Over the last few years, artificial intelligence has gained popularity across all industries. It seems every day, new applications for AI are popping up in the form of startups, products, and SaaS solutions. As a marketer, you may be wondering how these tools could impact your job — and whether they could even put you out of work. For now, your job is probably safe, but here are some ways AI may change the marketing industry in 2024.
AI-Generated and AI-Edited Imagery
As a marketer, you know a picture is worth a thousand words when it comes to making a lasting impression on your customer. According to the experts at Hawke, a unique visual aesthetic can help “distinguish your brand and make it resonate with target audiences.” AI is changing the marketing world by making it easier than ever to create these kinds of engaging visuals.
With AI technology, you can feed a text description into an image generator and instantly get back dozens of images. You can specify colors, style, and countless other parameters to get exactly what you’re looking for. This means you can generate lots of different images that are all consistent with your branding and voice.
If you sell a physical product, you can use AI to create product photos for your site, social media, and more. You can use AI to dream up unique photos incorporating your product, as with the above methods, to save money on photography. Or, you can use AI-powered tools that make it easier and faster to edit photos, by changing backgrounds, correcting lighting, and more.
Personalization and Segmentation
AI can also help with personalization, something many customers now say is crucial to their satisfaction with a brand. Advanced algorithms can analyze customer data and segment customers into distinct categories. Those categories can then be used for delivering targeted emails or offering different kinds of promotions.
AI can also be used to come up with the promotions themselves, analyzing data to determine what customers want. And it can recommend changes to future marketing campaigns based on all kinds of data points. Eventually, AI may be able to create optimized recommendations and promotions that are unique to each and every individual customer.
AI is already being used to offer a customized experience to most e-commerce customers. Online shoppers already see different landing pages depending on their historical data. AI is also offering customers recommendations of what else to add to their carts at checkout. The possibilities for AI are endless, and they’re expanding every day across many industries.
Search Engine Optimization
AI is already evolving in ways that could permanently change the way internet and product searches are conducted. Many companies are experimenting with technologies that replace keyword searches with natural language queries. Instead of typing “weather Mexico January” into a search box, the user might type “When is the best time to visit Mexico?”
Conversational AI search tools will have major implications for the marketing industry because they have totally different search engine optimization techniques. Marketers who currently rely on keyword optimization metrics will have to completely rethink their techniques. Businesses that succeed will be the ones whose sites and content succeed at “talking” to AI search engines.
AI will also mean an evolution in other aspects of search, such as visual and voice search optimization. Marketers will need to optimize their sites to make sure images contain relevant metadata and are “readable” by search engines. As search engines evolve, marketers will also use AI to predict new trends or analyze new algorithms and continually re-optimize content.
Content Generation
AI is already being used for content generation, perhaps more than any other facet of marketing. From writing blog posts and emails to social media hashtags and product descriptions, AI writing is everywhere. More tailored AI writing programs are also springing up to help marketers and other content creators generate this content.
It seems more than likely that this trend will continue well into 2024 and beyond, as the technology continues to improve. But living, breathing editors will still be needed to tweak and humanize this AI writing. Human oversight is needed to avoid legal and compliance issues, correct errors, and avoid creepy, robotic-sounding writing.
At some point, AI may be advanced enough to replace the need for creative writers in marketing. But the technology has not evolved sufficiently to produce the kind of original, engaging content real writers can. Currently, many companies are working with countless human writers to iterate and improve the large language models powering these writing generators.
Automated Everything
It’s not really possible to produce a list of all the ways AI will influence the marketing industry in 2024 or beyond. That’s because AI is so prevalent — and growing so fast — within nearly every imaginable field. Marketers may not be directly impacted by each use case for AI, but a great many AI tools will influence every single marketer’s day-to-day.
Across most, if not all, fields — including marketing — AI data analytics will replace spreadsheets, formulas, and quantitative testing methods of all kinds. Simplified formulas will be replaced by complex calculations that account for thousands of variables. AI will likely also be used to make qualitative predictions, eventually doing away with the process of getting feedback from human users.
Instead of worrying about what will come of their jobs or that AI will replace them, marketers should think about education. Staying current on AI trends and being willing to learn new skills and technologies will put all marketers at an advantage. Rather than worrying that you’ll be made obsolete, look at these changes as an opportunity to learn and grow.
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