Adapting Digitally: 5 Ways to Elevate Your Marketing with AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is disrupting the world. With its ability to rapidly analyze information and respond to commands at light speed, there’s no surprise that AI is also impacting marketing.
In fact, we’re confident that AI is rewriting the marketing playbook on how to plan, execute, and optimize winning campaigns. In hopes of adapting to these new technologies, today we’re exploring five practical ways you can immediately start to leverage free AI tools to elevate your marketing.
AI Prompting: Best Practices
Before we dive in, it’s important to understand how to prompt modern AI tools effectively. These large language models (LLMs) tend to respond better to certain prompt structures and phrasing. Here’s the rundown on prompt engineering.
Use [hard brackets] to separate instructions from context
When prompting an LLM with context, use hard brackets to clearly show the model where instructional input ends and contextual material starts. This can dramatically improve model outputs, so always inject this nuance into your prompts.
Be as descriptive as possible
While the prompts we use throughout this piece may not be uber-detailed, that is only in the interest of time. LLM tools typically output higher-quality responses when prompted with more details. Give the AI a background expert background, use adjectives generously, and be clear with your instructions.
Specify your desired output format and traits
Do you want the AI to output a tweet? Should its response be less than 140 characters? Maybe you want it to be at least 1,000 words? All of these characteristics, and more, should be included in your prompts to maximize the model’s odds of success.
1. Keyword Research: Unlocking Hidden Opportunities
Keyword research underpins any successful SEO strategy. By gauging what topics users in your target audience are searching for, you can get there first and capture value. That’s why most marketing teams try to optimize every piece of content for search engines. While this is typically a tedious process of brainstorming and research, AI-powered tools can supercharge the workflow by 10x — let’s find out how.
Open up your favorite LLM — some popular options are ChatGPT (OpenAI), Bing (Microsoft), and Bard (Google), all of which are free to use. Now, let’s get to prompting. Feel free to play around with our inputs to produce better responses for your use case.
Start by asking: “What are the most popular sub-topics related to [your niche]?” This should lead to roughly four to six relevant topics, and you can re-prompt to widen your scope. After compiling a list of broad ideas, let’s take it a step further; we don’t just want to know about adjacent topics but about high-value keywords within those topics. So, we’ll prompt the AI twice more to generate 10-15 short-tail and long-tail keywords for each of our sub-topics.
Boom! We’ve now created a 100+ keyword list, tailored to your niche and audience. You can prompt the LLM to curate a different subset of keywords (low cost, low-volume, etc.) to improve your targeting odds or revise your topic selection to better capture your goals.
Pro tip: After constructing your list of keywords in ChatGPT, you can ask it to output an Excel table of the keywords; this will enable you to quickly copy and paste it into Excel for future use.
2. Optimize Your Email Marketing
Email marketing is another powerful channel for modern marketers. It boasts a healthy 3,600% ROI, or $36 for every $1 spent on an email campaign, making it a prime avenue for us to optimize with AI. We’ll do that by dramatically expediting the process of crafting personalized emails.
Typically, this is a mentally taxing and time-consuming game; you have to first segment your audience into strategic profiles, then build email copy around each one to cater to their unique needs, all while selling your offer. Over time, this can grow to become tiring — let’s use AI to streamline the entire workflow.
There are countless ways to approach this, and it’ll take time for you to find your optimal prompt. However, here’s a short example that worked for us, that you can apply immediately apply to your brand and audience: “You are a 10+ year veteran email copywriter who has driven millions in revenue from your emails. Let’s write an email selling [your offering] to [your demographic].” You can even ask the LLM to utilize certain copywriting frameworks, such as AIDA, to maximize your email’s chances of converting. From here, you can export the system’s output and start tweaking it to your liking.
While the initial response may not be perfect, it’ll certainly go a long way in speeding up your writing process. Another pro tip: Tell the AI system you’ll also provide successful examples for it to imitate. Feed it your best-performing emails and watch the magic happen. Since LLMs are great at imitation, they’ll output uncanny emails that mimic your own successful drafts.
3. Streamline Your Topic Ideation
Our next AI application is simple yet straightforward: Brainstorming. It’s a foundational part of developing content and must be done time and time again at a high level to ensure quality ideas make it through. While we won’t be outsourcing the entire ideation process to AI, we can certainly help it guide our own efforts.
Start by feeding the AI all titles in your content library—all of it. Our goal is to familiarize the system with the style and nature of your topics. Here’s a sample prompt you can enter yourself: “Study the following titles from my content library for their style and nature, and respond ‘DONE’ when finished.”
After the LLM has analyzed your content, it’s ready to ideate on its own. Now, just ask: “Brainstorm 10 ideas similar to the content you studied.” This should result in a bulleted list of ideas that you can start crafting right away.
4. Repurposing Content: Maximizing Reach and Impact
Creating high-quality content for several channels is demanding — it takes significant time and resources to operate an omnichannel presence effectively. However, content marketing across multiple channels brings a myriad of benefits, too. With the power of modern LLM tools, you can start repurposing existing content to maximize its reach and impact. AI-powered tools can efficiently reframe your material for external channels, letting you focus on what matters most: Generating valuable ideas.
Navigate to your LLM of choice and input the following prompt to contextualize the model: “You’re a seasoned copywriter with 10+ years of experience writing for Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, and Facebook. Let’s repurpose the following blog into a post for each of those channels: [Your blog].”
Just like that, the AI system should output marketing collateral that you can deploy across various channels, all based on the input text you provided. Of course, you should always proofread and refine AI-generated content to ensure it reflects your brand authentically. Nevertheless, this simple workflow can 10x your output and expedite the process of maintaining an omnichannel presence.
5. Perform an SEO Audit
Our final method of leveraging AI to improve your marketing deals with SEO. It’s a game we’re all playing, and it’s necessary for any brand to flourish in today’s digital age. However, what if we could utilize AI to optimize SEO? That’s precisely what we’ll accomplish with the help of free LLM tools.
While there are several ways you could implement AI to boost your SEO, we’re going to start with enhancing keyword surface area. Remember that list we compiled in Step 1? It’s time to put it to use. We’ll revise your entire existing content library by having AI scatter those keywords throughout it.
The prompt is simple. Tell your LLM: “You’re an expert content strategist with dozens of years optimizing content for search engines. Optimize the following blog post with these keywords: [Your keywords]; [your blog].” Verify the AI’s work, then rinse and repeat. In no time, your content library will exert a much higher search authority thanks to this keyword boost.
You can further leverage AI to improve your formatting for SEO, too. You’ll ask it a similar prompt, except slightly tweaked: “You’re an expert content strategist with dozens of years optimizing content for search engines. Optimize the following blog post’s formatting using SEO best practices.”
Finally, you can have your LLM create an SEO audit checklist. Instruct the model: “Draft a checklist of SEO items I should verify before posting a blog.” Once it outputs the checklist, simply crosscheck your content with all the items to maximize your SERP potential.
Wrapping Up
That’s all we’ve got on leveraging AI to elevate your marketing. The landscape is shifting now, making it the best time for you to start adapting to new technologies and get ahead of the competition.
From keyword research to email marketing and SEO, modern LLM tools are capable of assisting marketers in a wide variety of use cases. It’s up to us to learn how these tools can add value to marketing initiatives, and then make it happen.
