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Unleashing AI's Creative Power in Marketing: 5 Real-world Examples

Guest Post by Gregory Kennedy, Fractional CMO and Founder of BrandZen

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Justin Gordon & Gregory Kennedy
August 22, 2023

Hey! Justin here, and welcome to another free edition of Just Go Grind, where each week I write deep dives on world-class founders. Today, for the first time, I’m publishing a guest post.

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Today we have a special guest post from Gregory Kennedy as part of an effort on my part to offer more value to readers and share the expertise of others in my network!

With over two decades of expertise, Gregory has an impressive track record in spearheading global marketing, content, brand, and communication strategies for leading high-tech firms such as InMobi, AdRoll, and Sojern.

A former creative director and a two-time head of marketing, his specialty is helping to take startups from zero to scale.

He now works as a Fractional CMO and marketing consultant with his agency BrandZen, where he advises early-stage companies on their go-to-market strategy, empowering them to thrive in a competitive environment.

Follow Gregory on Twitter and check out his website.

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Unleashing AI's Creative Power in Marketing: 5 Real-world Examples

Gregory Kennedy - Just Go Grind

Over the last 20 years, few areas of business have been transformed by technology as much as marketing.

While this is a bold statement, no one can deny that transitioning from a static and simple world of television and print to the dynamic and fast-paced world of online media forced the entire marketing discipline to reinvent its approach.

Marketing’s transformation has been an exciting area to observe or participate in. New channels emerged, like email, display ads, social media, and search. Entirely new approaches were developed to take advantage of these channels, and a new data-first marketing culture emerged that sought to make sense of all the information that was now at every marketer's fingertips.

The results of this change have been impressive. Marketing is now more trackable, actionable, measurable, efficient, and accountable overall for results than ever.

Now a new technological innovation is on the horizon that is set to reshape business and drive the reinvention of marketing once again.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a predominant force, redefining strategies and reshaping the boundaries of creativity.

Exploring the Landscape of the Top 50 AI-powered Marketing Tools

Developers have been hard at work building many new apps across various categories. In the dynamic world of AI-powered marketing tools, the latest insights from Trackxn shows there are now a staggering 10,000 venture-backed AI startups.

These visionary companies are forging ahead. Some even compete directly with OpenAI's ChatGPT by building core Large Language Models (LLMs), the software fueling other AI-driven chatbots and tools.

While ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion are two well-known AI-powered startups, a proliferation of AI-powered tools—numbering in the hundreds—are now available for marketers to seize their potential.

Writing and imaging tools constitute the majority of applications within the marketing domain. But developers have started to create applications in many other categories.

Here I have assembled a list of the top 50 AI-powered apps for marketers by category:

General writing and content editing

Marketing and sales copy

Image editing

Ad collateral

Design

  • Galileo AI: Idea to design in an instant, powered by AI

  • Swapp: AI-Powered Construction Documents in minutes

  • Diagram Labs: Design Experiments. Made by Diagram. designOS.

  • Beautiful.AI Fast. Beautiful. Helpful.

  • Hypar: The next-generation platform for designing, generating, and sharing

  • Uizard: App, Web, & UI Design Made Easy | Powered By AI

Text to image

Audio editing & music generation

  • Amberscript: Audio & Video Transcription | Speech-to-text

  • Voicemod: Free Real Time Voice Changer & Modulator

  • Podcastle: Podcast CreationKripsWorld's #1 Noise Cancelling App

  • Krisp: The World's #1 Noise Cancelling App

  • Moises: The Musician's App

  • Boomy: Make Generative Music with Artificial Intelligence

  • Supertone: Intelligent audio for artists

  • Musico: An AI that writes musicDaaciIt’s time to break the sound barrier.

Video editing, generation & animation

  • Descript: All-in-one video editing, as easy as a doc

  • Runway: Everything you need to make anything you want

  • Lumen 5: Create Videos Online in Minutes

  • Plask: AI-powered Mocap Animation Tool

You can view a list of The Top 50 AI-Powered Marketing Tools here. The list includes a bit more about each tool.

Unleashing AI's Creative Power in Marketing

Based on a recent survey conducted by Bergur Thormundsson on June 5, 2023, a striking 37% of U.S. marketers say they have embraced the potential of AI within their daily work. Marketers score the highest response rate across all business sectors in the survey, and they are crushing it with AI, or at least, according to this survey, they say they are.

This poses an obvious question: What innovative techniques and strategies have these forward-thinking marketers employed with the power of AI?

