The Pros & Cons of Using AI in Marketing
Artificial intelligence is becoming more ubiquitous with marketers around the world. While it has many positives for marketers when it comes to improving efficiencies and streamlining specific tasks, it comes with a number of negatives to overcome.
Discussed below are main advantages and disadvantages of using AI generated content as part of your organisation’s marketing strategy.
Pros
Increased Efficiency
Marketing teams often get bogged down with tasks such social media scheduling and list management, which can be monotonous or repetitive over time. AI-powered tools can automate these tasks saving both time and resources so that attention can be given to more pressing matters.
Idea Generation
AI can assist with idea generation in various areas of the business, including marketing. Idea generation is a challenging aspect of marketing as it often requires fresh thinking and an outside the box approach. AI-powered platforms work as ideation tools help with generating creative ideas, answering prompts and expanding on initial concepts.
Trends, customer data and market research can also be used by AI to propose innovative product or marketing ideas for your team. This works especially well for smaller marketing teams with limited budgets.
Increased Mass Personalisation
Artificial intelligence allows marketers to greatly scale up personalisation in mass communications. AI allows for analysis of vast amounts of customer data to deliver targeted content. This helps improve customer engagement and conversion rates.
Some examples of mass personalisation include highly personalised emails, product recommendations and tailored advertisements.
Create Competitive Advantage
Predictive analytics using artificial intelligence help marketers make data-driven decisions, forecast market trends and ultimately help brands stay ahead of the competition.
This also works well with improving customer insights. Artificial intelligence can process large datasets to display patterns in customer behaviour. Thus allowing marketers to better understand audience preferences and predict trends with certainty.
Cons
Cost
Implementing AI-driven marketing tools can be expensive, especially for small businesses. The costs associated with using multiple AI tools may make a lot of organisations think twice about what they need and how much impact it’d have on improving marketing efforts.
As most tools seem to have a pay as you model in place, AI will have to be incorporated into future marketing budgets.
Lack of human touch
Artificial intelligence is great at streamlining task and creating personalised accounts, but it lacks a human element that many customers resonate with. It can easily analyse data and provide insights, but it lacks the ability to make contextual judgements or decisions based on nuanced considerations.
Over-reliance on an automated approach can lead to impersonal interactions and diminishing customer satisfaction.
This is especially true in customer service aspects of the business, as customers become dissatisfied with the quality of many AI chatbots and prefer a human agent to deal with their issue.
Dependence on Limited Data
AI-driven marketing strategies rely heavily on accurate and up-to-date data. If the data is limited in any way it could have detrimental effects on your campaign.
Inaccurate data that has been input can lead to flawed predictions and ineffective campaigns.
Unreliability
Artificial intelligence isn’t always reliable and can’t always be trusted to perform a task with certainty. As many AI-powered tools are still in their infancy, they come with plenty of quirks, bugs and errors that could make your team think twice about relying on it for decision making.
Human intervention is still necessary in many cases. Far too often AI tools return false information, incorrect data or shoddy artwork in the case of image generation.
In its current state, AI should be used as a tool to assist with marketing and not rely on it completely.
Are you preparing to alter your customer engagement strategy over the next few months? If so, contact us today on +353 1 8041298, or click on the link below to be brought to our contact form.