Everyone’s talking about AI. Most of it is noise. You and I are here to talk about one thing: using AI to build a marketing system that generates revenue.
The work is building integrated AI systems that automate entire workflows and deliver measurable results, and cute prompts or shiny new toys won’t get you there. I’ve been building with ML since 2016 and Generative AI since 2019. I’m here to show you how to move past the hype and into execution.
To understand the bigger picture of where we are in the AI revolution, let’s look at two technological developments from the Internet’s past:
The Browser Wars and the Search Engine Wars.
Here’s what happened.
Since ChatGPT was released to the public in November 2022, it’s been ground zero for tens of millions of people to experiment with AI in all kinds of areas, from copywriting to programming.
But some of its greatest potential—and greatest challenges—can be found in long-form content writing.
ChatGPT excels at producing large quantities of short-form ideas on the fly, like headlines and meta descriptions.
Email marketing is a unique discipline:
Highly creative, yet exceptionally data-driven.
You can’t succeed in email marketing if your emails don’t appeal to readers, which takes creativity and originality.
At the same time, if you don’t pay attention to your analytics—and learn from them—your emails will languish unread in your subscribers’ inboxes.
That’s why email is so well-suited to artificial intelligence—and why AI email marketing can be so profitable.
ChatGPT can feel like a copywriting superpower.
But left to its own devices, it’s often flawed and directionless. It’s a superpower, for sure—but from the part of the movie before the wise master shows up to harness that power in the right direction.
ChatGPT is Luke without Yoda.
To unleash ChatGPT’s potential, you need to be like Yoda. Take your knowledge of human psychology, and guide ChatGPT with specific instructions to use persuasive copywriting formulas that will resonate with your audience.
Or, as Yoda might say:
If you’ve seen Mad Men, the show about marketing executives in the 1960s, you know how marketing campaigns used to work:
A handful of people sit in front of a whiteboard throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks. Finally, after hours or days, one brilliant contributor comes up with an off-the-wall idea no one saw coming.
BAM.
The perfect marketing campaign.
But in the age of AI, that’s not how it works anymore.
There was a time when incorporating AI into your marketing strategy felt optional.
As recently as the early 2010s, AI was largely the domain of researchers and technology futurists. Some marketers were experimenting with AI, but most were waiting until the use cases became too obvious to ignore.
This was the era of IBM’s Watson beating human competitors on Jeopardy—there was serious promise, but AI still felt like far-off science fiction to most.
Today, AI is indispensable in marketing. (Heck, you can even ask AI to create an AI marketing strategy for you).
AI social media marketing tools can boost your productivity by 10x.
Remove “ums,” “uhs,” and other filler words automatically from audio and video—in addition to automatically removing the background from video, deleting unwanted objects on the fly, simplifying motion tracking, and so much more.
Here are 5 things you can do easily.
There was a time when marketing campaigns were manual.
Analytics were primitive. Emails weren’t dripped automatically to a list. Customer behavior tracking was clunky and limited.
Marketing automation changed all of that.
From personalized email marketing to lead scoring to analytics, marketing automation connects it all. And it works—80% of companies that use marketing automation see an increase in leads, and 77% see an increase in conversions.
Now, AI is revolutionizing marketing automation.
The AI advertising landscape is changing fast.
What used to be cutting edge—AI-powered programmatic advertising, for example—is now commonplace.
Some of the most innovative examples of AI advertising today are in the realm of market research, predictive analytics, and personalization.
One of the best ways to keep up is by closely watching other companies using AI for marketing—and borrowing what’s working for them.