What AI-based tools and digital marketing techniques should businesses from small to large be considering?
I’ve been fortunate to be involved in digital marketing for over 25 years now. The opportunities presented by AI recently are the most exciting developments that I have seen in this time, since the early days, where everything from organic search, a website and email marketing seemed a similarly huge opportunity.
This range of projections of advancement in AI presented at Technology for Marketing by Implement AI highlights that we are at a relatively early stage of adoption of AI, with the biggest advancements yet to come recently hinted by the rapid adoption of ChatGPT.
In this post, I’ll summarize trends in real-world applications of AI and tools to consider in each of these categories of AI that are open to any business from small to large. Some of the…
Actionable steps to prepare for the future of marketing
Digital marketing today is complex and it’s inevitable it will get more complex in the future as new technologies and platforms emerge. Take the recent rapid adoption and interest in Instagram Threads and Open AI ChatGPT, as an example. Marketers also have to contend with the complexity of the many channels we need to track in our analytics such as organic and paid search, social media, display, and email marketing.
This visualization of the B2B customer lifecycle shows the great opportunities for harnessing different digital marketing channels to encourage lead generation, nurture, and purchase. It also highlights the challenge of managing the always-on marketing activities that need continuous focus to maximize conversion in the face of fierce competition.
Our latest research on digital marketing trends for 2023 to 2024
Each year, at Smart Insights we…
Benchmark your use of AI with other businesses
Despite the recent hype around ChatGPT, the opportunities for using AI in marketing are far from new. We have been advising on using AI for marketing since at least 2017 when we first recommended businesses consider these 15 use-cases of AI in marketing.
Yet before 2023, I have been surprised by relatively low levels of interest and use of AI by marketers and within businesses when we have asked in our surveys. Typically in-house use of AI had been at the level of 10-15% of respondents since it seems only the largest brands with Business Intelligence teams could work on their own AI applications. Of course, levels of use are much higher if you include AI in paid media such as Google Ads, LinkedIn or Meta Advertising.
However, with the growth of interest in using…
What are the most popular free and paid marketing writing assistant tools using generative AI for creating content?
2023 has been a rare year in marketing, where the latest martech innovations we discuss have crossed over into the mainstream. Of course, this has been prompted by the huge interest in ChatGPT, not only for marketing, but in many other applications.
For 'hands-on' marketers seeking to take advantage of the latest AI-based tools for generating content and copywriting, there are now quite a few options which I'll recommend at the end of the post.
In previous posts, I have reviewed how to use the free version of ChatGPT for marketing and covered the latest updates to ChatGPT relevant for marketers.
Smart Insights Business Members can also read more about how to start use ChatGPT collaboratively in our new Quick Win: How to use ChatGPT for marketing, covering AI marketing planning, strengths and…
How do the latest updates to ChatGPT including GPT–4, AutoGPT, Plug-ins and ChatGPT Plus boost its potential for marketers?
Since I originally wrote an article on Using ChatGPT for marketing just after ChatGPT launched, there has been a whirlwind of developments from OpenAI and their partners. For marketers who are busy with their day job, this can be bewildering and you can miss some of the key developments, so here I’ll summarise some of the main developments in a brief timeline and how significant I see them to be.
Members can read about other ‘need-to-know’ key digital marketing developments in our regularly updated latest Digital Media updates tracker.
As of May 2023, the main developments since the launch of ChatGPT relevant to marketers and businesses have been:
1 ChatGPT features integrated into Microsoft Bing
This seemed to happen a long time ago now, but was actually in February. I got access to the…
My example dialogues and use cases showing how ChatGPT is much more than ‘yet another AI chatbot’
I’ve been advising on digital marketing and new innovations for over 25 years. Since it was called Internet Marketing… This tends to make you super cynical as to new claims about marketing innovations. Over this time, many of the techniques for digital marketing and approaches to planning digital marketing strategies and campaigns have remained similar.
Much Martech now promises to be be ‘AI-powered’ while still relying on manual analysis and customizations. In fact, I’d say that it’s the development of search and social media platforms that have been the main drivers of change. Until now, that is...
Having tested ChatGPT, I believe it will spark mainstream adoption of AI amongst marketers, since it will be used as a practical tool to support creative development to help marketers working on search, email and social media marketing.
I…
Practical examples including 8 recommended GPT-3/GPT-4 prompts to support content marketing, email marketing, search and social media marketing
In Part 1, of my review of marketing applications of Chat GPT, I reviewed the quality of output and interactions of the GPT-3 Large Language Model (LLM) on which ChatGPT is trained by asking: How can I use ChatGPT for marketing? I showed how you can use ChatGPT for learning more about digital marketing and marketing planning by creating plans.
In this article, I will explain some practical use cases of how marketers can use Chat GPT for content marketing to support different digital marketing channels. We'll see that knowing how to Prompt ChatGPT will be a key skill, so I'll show different Prompting techniques before reviewing specific applications for the different digital marketing channels.
Some of the key digital marketing channels that I'll describe are summarised in this visual from my book Digital…
