plug-ins and tech, using Excel is a skill as a marketer that won’t go away. The same can be said for practical competitor research or putting together a killer presentation. What about running a meeting or working with designers on new creative? 

Even if you aren’t directly client-facing, a lot of work goes into setting up automated systems and teaching AIs to optimise according to the right KPIs. The AI will do what it thinks is best based on popular trends. But this might not always be what you need. 

The logic might be sound, but there will be more factors that it simply can’t consider. You’ll need to translate these into data points the AI can understand. Even with human intervention, tracking implementation remains an ongoing process of identifying and modelling what is valuable to us.

You’ll Be Even Better 

AI is a valuable tool that needs to be funnelled by you and can be improved. The beauty of this technology is that it’s continually growing and learning. Your AI provider might even be open to requests to make the tech better, which will, in turn, make you better at your job.

Great Digital Specialists Will Continue to Add Value

AI can free you up as a digital marketing specialist to be more balanced, creative, and productive. The key is to use a healthy level of critical thinking and to make sure that you continue driving to grow your skills in parallel.