Delegate marketing drudgery to AI and spend your time on the creative aspects.
For over two decades, ever since the dot com days and emergence of digital marketing, marketers have been busy with and characterized by technical implementation, as much as by strategy.
Most marketers spent hours dealing with platform configuration and setup, decoding and interpreting search algorithms, and manual data collection and reviewing performance data. As important as these disciplines are, they left little room for what marketing should have always been: creativity, storytelling, strategic thinking, and human connection.
I still remember spending hours, sometimes days, setting up what we used to call SKAGs (short single keyword ad groups) in Google Ads. Essentially we were creating separate ads for each keyword we were bidding on. That gave us control and it had many optimization benefits. But depending on keyword list and campaign size, it was a time-intensive task. I spent hours in spreadsheets, formatting the account structure before uploading it to the Google Ads platform. Sometimes I still would not get the results I wanted because I should have spent more time on the offer, strategy, ad copy, and creatives, and less on the backend account structure.
Creativity closes the deal
Thanks to AI, that strategy isn't commonly used anymore. As AI features roll out not only in Google Ads but other advertising platforms, marketers now can worry less about technical marketing aspects, and focus more on what matters the most: the ideas and narratives that actually inspire people.
A friend and marketer, Amir Razavi (CEO of Get My Auto) said something along these lines: "Modern ad platforms have mastered targeting, so today, it's your creative and copy that determines performance. Targeting opens the door, but creativity closes the deal."
Amir has an enterprise level SaaS business running a lean and strategic marketing team. He realizes that in the AI age, you don't push back. You embrace it and let it do the technical aspects of marketing. He and his team focus on creativity, storytelling, messaging, and sales. And the result validates a bigger picture: The future of marketing is not about mastering the martech; it's about mastering it to amplify ideas that resonate with your audience and customers.
How marketers use AI
I speak with many marketers and I interview them on our Clarity Digital Podcast. Consensus is that the secret to a successful and impactful marketing campaign is not only using ChatGPT, but completely adopting and integrating AI into nearly every stage of marketing, including the following:
And there's much more. All the tasks that consumed countless hours previously or were simply unachievable, are now completed accurately and quickly.
AI isn't replacing marketers, at least not those who have adopted AI and know how to use it. But AI is replacing many activities marketers used to do, which essentially distracted them from the core and soul of the discipline of being creative and connecting with customers through engaging ads and offers.
AI adoption recommendations
Here are some recommendations I have for marketers who want to catch up with the AI trends and be relevant in this new, exciting era of marketing.
Embrace AI, holistically: AI is not a one-off task or project. AI should integrate into your workflow, from research through implementation, and marketing operations, end to end.
Learn how to prompt better: Prompt engineering is quickly becoming a core marketing skill. I like to learn things academically so I took a prompt engineering course on Coursera, and that made the difference between mediocre and breakthrough output for me.
Understand agentic AI: AI agents are increasingly being adopted in marketing. AI agents are useful for marketers, as they require little or no supervision, can use reasoning, and autonomously make decisions.
Diversify your AI stack: There is no single tool that is good at everything. Different LLMs (large language models) tend to be better at certain things than others, so understanding that is key.
Experiment with AI features within your current platforms: Most modern marketing platforms are rushing to add AI features and enhancements to their platform, so evaluate them before you pay for new AI platforms.
Develop an AI adoption protocol: As great as AI can be, there are still some drawbacks. They differ project to project and organization to organization. Therefore, setting an AI adoption guideline with "dos and don'ts" and refining it over time as the technology advances, is a safe and sound strategy.
AI is making marketing great again
AI isn't necessarily making marketing less human. In fact it's making it more so by eliminating the drudgery of its technical aspects and helping marketers focus on strategy, ad, creatives, and human connections. Marketers can use AI to better understand their customers, improve content and creatives that resonate. This isn't just a technology update. It's an update of philosophy and marketing methods.
