It’s probably safe to say that AI is going to revolutionize marketing.
You need to learn how to harness the power of artificial intelligence if you want your business to remain competitive. There’s no way around that.
That being said, we have seen too many companies hop on the AI hype train without putting much thought into it.
This haphazard approach often leads to creating a bunch of new problems without solving the existing ones. AI can turn out to be a net negative if you don’t know what you are doing.
That’s why today we want to discuss how to create an AI marketing strategy that will enable you to take your business to the next level!
A Word of Caution About Generative AI…
Generative AI is all the rage now. And for a good reason!
Tools such as large language models, text-to-image generators, and text-to-video generators can help you produce the first drafts of your marketing assets in a matter of minutes.
But if you want to use them in your business, you need to understand the phenomenon known as “hallucinations”.
Large language models sometimes just make things up and confidently state them as facts.
For example, if you ask a large language model like ChatGPT to give you an overview of scientific research on a specific subject, it might make up scientists and papers that do not exist or provide incorrect information about real scientists and real papers.
This means that you cannot publish content generated by large language models without manually fact-checking all claims within it. Otherwise, you risk unintentionally spreading misinformation and damaging your brand as a result.
Meanwhile, when it comes to text-to-image generators and text-to-video generators, the output of these tools might include details that shouldn’t be there.
For example, here’s a real photo of Scotland’s famous Glenfinnan Viaduct bridge:
If you ask a text-to-image or a video-to-image generator to include a video of this bridge in their output, you might get something that looks similar but isn’t quite right.
For example, here’s a screenshot from a video generated by Sora that depicts the Glenfinnan Viaduct:
If you published an image or a video like that, Scottish people in your audience would probably wonder why there’s an additional railway on this iconic bridge.
Spotting hallucinations in AI-generated images and videos can be challenging because it requires attention to detail. But you should still do your best to ensure accuracy.
Note that complete marketing automation won’t be possible until hallucinations are solved. The unreliability of these tools means that there still needs to be at least one human in the process that can evaluate their output!
Now with all that out of the way, let’s discuss the AI marketing strategy that we recommend…
AI Marketing Strategy for New Businesses
Let’s say that you want to start an online business.
In that case, we recommend using AI to help you brainstorm ideas, build a sales funnel, produce marketing content, create marketing visuals, and grow your social media following. That is all you need to get your new business off the ground!
Brainstorm With ChatGPT
Entrepreneurs often get stuck in the ideation phase.
In fact, there are a lot of people out there who want to start an online business but don’t know what to sell!
We would argue that the best way to use ChatGPT in the business context is brainstorming.
You can ask it to help you come up with ideas for a brand name, products and services, upsells, cross sells and downsells, marketing campaigns, etc.
In all likelihood, the majority of ChatGPT’s ideas won’t be helpful. Some might even be nonsensical due to hallucinations.
(To be fair, when we humans do brainstorming all by ourselves, we typically end up needing to discard most of our own ideas as well!)
However, ChatGPT can help you drastically speed up the ideation process. Coming up with 100 ideas by yourself can take a lot of time but large language models can do it in a matter of seconds. Even if 99 of those ideas are garbage, the one idea that’s actually viable can help you grow your business!
Note that ChatGPT has several different versions: GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and GPT-4o. We recommend using the latter for brainstorming. Why?
Because it’s the latest version that is lightyears ahead of the previous ones. There’s a huge difference in capabilities.
Both the free plan and the paid plan only offer limited access to GPT-4o but the latter has 5x higher usage limits.
Build Sales Funnels With ClickFunnels
Here at ClickFunnels, we believe that the best way to sell products and services online is to build a sales funnel for your business and then drive traffic to it with targeted marketing campaigns.
Entrepreneurs tend to agree with our reasoning, especially once they read our co-founder Russell Brunson’s best-selling book.
But we noticed that they often never get around to actually building sales funnels. As a result, they end up leaving a ton of money on the table, especially as their companies grow!
Initially, it seemed baffling, but eventually, we realized that it all boiled down to feeling overwhelmed. If you have never built a sales funnel before, it might seem like a daunting task. And you know what? It’s understandable!
That’s why we decided to add an AI sales funnel builder to our platform. Now all you need to do is answer a few questions, click the “Create Funnel Now” button, and wait for AI to generate a sales funnel for you. It typically takes around 10-15 minutes.