To answer this question, I researched several new AI-powered applications for marketers by speaking with their builders and founders. I also connected with other senior marketers and CMOs to get their perspective on AI and how their teams use it today.

What follows are five case studies that spotlight how innovative marketers have harnessed AI. These real-world examples not only showcase AI's powerful capabilities but also illustrate its capacity to transform marketing and business.

1. Unlocking New Use Cases in Content Marketing and Branding

During a corporate acquisition, an often-overlooked but challenging issue is the substantial marketing debt accompanying it. When one company acquires another, transforming an extensive array of assets to align with the new entity's tone and voice is a huge undertaking.

The costs, in terms of time and resources, mean that many CMOs forgo rewriting each blog post, FAQ, and other public-facing resources to fit the desired brand tone and voice.

However, the emergence of AI-powered writing tools means that rewriting an acquired company's entire blog catalog or FAQ library into the acquiring company’s tone or brand voice is an achievable reality.

While it is possible to do this with ChatGPT, other tools like Writer or Hyperwrite have ‘rewrite’ and ‘brand and tone’ features that allow content marketers to rewrite entire blogs automatically. A task that previously was time-consuming and not worth the effort given the low ROI it would generate.

This example shows the potential of AI to reshape traditional paradigms. It also goes against the current popular perspective that AI is only about cost-cutting and job reduction. In this use case, AI provides marketers and CMOs with new opportunities. It allows them to expand their capabilities and take on tasks that previously might have been deemed impossible or too costly.

2. Amplifying Digital Advertising Performance and Reducing Costs

In the ever-evolving digital advertising landscape, the resiliency of the banner ad format remains indisputable. Despite the unfavorable sentiment towards them, they persist as a formidable force within advertising because they are low-cost, nearly ubiquitous, and effective.

Yet, the process of constructing a comprehensive banner campaign is challenging. The manual process of creating them requires a significant amount of time and is error-prone. This is because of the sheer number of sizes and formats that exist.

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) provides guidelines for 15 standard banner ad sizes. However, popular tech advertising platforms like Google, Facebook, Pinterest, and Snap each have their own unique set of dimensions, complicating campaign build-out.

Crafting a full-fledged campaign can require the manual creation of hundreds of different sizes—an arduous task fraught with the potential for inconsistencies. Traditionally, the creation process has meant teams only prioritize only the most popular banner sizes, but this comes at a cost. The less-popular sizes can have a measurable increase in performance, a fact often overlooked due to the resource-intensive nature of crafting assets.

But with tools like CreativeAutomatic—an AI-powered tool that automates the creation of hundreds of ad units, creating any size a campaign requires is easy. This allows teams to take advantage of any ad size or format they want and vastly improves the performance of digital advertising campaigns.

3. Simplifying Podcast Content Creation at Scale

The podcast landscape now boasts an astonishing five million podcasts, of which podcasters have recorded an estimated 70 million episodes. If all these podcasts were published in print, they would represent a staggering 5.7 million books. Remember that the average local central library branch has about 50,000 books.

This massive archive of audio content is full of untapped potential, and AI tools have emerged to help unlock it. There are now several tools that can meticulously analyze and comprehend podcast episodes. By providing these tools with just an audio file, they can automatically create any text-based asset a marketer might want, including blog posts, headline line options, full summaries, podcast notes, and many promotional materials. They can even give you options from which you can select the one you like most.

The implications are profound. Media enterprises with huge back catalogs are now working to develop new assets to help promote old episodes, and they are using these tools to generate higher-quality and a wider variety of promotional materials for new episodes faster. These assets not only bolster the promotion of their podcast archives but also facilitate better monetization of their entire back catalog.

SwellAI is one of the more popular tools dedicated exclusively to podcasting. It empowers content creators and media companies to effortlessly generate many content assets from audio clips, videos, and other recorded materials.

The scalability that AI-based technology like this brings will not only redefine the speed of content creation but also usher in a new era of strategic resource allocation. Small marketing teams will continue to be able to produce more with less. The limiting factor will be ideation and creativity, not access to tools.

4. Personalizing Every Marketing Email to Improve Performance

To the surprise of many in marketing, email continues to reign supreme. Spanning industries, verticals, and enterprises, email is a cornerstone marketing channel, steadfast in its ability to foster engagement. Primarily because of the hard-to-beat value prop that it remains free to send to anyone with an email address.

Long-time email marketers know that email performance continues to decline due to many factors like spam filters, UI changes to popular email clients, and the continued migration to other internal tools in many businesses. The need to wring more performance out of the channel is a priority.

