Eight ways to leverage AI and optimise your marketing efforts

Effective content creation for marketing departments requires leaders to be both agile and willing to explore and adopt new technology. Artificial intelligence (AI) technology—with all its possibilities and applications—has already changed the process of creating content forever, and it’s only just begun.

Understanding how AI is transforming content creation is essential for online businesses across all geographic regions. Investing time in learning what AI can do well, where it falls short, and how it can be applied for the benefit of marketing teams and the customers they target will ensure companies get the most out of this technology and avoid the pitfalls it presents when used recklessly.

AI in its current iteration is already powerful, and it’s only growing in usefulness. New creative applications that use AI appear every day, and they’ve been developed to address a wide range of business and human-related needs. The outputs of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Google Gemini have improved significantly in a short amount of time and are already helping marketing teams automate mundane tasks, create new viable assets, and scale content creation efforts.

With the above in mind, here's eight ways to leverage AI to boost your marketing efforts even further:

1. Massively scale content creation without increasing headcount

AI’s ability to churn out vast amounts of content will drive marketing teams to new levels of productivity without the need to hire more employees or contractors. These tools take care of laborious, repetitive content-creation tasks and provide a golden opportunity for marketing professionals to flex their creativity while producing more than ever.

Today, we’re at a point where AI-generated writing can be polished into something worth presenting to even the most discerning users. Just keep in mind that AI’s writing output without human oversight can lead to distrust among users, with tech websites like CNET learning the hard way.

However, such stories shouldn’t deter leaders from using ChatGPT and similar tools. Scaling a business’s marketing efforts—regardless of its target demographic or even the team’s geographic location—is made much easier with AI.

For instance, while it’s not unusual for international companies to outsource content creation to APAC countries like India or the Philippines, AI can be used to greatly enhance the quality of this content. Even simply asking an LLM to rewrite a passage for a specific audience can clean up errors and use geographically targeted language.

2. Localise your business for international markets

Translation agencies are expensive, and hiring teams in new geographic regions can also take up valuable resources. With AI, these efforts become significantly less costly and provide an exciting opportunity for companies to expand into new regions and capture more of their total addressable market. For instance, ChatGPT already works effectively in over 80 languages, including more than 30 languages in the APAC region.

However, writing translation is only the surface of AI’s use as a translation tool. Localisation management platform CrowdIn is already taking AI and applying localised code integration for apps and software. Other AI programs process vast amounts of text, apply your preset language and branding style guides, and quickly translate this text at scale. Huge translation projects become much more manageable and require fewer human translation resources.

3. Autogenerate dynamic visual assets for e-commerce and social platforms

Industrious early adopters of AI are already reaping the rewards with their creative approaches to content generation. For instance, by generating unique visual assets with text prompts and turning them into TikToks monetised for high-value affiliate links, Matt Lorion was able to make $220,000 with two hours of actual work.

Even with TikTok’s legal status in the US in jeopardy, global interest in TikTok and short video content is increasing. TikTok’s Shop has grown rapidly in Southeast Asia, with its ecommerce platform demonstrating a compound growth rate of 30% a month in 2023 and close to $20 billion gross merchandise value by the end of the year. If the platform does get banned in the United States, that number could become even more impressive with influencers and companies directing their focus toward the burgeoning SEA market.

Penetrating the SEA and APAC markets with AI-generated visual content presents a big growth opportunity for businesses. Translating a video script with Chat GPT and overlaying that text onto static images generated using Midjourney is one way to quickly create usable short-form content. And with OpenAI’s Sora video generator set to release in 2024, making dynamic, high-quality videos from text prompts and localizing them instantly will become possible.

4. Create synthetic data and analyse real data

Processing user data carefully has been a major theme for many companies since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in 2018. There’s not much more valuable to a business than understanding the data of its customers, yet processing this data haphazardly can lead to hefty legal fines.

Singaporean startup Betterdata.ai uses artificial intelligence to produce synthetic data—algorithmically generated data spun from real data—that can be used safely for your marketing efforts. This data doesn’t contain personally identifiable information, and helps protect your company from data processing-related litigation.

Looking to review or parse data at scale? An AI document reader developed by Cinnamon.ai can scan unstructured documents with character recognition and picture text and help users identify specified issues in minutes. With the goal of speeding up repetitive, onerous data-related tasks in an attempt to provide better lifestyles for workers in Japan, the potential for AI to make companies more efficient and employees happier is apparent.

5. Personalise and scale customer support efforts

Providing better support for customers around the clock is made easier with AI-powered, customisable chatbots. These chatbots can gradually be trained to better meet the needs of your specific business—reducing the need for a large customer support staff and providing help to existing teams inundated with user requests and queries. Major customer service platforms like Zendesk have already partnered with OpenAI, and adopting these tools ultimately can help businesses reduce overhead while creating better user experiences across different geographic areas.

For customers who prefer talking to actual agents, companies like Auraya use AI to provide biometric voice support that can verify users using just the sound of their voice, and then help prepare a customer service representative prior to taking a call—saving time for both sides.

6. Use as a personal research assistant

AI chatbots are powerful research assistants, trained on datasets of billions of words and entities. They can quickly process input by drawing from this vast wealth of data and predicting the most logical response, saving teams time conducting research that can instead be spent analysing that research and taking action.

Chatbots are trained up to a certain date (Chat GPT-4 to April 2023) and can only speculate on current events and the news, but with features like GPT-4’s Link Reader you can largely get around this limitation.

Chatbots can be leveraged by creative marketers in myriad ways. Quickly executing competitor analyses, summarising swathes of research, and suggesting market strategies based on their understanding of online data is only the surface of their utility.

7. Utilise as your personal sounding board

Inspiration is close at hand with the support of an AI chatbot. Asking questions, making requests, and prompting the chatbot to refine its output can generate immediate results. Even just asking a quick question can get the ball rolling.

8. Organise data and generate code

Effective content marketing is creative and data-driven, which causes challenges for marketers who are creative but inefficient at organising and processing data. AI takes much of the organisational workload off their shoulders.

For marketers using Excel, ChatGPT spins out easy-to-understand tutorials for utilising advanced spreadsheet functions. It can also write and debug code in various programming languages and effectively handle black-and-white requests, like generating Python scripts and making HTML tables.

The future implications of AI for content marketing

AI is no longer just a buzzword, and its utilisation in marketing will only continue to grow heading into the future. Keeping up with advances in LLMs and chatbots like ChatGPT will ensure marketing leaders are ready to adjust strategies and processes accordingly.

Resisting the temptation to mass-produce content in an attempt to reach more users and drive traffic is crucial for businesses. Online consumers are wary of AI-generated content, and desire authenticity from the brands they interact with. However, not embracing AI and its utility would be a mistake. Finding the right balance where customers are happy with the content they encounter and stakeholders are satisfied with the productivity boost and reduced costs is the best way forward.

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Tyler McConville is a global marketing leader in APAC.