By Fast Company Executive Board
When used correctly, consider AI technology as a minor contributor to your daily workflow, not a major threat to your current role.
Marketing is all about the creative process of the human mind, but after so many years of coming up with brand campaigns, it’s not surprising that new ideas can sometimes grow stale. That’s where the evolution of AI tools comes in.
Whether companies are using artificial intelligence to gauge a potential customer base or to spark an attention-grabbing subject line in the latest email newsletter, most teams realize the benefits of utilizing AI responsibly to personalize their brand communications and increase their daily productivity with the help of automation. To demonstrate how AI tools have improved the quality of their work life and technological mindset, 14 members from Fast Company Executive Board each offer one specific way marketers can treat AI as a “tool in the shed” to support their creative outlet process, not take it away.
1. DISRUPT CREATIVE BIASES AMONG MARKETING TEAMS.
Marketers should use AI to challenge and disrupt their creative biases. By feeding AI unconventional data and prompting it to generate ideas that contradict their initial instincts, they can break free from traditional thinking patterns. This approach forces teams out of their creative comfort zones, fostering innovation and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in their marketing strategies. – Chris Dyer, Company Culture and Leadership Keynote Speaker
2. AUTOMATE AND EXPERIMENT WITH A/B TESTING.
Marketers should use AI to optimize and test creative variations in real time. By automating A/B testing and analysing performance data instantly, AI allows marketers to experiment with different creative elements and refine their campaigns on the fly. This dynamic feedback loop enhances creativity by providing insights into what resonates with audiences, leading to effective marketing strategies. – Maria Alonso, Fortune 206
3. EXPLORE A VARIETY OF EMAIL SUBJECT LINES AND CALLS TO ACTION.
For marketers, AI presents an opportunity to ensure efforts do not become stale. Whether it’s for brainstorming purposes, figuring out new ways to approach a particular subject or, in the case of email marketers, exploring a variety of subject lines and calls to action, AI should be looked at as a tool in the shed, but not something that replaces the human touch. – Richard RB Botto, Stage 32
4. IMPLEMENT TRANSLATION AND LOCALIZATION FOR CULTURAL RELEVANCE.
Marketers should use AI for translation and localization. AI-driven translation ensures that content is culturally relevant and resonant with consumers and audiences. It enables marketers to produce personalized content at scale, blending translation with creativity and imagination for innovative and impactful marketing that stands out. – Bryan Murphy, Smartling
5. MANIPULATE IMAGES WITH EASE.
Plenty of people use AI to generate content. I also think there are many amazing ways to use AI when creating your visual content with image manipulation, such as changing backgrounds, removing unwanted elements, or adding imagery. AI is a powerful tool to help level up even the smallest marketing budget. – Alexander Kwapis
6. INTRODUCE ANIMATED EXPLAINER VIDEOS AND TUTORIALS.
We are just scraping the surface of how AI will help us marketers move with more efficiency, creativity, and scale. I’m watching the innovation happening in the video space. I want to see how AI can be leveraged to create animated explainer videos and tutorials and bring white papers and interactive graphics to life with built-in distribution, connectivity, and analytics. – Mack McKelvey, SalientMG
7. ELEVATE THE STORYTELLING QUALITY OF YOUR BRAND.
Leverage AI content generation tools to streamline idea development and visual creation, allowing more time for strategic and creative thinking. NightCafe Creator and Looka are two excellent tools to automate the creative process, so marketers can focus on refining concepts, storytelling, and the strategic aspects of campaigns, enhancing both productivity and the quality of creative output. – Britton Bloch, Navy Federal
8. BRAINSTORM FOR CREATIVE CONTENT.
Imagine having a creative brainstorming partner who never gets tired, never runs out of ideas, and always has their finger on the pulse of what’s trending. That’s the power of AI for marketers. By analysing massive amounts of data, AI can help you spark creativity, identify untapped opportunities, and create content that truly resonates with your audience. – Christine Alemany, Thrv Advisors
9. IDENTIFY TRENDS AND CONSUMER BEHAVIOR PATTERNS.
Marketing involves knowing your customer, sending the right message, and using the right medium—simple in theory, but expensive in practice. AI, through predictive analytics, analyses data to identify trends and behaviours. This allows marketers to craft personalized, relevant campaigns, freeing up creativity for innovative ideas, and ensuring targeted, cost-effective strategies. – Mukesh Kumar, Slalom
10. SEND YOUR AUDIENCE PERSONALIZED AND RELEVANT CONTENT.
One way marketers can leverage AI is by analysing volumes of datasets like audience behaviour and trends, allowing them to create more personalized and relevant content. AI can up time for marketers to focus on the creative aspects, like storytelling and strategy. – Anthony A. Luna, Coastline Equity Property Management
11. LEVERAGE AI AS A CONTRIBUTOR ALONGSIDE YOUR STAFF PRODUCERS.
You can leverage AI for up to 60 to 80% of the creation of your project, and then add individual creativity to it. Think of your people as producers and AI as a contributor, not the other way around. Foster creativity by modelling what quality, creative prompting reads like. If you’re not modelling what quality usage of AI producing is like, who the heck is in your organization? – Jay Steven Levin, WinThinking
12. ENHANCE YOUR TEAM’S PRODUCTIVITY LEVEL.
AI is the most potent way to attain superpowers: creativity, iteration, ideation, content creation, and more. Achieving an order-of-magnitude increase in productivity and gaining the ability to do what was once impossible at near-zero cost is transformative. Those who wholeheartedly embrace AI have an unbeatable advantage. Those who resist it may soon find themselves looking for a new position. – Jared Reimer, University of Washington
13. DESIGN VISUALS FOR MARKETING PRESENTATIONS.
One way AI works with creativity is in visual applications. Visual applications include covers, art, cartoons, or videos that work with presentations or marketing ideas. AI is the new storyboard, only much faster and more accurate. I’ve found it adds to my projects because it can create what you want the clients to visualize. – Baruch Labunski, Rank Secure
14. GUIDE AND DEVELOP YOUR ORIGINAL IDEAS.
Marketers should use AI to help guide and develop their original ideas so they can maximize how they reach their target audience. While AI is certainly capable of providing its own answers and being somewhat creative, I believe that the best ideas—and ultimately how to achieve them—really come from the minds of people. – Misty Larkins, Relevance