Currently, most email marketing tactics often hinge on labor-intensive and unfocused A/B testing scenarios, a process that is not only time-consuming to deploy but can also inadvertently result in a subpar experience for some segments of the audience.

Personalization has always been the holy grail. But how does a marketing team deploy it at scale and with limited resources? The answer lies in AI-powered email personalization tools.

Take, for instance, the American Marketing Association (AMA), an entity that used AI-driven personalization to reshape its email strategies. Through the integration of AI, the AMA underwent a transformational shift. The institution embarked on a program where all 100,000 subscribers receive an email uniquely tailored to their preferences, from the subject line to the content and structure of the newsletter.

This departure from traditional methods yielded a remarkable outcome. Since implementing this groundbreaking approach, the AMA's marketing newsletter boasts a staggering 42% monthly engagement rate beyond industry standards.

This was made possible by RasaIO, an AI-powered email marketing tool that taps into the potential of personalization, taking email marketing into a new dimension. By bridging the gap between human intuition and AI-powered precision, tools like RasaIO offer a glimpse of the future of marketing—one where each interaction is tailored to the end user, and A/B testing is a relic of marketing’s blunt and imprecise past.

As organizations like the AMA, equipped with tools like RasaIO, set new benchmarks for engagement, the broader marketing landscape stands on the brink of a transformation. In this realm, personalization is no longer a mere buzzword but an experience unique for each recipient.

5. Automating Photo Image Editing and Color Correction

From real estate to fashion to consumer products, high-quality captivating images are the linchpin of captivating consumer attention.

However, even with the advent of digital photography, the journey from capturing images to final polished and ready-to-publish output remains a manual and labor-intensive process that would surprise most not in the industry.

Previously, the image editing landscape was characterized by painstaking tasks that consumed time and resources. But today, AI-powered tools have forged a new narrative, one where nearly every facet of image correction is seamlessly automated.

New AI tools from Imagen, Autoenhance AI, and even tech giant Adobe are rewriting the rules of image editing, automating processes that once required meticulous time-consuming artistry.

These tools don't stop at basic corrections; they delve into the nuanced domain of image selection, a process often called "culling" within photography circles.

The real estate industry stands as a prime exemplar of this revolution, as it swiftly embraced the capabilities of AI-driven image editing. Fueled by the popularity of social media and the visual impact of platforms like Instagram, the real estate industry recognized that images of exceptional quality could add substantial marketing value.

Tools like Autoenhance AI have asserted that their enhancements can lead to as much as a 2% increase in the sale price of homes—which, given the swiftly rising value of home prices, can translate into thousands of dollars, covering closing costs and beyond.

In the luxury real estate market, where average selling prices are well into the millions of dollars, a 2% increase equates to a substantial amount of money, redefining not only profit margins but a seller's entire approach to marketing.

Automated image enhancement is not just a technological achievement—it's a tangible game-changer for industries that thrive on visual allure.

Unleashing AI's Transformative Potential in Marketing

These real-world case studies underscore the profound impact that AI is having across many areas of marketing.

These case studies serve as living testaments to the dynamic shift AI ushers in—an era where customer engagement is redefined, campaign efficacy reaches unprecedented heights, and overall performance scales to new dimensions.

As the marketing landscape continues its relentless evolution, the integration of AI emerges not as an option but as an imperative—a catalyst for unlocking uncharted horizons in creativity and strategy.

Key Takeaways for Marketers in The Era of AI

With AI-powered innovation, marketers find themselves at the crossroads of transformation and potential.

When planning your AI marketing strategy for your organization, consider these principles to help you leverage its full potential.

  • Leverage Historical Data: AI tools in marketing work best at scale by capitalizing on your historical data. The uniqueness and originality of data access are key to breakthrough gains in efficiency, quality, and performance.

  • Gains in Performance: Companies pioneering AI in marketing are witnessing remarkable gains in performance. This shows that AI's potential to provide early adopters with a considerable competitive edge is significant.

  • Operational Complexity: Adding AI-powered tools to the marketing tech stack adds significant complexity to marketing operations. To navigate this, teams must invest in marketing operations in managing systems to keep them operational.

  • AI as an Amplifier: AI is a conduit for amplifying human creativity, not a replacement. AI functions as a force multiplier for your ideas. It’s an innovation partner that magnifies human potential rather than replacing it.

  • Customer Psychology: Marketers should recognize that AI will never replace your understanding of customers. Focus on deepening your insight into human psychology by talking with customers and understanding why they buy.

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