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 ChatGPT for marketing, our recent research shows a big uptick in usage of AI in marketing:
48% of marketers are using now AI to assist with generating content, with 10% planning to use it in future.
However, the use of AI for targeting and website personalization is lower, around 28%.
This chart from our free Future of Digital Marketing report gives more detail on AI usage:
Despite the increases in adoption, there still seems to be a shocking of amount of businesses who aren't using AI, or even planning to use AI in future... The report also shows a similarly shocking pattern for use of AB testing.
I say this is shocking since there are plenty of examples and research showing that AI outperforms marketers. For example, recent research from Persado comparing AI and human-generated email headlines shows that:
Generative AI creates a 68% engagement uplift when comparing the average clickthrough rate for the highest AI perfoming messages compared to human-authored controlled messages. Marketers chose the best performing campaign message only 33% of the time.
The latest Smart Insights resources for using AI in Marketing
In our next Masterclass webinar for Pro members in October on Using AI and ChatGPT in Marketing I will recommend reviewing both the strategic options for using AI including developing AI policy and strategy. Our member resources have advised on using AI since 2017 and we use AI ourselves including chatGPT.
In this webinar, I will cover:
- Different options for using AI in marketing from free services like ChatGPT to paid tools for more sophisticated applications like predictive analytics
- How to develop a strategy and policy for using AI in larger businesses
- Practical prompting skills for ChatGPT so you can use it for planning and copywriting for email search and social media marketing
- Business examples of free and paid tools and case studies from businesses
Our latest Quick Wins are also designed to help marketers learn practical ChatGPT prompting skills: