Working as a creative professional in digital marketing means brainstorming, ideating, and generating non-stop. And with every passing calendar day, deadlines can build up, briefs morph and expand, and client demands for beautifully crafted campaigns never cease.
You’re also often constantly jumping between tasks: Photoshopping visuals one minute, writing copy the next, and jumping on analytics tools to monitor all your numbers at the end of every day. And by the time you press “Publish” it’s already time to get back on the hamster wheel and start from scratch. It’s relentless work. No wonder even the best creatives start to feel stretched thin.
Thankfully, AI tools have been proving to be a major boon for digital marketing specialists. From structuring content to proofreading emails and reports, and even automating campaign analytics, AI is helping marketing specialists take some of the pressure off, ticking all the admin boxes, and return to doing the creative work they actually love: strategy, storytelling, ideation (and not just busy work).
AI’s not here to replace human creatives, by any means – but it can be a creative ally, an assistant of sorts, that will let you brainstorm beyond the blank page, explore new directions, or smooth out the rough spots to help you focus on the parts of your work that are most important.
Let’s take a look at some of the practical ways AI can help enhance your marketing content and process workflows without sacrificing that all-important human edge that powers all great campaigns.
Creating Campaign-Ready Images
Image editing and creation are amongst some of the most prevalent uses of artificial intelligence when it comes to marketing. For creative strategists in particular, AI tools have a whole host of capabilities. Whether you want to use AI to expand your images, remove blemishes, change backgrounds or even create brand-new images based on prompts, there's an AI tool out there that suits your needs.
It’s important to keep in mind, however, that AI tools aren’t a stand-in for human creativity. While AI graphic design technology has grown by leaps and bounds, it's still crucial to hone your designer’s eye if you want to make the strongest possible assets for your brand and campaign efforts. After all, you’re trying to appeal to human consumers – not robots. AI will do what you tell it to and even make suggestions, but having good foundational knowledge about your audience demographics (not to mention key design elements like lighting, ratios, contrast, etc.) will help you better direct the output of your AI tools and create graphic assets that best connect with your audience and relay your unique messaging.
On that note, it's also essential to hone your prompting skills, as the more specific you are, the stronger your generated output will be. There’s a reason why AI prompt engineering is being recognised as a highly in-demand digital era skill. By honing your own AI prompting skills, you won’t just elevate your digital marketing campaigns, but also strengthen your CV as a digital-age marketing professional.
Writing Web Copy, Social Copy & SEO Content
There's a lot of debate about the extent to which AI is a useful tool for writing content that ranks, but what's certain is that AI can and should play an important role in supporting both your caption and post-writing for social media, as well as your enterprise’s SEO strategizing. While large language models still can't generate content outputs that showcase the same authority and experience as human beings, LLM outputs are still incredibly useful when it comes to outlining your content and even streamlining brainstorming (i.e. helping smaller teams in generating new ideas).
There are some SEO specialists who use AI to write content directly, but this isn't something we recommend you do, due to the increased risk of AI hallucinations across written content outputs. If you're pressed for time and want AI to play a more central role in your content marketing processes, then a good rule of thumb is to invest in quality control measures just to safeguard your content output. This can be as simple as implementing some editing and fact-checking reviews of your final outputs before you publish any content.
You should also always add a human touch to all content that ends up on your website or those of clients, both for SEO and engagement purposes. Here, consider content authorship to determine who these human insights should come from. If you’re preparing a blog post that will be credited to your Head of Marketing, for instance, they should be tasked with completing the final review before publication as that work will naturally become part of their digital footprint and may even ultimately inform future client conversations.
The same goes for any SEO content that will then be optimized for republication or reposting on social channels. Make sure your social copy isn’t just cut and paste text directly from your longer form blogs. By producing bespoke copy for all your social channels, you can make sure your written content assets generate greater engagement, and lead to more clickthroughs to your website. Again, AI copy tools can help mock up captions and other social copy in a matter of seconds, leaving social media marketing specialists with more time to focus on performance monitoring and user interactions.
Making and Editing Videos
Digital strategist Scott MacFarland stated that if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million. And in the age of social media, it’s undeniable that video marketing has become a potent and intrinsic force for any high-impact campaign. Engaging video content can just reach a wider audience, cultivate improved audience engagement, and support brand recognition.
In the past, crafting high-quality marketing videos, whether they're for ads, social media posts or on-page content, was a multi-faceted process that required a very specific set of skills (i.e. videography, video editing, etc.). As a result, video marketing wasn’t an accessible path of action for many small to medium-sized enterprises.
