AI tools are transforming digital marketing and proving valuable to many small businesses, with a recent survey by Small Business Britain and BT Business finding that 47% of small businesses are using AI to assist with marketing.
From sparking creativity, to streamlining workflows, and uncovering valuable insights, the benefits are myriad but AI isn’t a silver bullet. Relying too heavily on AI, or using it without a clear strategy, can lead to serious missteps that hurt your brand and undercut your marketing goals.
In this post, we break down the advantages of AI in digital marketing, highlight the most common pitfalls, and show you how to navigate both.
The benefits of AI for digital marketing
A source of inspiration: Generative AI (Gen AI) can suggest content topics tailored to your niche and business objectives. Whilst it’s not without limitations (we’ll get to those!), it’s a handy jump-start when you’re low on ideas or stuck in a creative rut.
A content creation assistant: From text and visuals to audio, AI can generate content in a flash, and, with good quality prompts, the results can be surprisingly strong. That being said, AI is no replacement for human creativity, skill and experience. People write with originality, nuance, and empathy that AI isn’t able to fully replicate.
Content generation might be at the centre of the AI hype, but it’s really just the tip of the iceberg. There are a growing number of AI-powered tools (with varying costs) that offer specific functionality, ranging from keyword research to reporting and evaluation. Even free large language models (LLM) chatbots, like ChatGPT, Microsoft Co-pilot and Google Gemini, can perform many of these functions, providing you use the right prompts.
How to avoid AI marketing pitfalls
Used with care, AI can be a great addition to your business’ marketing toolkit. However, there are downsides, which could potentially hinder your progress and could even damage your brand. To help you navigate this tricky terrain, here are some of the most common pitfalls of AI and how to avoid them:
Blending in with generic content: AI’s creativity isn’t unlimited; in fact, AI is not really creative at all. AI draws on masses of training data and looks for patterns, which it then uses to inform its outputs. In other words, it takes examples of other businesses’ marketing practices and uses that data to generate content that fits in. It regurgitates trends, not original ideas.
Aside from obvious concerns about AI and copyright, that means that we’re seeing cookie-cutter content being churned out by AI and published far and wide. Without human input, AI-generated content can feel mass-produced and lack personality; a sure fire way to blend into the background rather than stand out from the competition.
How to avoid it: Use AI as a starting point to get your creative juices flowing but avoid over-reliance on AI for content ideation and creation. There’s no replacement for human creativity or connection!
Misalignment with your brand: Your unique brand voice should be at the heart of everything you create. Generic AI-generated content simply won’t cut it when you’re building a brand that people will connect with, remember and, ultimately, buy from.
Consumers are also becoming increasingly aware of the proliferation of AI-generated content and they’re learning how to spot it. Over-reliance on AI can undermine the connection you have with your audience and quickly devalue your brand by making you appear inauthentic.
What’s more, content for content’s sake won’t deliver the results you’re looking for. It’s essential to have a marketing strategy that’s focused on your business objectives, and create content that’s tightly aligned with this.
How to avoid it: Use AI as a final review process to check for coherence, tone, spelling and grammar, helping you to polish your content. A little prep work is essential here – create a prompt that clearly details your brand’s tone of voice and your objectives, then ask your LLM to save that prompt in its memory and refer to it whenever you ask for feedback on your content. Be aware though, this isn’t foolproof as tools like ChatGPT aren’t always consistent about following your guidelines!
False information and AI hallucinations: Just as the creativity of AI is often over-estimated, so is its intelligence. Of course, it can do a lot of smart things. But it’s also extremely prone to mistakes and hallucinations (the term used for when AI generates incorrect or misleading information).
If you’re using AI to create content for your business, you no doubt have the expertise to spot false or inaccurate information, but, of course, that’s extra work you could do without.
Hallucinations and misleading advice are an even bigger problem when using AI to inform your marketing strategy. Put simply, you can’t rely on AI to give complex or sound marketing advice.
How to avoid it: Use AI tools as a starting point only for complex tasks like keyword research, competitor analysis, marketing strategy, or evaluation. Due to AI’s tendency to hallucinate, chatbots truly aren’t a replacement for expert marketing support that’s based on extensive training, experience, and human judgement.
There are numerous other pitfalls of using AI for digital marketing (look out for a future post on ethical considerations around AI), and more are likely to emerge as AI and its uses continue to evolve. But for now, we hope the advice we’ve shared in this blog helps you make better use of AI tools. And, remember, it’s still a long way off from being able to replace the human touch!
Digital Marketing Executive at And Marketing. A seasoned digital marketing professional with extensive experience supporting a wide range of businesses (B2B and B2C) with digital marketing strategy and implementation. Beckie is a specialist in social media marketing and has supported hundreds of businesses to grow by utilising social media in strategic and creative ways.