This means that you can build a sales funnel for your business today if you want to, even if you have never done it before!
Create Marketing Content With Jasper
You might be wondering why we recommended ChatGPT for brainstorming but not for content creation. After all, it can generate text, right?
It’s because there are other tools out there that have been designed specifically for the purpose of producing marketing content.
We recommend the AI marketing platform Jasper. It makes it easy to produce social media posts, blog articles, cold outreach emails, marketing emails, landing page copy, sales page copy, ad copy, and more.
One notable feature is the brand knowledge database where you can store information about your products and services, your target audience, your brand voice, etc.
You only need to upload all this information once and then Jasper will be able to get the relevant details from this database whenever you ask it to generate marketing content for your business.
This means that you won’t have to repeat the same stuff every time you are using this app. Plus, there will be less need for editing because this database will help Jasper stay on-brand.
Another notable feature is campaign generation. You can upload a document that describes a marketing campaign and Jasper will generate the whole thing for you, including all the marketing assets.
And sure, you will probably need to make some adjustments and do some editing before you launch that campaign, but being able to generate entire marketing campaigns just like that can help you save a ton of time.
Finally, this app also includes team collaboration features, so if you want to launch an omnichannel marketing campaign where different people are responsible for different channels, you can make it happen with Jasper!
Create Marketing Visuals With Firefly
While you can use Jasper to create marketing visuals such as ad images, social media images, and blog post images, we recommend going with Adobe’s Firefly instead. Why?
Because not only is it an amazing text-to-image generator that you can easily integrate with other tools in Adobe’s software suite but it’s also been trained exclusively on licensed data and public domain data with expired copyright.
That means that you can use the images produced with this tool without worrying about copyright infringement.
Keep in mind that there’s a possibility that lawmakers will eventually start cracking down on the companies that train their text-to-image generators on unlicensed data scraped from the Internet.
In that case, the users of those products would likely be affected as well. It might become illegal to use images created with them for commercial purposes.
Of course, no one knows what the future holds, but we believe that it’s best to play it safe. Why introduce unnecessary legal risks when you can simply use Firefly instead?
Grow Your Social Media Following With Flick
Social media marketing is a type of marketing that is the most accessible to entrepreneurs who are just starting out.
All you need to do is choose a platform, create a social media profile, and consistently post high-quality content.
Of course, all that is easier said than done because life tends to get in the way. Next thing you know, you haven’t posted in six months and your social media profile looks like a ghost town.
We would argue that this lack of consistency is the primary reason why entrepreneurs fail at social media marketing.
That’s why we recommend Flick, an AI-powered social media marketing platform that enables you to generate ideas, produce content, and maintain a consistent publishing schedule.
Simply batch-create social media content for an entire month in a single day and schedule it to be published automatically.
That way, no matter what curveballs life throws at you, your social media publishing schedule will remain unaffected!
AI Marketing Strategy for Growing Businesses
Okay, so you managed to get your business off the ground, you are consistently making sales and your revenue is steadily increasing. What should you do next?
It appears that people across the globe prefer the video medium over everything else, as evidenced by the growth of YouTube and TikTok in recent years.
In fact, video content is playing an increasingly important role even on social media platforms that used to be almost entirely text or image-driven, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.
That’s why we recommend incorporating video marketing into your overall marketing strategy once you start making some money with your business!
Generate Videos With Visla
Did you know that you don’t even need actual video footage to produce videos with AI?
Visla offers an AI text-to-video generator that you can use to turn text prompts, blog articles, video scripts, product documents, and even entire eBooks into videos!
It’s also worth noting that this app also includes a wide range of video recording and editing features as well as a team collaboration functionality which makes it easy for several people to work on the same video.
Edit Videos With Descript
Something that people who don’t have video production experience tend to underestimate is how much editing is required to create a video that’s good enough to be published.
In fact, video editing used to be a real pain because industry-standard tools like Adobe’s Premier and Apple’s Final Cut Pro have a steep learning curve.
Fortunately, AI tools like Descript have drastically simplified the video editing process and made it accessible to everyone.
Descript’s most notable feature is text-to-video editing. Basically, if you know how to edit a text document in Google Docs, then you can easily edit videos with this app.