Today, however, the barriers to creating marketing videos are much lower thanks to AI. Even established industry tools like Adobe Premiere Pro have incorporated AI features into their platform, speeding up tasks like transcription, content searches, establishing chapter breaks for YouTube videos, and even supporting video editing magic like object removal. It’s even possible to include fully automated voiceovers for your videos using AI, which makes it easier for video marketers to optimize video content to suit different markets or regions.
You can also create simple videos purely by writing prompts thanks to software like Adobe, Midjourney and Sora. Again, you choose to use these AI tools to support your video marketing efforts, it's crucial to be as detailed as possible with your prompts to ensure that the output matches aligns with your intended concepts and campaign strategy.
Once you’ve mastered the art of prompting, you can make almost any video you can imagine, no matter your skill level. Just be prepared for a little trial and error!
Supporting Research Processes
When the first generative AI models were released, the majority of users were interacting with the tools in the same way that they would a search engine like Google. As Open AI’s LLMs were trained on content harvested from the open web, ChatGPT was essentially drawing from information from the internet to respond to user prompts and queries. This process provided people with a new way to search, cutting out search engine results pages and giving a single, clear-cut answer to every prompt or question.
It was natural for users to start seeing AI chatbots as potent research tools, especially for users looking for very precise pieces of information, from students needing answers to a mathematical equation, to industry professionals looking to chase up a key point of regulation, or even just generally curious minds wanting to chase up a particular fact or piece of trivia.
For digital marketing specialists in particular, AI tools were a great alternative to search engines specifically because they allowed for easy fact-checking on client or industry campaigns without risks of going down Google spirals. AI is an incredibly focused research tool that you can use to pull up key information when putting together marketing materials like promotional emails or social media copy, making sure that these small, quick jobs stay small and quick.
Keep in mind, however, that AI hallucinations are still a concern even for basic search queries. As such, it's important to always cross-reference answers provided by AI searches to determine whether or not the information you're being given is correct. A little due diligence can go a long way here.
Another way to use AI for research is to build a custom knowledge library. There are tools you can use to upload documents, papers, previous marketing collateral and other sources of information to a large language model. You can then query the LLM at a later date if you need to pull up a certain piece of information from the database.
As with general research, it's crucial to fact-check the info you're given. AI search engines work best when used in tandem with good old-fashioned research skills.
Streamlining Reporting & Data Analytics
One other application of AI that’s set to revolutionize the digital marketing sector is the automation of data and performance monitoring. Campaign management is a dynamic mix of creative strategizing and number crunching. As such, the strongest digital marketers utilize both left and right brained thinking on a daily basis.
Granted, combining creative and analytical skills everyday can be a tall order – especially if you’re working across multiple different campaigns. And with all the numbers to monitor from clickthrough rates to conversion rates and everything in between, it helps to outsource a little bit of that thinking and vigilance to AI systems.
AI-automated analytics reporting isn’t a new thing in the realm of digital marketing either. Software providers like AgencyAnalytics have been using AI algorithms to power their predictive analytics capabilities, supporting marketers in predicting dynamic future outcomes by extrapolating insights from internal and industry/market data points.
We’re also seeing AI features being rolled out in social media and email management tools as well now. Integrated AI-powered caption and email subject line recommendations in-app help keep users focused on the task at hand, ensuring social campaigns can be rolled out faster and with improved results. Simultaneous to this, however, there are also AI-powered performance analytics features across social media and email campaign management tools as well, providing marketing specialists with the newfound ability to generate weekly, monthly or quarterly reports that present all the key performance metrics relating to those campaigns.
And of course, the same goes for SEO campaigns as well, with AI algorithms supporting monitoring and analytics for not only search engine rankings, but also for LLM citations (i.e. brand mentions across ChatGPT, Google Search AI, Bing, and other platforms). Using these AI features, SEOs can support GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) campaigns and ensure their strategies are geared for the growing value of AI in search.
AI as Your Creative Partner, Not Your Replacement
AI has already transformed the way marketers create, write, edit, and research – making previously time-consuming tasks faster and more accessible. Whether you’re generating images and videos, whipping up SEO copy, writing social media captions, proofreading client emails, or mining insights and answers wherever they’re needed, LLMs and all the dynamic features of AI tools that are available today enables new creative potential that was previously inaccessible to most businesses just a few years ago.
And again, AI is not a substitute for talent, judgment, or creativity. Machines can produce images, videos, and copy, but it still takes an eye for detail to polish them, a strategist to place them in context, and a human touch to engage with audiences. The best marketing consultants won’t be those who automate their advice with AI, but those who apply it strategically to refine their ideas and increase their output.
So AI can do the heavy lifting, but it’s your vision, storytelling, and decision-making that will take your marketing materials from “good enough” to extraordinary. By understanding how to work with AI instead of against it, you can position yourself (and your work) at the cutting edge of marketing in the digital age.
