AI’s impact on marketing jobs

This question is one of the hottest topics of recent weeks and months. AI is becoming really advanced, and tools such as ChatGPT and DALL-E prove this advancement. This causes many people to fear their professional future—copywriters, graphic designers, and even SEO specialists are worrying whether their work will soon be fully automated with AI. While there is no definite answer to this question, it’s vital to examine what impact AI has on marketing jobs.

Last year, Drift and Marketing AI Institute published a report on the state of AI marketing and sales. One of the crucial questions the authors of this report asked is this: “What do you believe the net effect of AI will be on marketing jobs over the next decade?” With a slight predominance, respondents said that AI will help create more jobs. Here are the full answers:

A similar question was asked earlier this year by Influencer Marketing Hub. This time, though, the answers are more balanced:

In early 2023, it’s extremely difficult to predict whether AI will take over marketing jobs. This is primarily because no one can predict how this technology will look two, five, or ten years from now; perhaps in 2030, AI will be far more advanced than we can imagine today, and not only marketing but many other fields will be taken over by this and related technologies. Time will tell. What’s vital at this point is to see how marketers use this fascinating technology today.

How AI changes marketing

Digital marketing is one of these fields that are strongly shaped by artificial intelligence. Today, marketers have access to tools and technologies enabling them to:

• Generate pictures and images for texts, websites, social media, and marketing materials
• Write texts, including blog posts, press releases, company and market news, etc.
• Analyze the performance of their actions and turn them into actionable insights
• Automate basic communication with customers, e.g., concerning frequently asked questions or simple requests (e.g., booking an appointment)
• Adjust prices in online stores to find a perfect balance between acceptable prices and the company’s profit
• Come up with new ideas on where to concentrate their efforts and much more

In 2023, most advanced marketing tools are using some form of artificial intelligence to make them more effective, accurate, and faster.

THE MAJOR LIMITATION OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

However, there is always the other side of the coin. At the current stage, AI cannot generate anything unique or entirely new. Artificial intelligence and machine learning can only operate on a specific input. Let’s use an example. Suppose you want Dall-E to create an image for your website. And sure, you can do so! 

But you need to remember that Dall-E (the product of the same company behind ChatGTP) is an AI model trained on data comprising 650 million images and text captions. So, everything Dall-E comes up with results from the initial training this AI model received initially. Dall-E cannot create something that’s not, at least in some form, in its database. And that’s true with every other AI tool.

AI is a tool, not a profession

This means that artificial intelligence can support the work of human employees, freelancers, and specialists. But it cannot replace them altogether, at least not in marketing, where creativity, experience, and innovative thinking are still highly valued. AI has no experience, it’s not clever, and it surely isn’t creative. These are strictly human traits.

So, if AI doesn’t really work as a standalone solution (at least so far), what can it be used for? The shortest answer is to make the work of your marketing department faster and more effective.

1,600 AI TOOLS

Futurepedia regularly publishes and updates the list of AI marketing and web development tools. At the time of writing this article, their list comprises almost 1,600 tools (1,599), including:

• SEO: 43 tools
• Email marketing: 43 tools
• Copywriting: 59 tools
• Image generation: 41 tools
• Low-code/no-code: 61 tools
• Sales: 45 tools
• Productivity: 87 tools

It’s a huge selection for every marketing team out there! With carefully selecting and adopting these tools, you can save a lot of time, especially when it comes to mundane, repetitive tasks. This is where AI shines.

How marketers use AI

Last year, Capterra conducted a study on how marketing professionals use AI and machine learning in their work. Here are the answers:

They prove what we stated earlier – AI streamlines work in marketing. When it comes to emails, AI can help you send personalized emails (by the way, personalization is also a popular application of marketing AI, with almost 50% of answers) and even create effective subject lines based on what you want to convey. But it’s still up to you to decide what a given email should be about, what kind of offer/proposal it should contain, and who should see it.

When it comes to advertising, AI tools can help you design effective headlines and even ad content, but they will do so based on other similar texts (e.g., published by your competition). So it’s up to you to decide whether a given ad is a good idea.

Concerning analytics, AI tools can help you get more from your data and make it more useful. AI tools can do the preliminary analysis for you to get a ready-made list of what could be improved. But it’s up to you to feed these algorithms with useful data sources and decide what to implement. It’s the same story with all the other applications mentioned in Capterra’s study. 

A balanced approach to AI in marketing

While we can’t tell you what to do, it’s not a good idea to get rid of your marketing team. Someone needs to oversee what’s going on—what ads to run, what emails to send, what texts to publish, what graphics to put on the website, etc.

If you want to make the most of AI in marketing, simply add it to the mix – ask your marketers to take a look at available tools, make a shortlist of a few that could make a real difference in your company, and give them a try. But don’t think of them as cheap replacements for your employees. Think of them as facilitation for your marketing team. After all, cutting corners works only sometimes.