AI Integration in Marketing

AI is everywhere today. It is your digital assistant on your phone. It is used by social media websites like Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) for everything from answering questions you may or may not have asked to helping you write your status. In the world of marketing (digital and physical), AI has become integrated into almost every single tool available. With all these big companies like Alphabet and Meta investing heavily in AI marketing tools, how useful has it really become?

For quite some time, users have had the option to create “Smart ads’” with Google or Facebook that handle a lot of the creative aspects of the ad, including headlines and descriptions. You just need to input some basic information, and the rest is handled for you. Plus, you will get a higher optimization score for your search ad campaign. This all sounds great, but how do you know that the customization made by the AI program is right for you and your customers?

Over the years, I have had numerous clients who wanted to try out “Smart ads’”, thinking this will be the best use of an ad budget. Sometimes it goes well, and you see metrics like conversions, click-through rates, and interaction rates all improve. But AI is just that, artificial. It cannot read a headline the same way you and I would. When AI reads a headline, it compares it to hundreds of thousands of other headlines it was trained on to see how similar the created headline is. That opens up the door for readability issues, and somehow a headline that should read “We look forward to hearing from you” turns into “We look forward to hear you.” One headline provokes reliability and compassion, and the other seems like it was badly translated.

Does this mean that we should shy away from AI-influenced ads and assets in case there is a mistake made? Of course not. It simply means that the responsibility of a marketer shifts from making all of the copy to reviewing and inspecting it. If you plan on running ads that won’t be changed much month over month and will always be focused on the same objectives, you might not even need to review your AI-created assets very often.

But what if you plan on having lots of ads that are constantly changing? Maybe you have sales and offers that rotate every month, and you need to have ads that reflect that. Or you might want to highlight different aspects of your business in different seasons. In that instance, your marketer will create and AI marketing strategy and spend equal or, more likely, more time monitoring AI-created ads and assets than they would have spent creating everything from scratch.

So if the question is “Should I be integrating AI tools into my ads?” the answer really is “Maybe.” Factors like your budget, target audience, goods or services offered, and advertising goals should be accounted for, and a good marketer will use all of those factors when making the decision of what ads/ad types will work best for your business.