For example, if you want to cut something out, you can simply delete it from the video transcript and it will be removed from the footage as well.
You can also use this tool to edit audio files the same way, which is great for those who have audio-only podcasts or want to clean up audio that they intend to overlay on video footage.
Repurpose Long-Form Videos With Opus Clip
The best video marketing strategy appears to be publishing long-form videos on YouTube and then repurposing them into short clips that you can publish on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Repurposing long-form videos used to be a tedious process:
You had to watch the entire video, identify the best moments, cut them out, turn them into cohesive short clips, spice them up with some visual effects, and add captions to them before publishing.
Now an AI tool like Opus Clip can do all that for you in less than 10 minutes. Simply upload a video or provide a link to it and it will produce a bunch of short clips.
You will probably still have to do some manual editing before you can publish them. But that shouldn’t take too much time with Opus Clip editing features that were designed specifically for editing short-form video content!
AI Marketing Strategy for Established Businesses
Once your business is established, it’s time to start using AI for data analysis and brand management.
Make Data-Driven Decisions With Tableau
You probably have a ton of historical data.
You can use AI-powered business analytics software to analyze it so that you can optimize various business processes. That can help you increase your sales, revenue, and profit.
Also, once you have a solid business analytics system in place, it will help you make data-driven decisions going forward.
Finally, while business analytics apps aren’t crystal balls, they can help you improve the accuracy of your sales forecasting.
We recommend Tableau. It’s a powerful AI tool that enables you to take advantage of various machine learning techniques developed specifically for data analysis!
Learn From Customer Feedback With MonkeyLearn
When you are just starting out, it’s easy to keep track of customer feedback and learn from it, even if you are receiving it via several different channels.
But as your business grows, so does the volume of social media comments, customer emails and support tickets.
By the time your business is established, it becomes impossible to manually keep track of it all, much less analyze it and learn from it.
MonkeyLearn is an app that enables you to use a machine learning technique called text analysis to analyze, monitor, and learn from customer feedback.
It can help you improve your product or service, provide better customer support, and create more effective marketing campaigns!
Manage Your Brand Image With Brand24
It’s true that when you are just starting out a few bad reviews can tank your business.
However, at that stage, you are doing everything yourself, so you are probably aware of disgruntled customers. You can reach out to them directly and do your best to resolve whatever it is that they are unhappy about.
As your business grows, keeping track of disgruntled customers manually becomes impossible because of the sheer number of people that your company is serving.
Meanwhile, the viral nature of social media means that one person venting on Twitter can quickly escalate into a full-blown PR nightmare.
And the more well-known your company is, the more likely that is to happen.
Think about it:
No one cares if someone had a bad experience at an independent vacation house rental in a popular tourist destination. But if they complain about AirBnB? Everyone will jump in with their own AirBnB horror stories!
AirBnB is a good cautionary tale here because it shows that it doesn’t matter how dominant your company appears to be – if your customers are unhappy, eventually, it’s going to catch up with you. People who used to love the idea of renting apartments while traveling are rediscovering hotels!
That’s why brand management is so important for established businesses. You want to do everything you can to spot problems early on and address them immediately so that they won’t snowball until they get completely out of control.
Brand24 is an AI-powered social media listening tool that can help you do that. You can use it to monitor and analyze brand mentions. There’s also a feature that allows you to set up custom alerts so that you would get notified if something important happens and be able to respond quickly.
We recommend creating a new customer support role dedicated to brand management. That person should get notified about negative brand mentions and immediately reach out to the disgruntled customers, hear them out, and take measures to resolve their problems.
For example, if this customer support agent gets notified that someone is complaining about your product or service on Twitter, they should DM that person, ask them what happened, apologize for whatever it was that went wrong, thank them for their feedback, and give them a free voucher. That might be all it takes to de-escalate the situation.
The truth is that protecting your brand image is pretty straightforward if you are willing to allocate resources to it. Yes, having a full-time employee whose entire focus is brand management is expensive but it can help you avoid a ton of negative publicity!
Try ClickFunnels Risk-Free!
Let’s be real:
We are biased in favor of our software.
So we understand if you take what we say about it with a grain of salt.
Fortunately, we have a free 14-day trial, so you don’t have to take our word for it.
You can go and see ClickFunnels for yourself without any risk!
So what are you waiting for? 🧐