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, particularly 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, in the nature of 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 in order to add to 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 of a conclusive outcome to make a particular decision, can be quite frustrating. And is no way to condition your strategy and lateral thinking muscles. In some cases, a person may not know how much data is enough to make a decision, depending on their level of experience.
AI can look at innumerable different data points multiple times a minute… even a second. Where we come in as marketers is to guide what those points should be and 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 in order to drive value.
Explore Additional Opportunities
AI allows us to test multiple scenarios or identify a vast number of 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 certain outcomes that are pretty standard. Such as, most businesses want to make money; how do we help them do that? However, the context and the approach differ.
The computational thinking of AI can get us to 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 outcomes and insights that are valuable to your client or brand relationship. You’ll know they are valuable because you know the client and their product, and you understand 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 the use of amazing reporting plug-ins and tech, being able to use 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, there is still a lot of work that 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 take into account. These you’ll need to translate into data points the AI can understand. Even with human intervention, tracking implementation remains an ongoing process of identifying and modelling exactly what is valuable to us.
You’ll Be Even Better
AI is a valuable tool that needs to be funnelled by you and can also be improved by you. 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 knowledgeable worker to be more balanced, creative and ultimately more productive. The key is to use a healthy level of critical thinking and to make sure that you keep on driving to grow your own skills in parallel.