I've been using Claude to speed up my Marketing work for over two years, but I just took an online "AI for Marketers" class via Zip Learning through the UofU Business Department to go deeper into Marketing AI automation and augmentation.
In the class, we used both ChatGPT and Google Gemini Pro. Really glad I took the class, it showed me five core marketing skills using AI that I can use often to increase velocity for closing Sales.
In class, I was the last to start and first to finish all the work!
Core AI Marketing Skill: 1) Mapping the Customer Journey
The goal of creating a map of the customer journey, is to increase sales velocity through AI Automation, after we uncover high-value AI opportunities.
Breaking the journey into stages and touchpoints helps surface AI opportunities to improve speed, personalization, and efficiency.
Always start by telling AI your role and goal. Providing strong inputs, such as industry, personas, goals, and process details, leads to more useful AI-supported outcomes.
We started with a generic customer map we downloaded online, then customized it with AI to our specific industry, and target personas, and then added touchpoints that were missing for our specific business model.
Then we asked AI to recommend which touchpoints we could automate using AI.
Human judgment remains essential for prioritizing opportunities and deciding where AI automation adds value.
Core AI Marketing Skill: 2) Analyzing Data to Improve Ad Performance
We can use Data and AI to optimize campaigns: by clarifying insights from our meta ads, google ads, and GA4, like what happened, why it happened, and what to do next.
First we cleaned our data sets that were .csv format imported to spreadsheets, meaning:
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deleted proprietary data columns such as ad IDs
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deleted columns with customer IDs
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deleted unnecessary duplicate columns
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changed the format in money and date columns to match a single format, not technically necessary with AI, but makes analysis of huge amounts of data faster
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tightened up the time frame because it's easier to limit the data set and we still gain insights from one-to-two recent months of data
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AI analysis is needed on datasets longer than 500 lines
We asked Google Gemini Pro for an analysis of what happened, why it happened, and the top three insights on how we can improve ad performance over the next three months.
We had AI create an Executive Strategy slide as well as an Action Plan slide for the Team.
Core AI Marketing Skill: 3) Design Dynamic Creative Faster with AI
By prompting AI, we created an Instagram Ad ad and a short video ad very quickly with the right graphics and data points to get prospects to stop, want to learn more, and engage in the Sales process.
The Instagram ad I created:
The video I created:
Core AI Marketing Skill: 4) AI-Driven Competitive Analysis
AI-driven competitive analysis is lightening fast if we attach our product sheet and then point it to the URLs of Competitors Websites that we want to compare;
AI typically sources data from four to six sources and will pull up things like analyst reports, customer reviews on reddit, websites, wikipedia, and other sources it considers to be authoritative, if you ask it to cite it's sources.
It will create messaging and positioning, in minutes, not days or weeks, but again, you as the human have to make a judgement call on what to actually use.You also need to make sure it's not making stuff up to fill in the blanks, by telling it to not include info that it doesn't have multiple sources to corroborate the infomation.
Core AI Marketing Skill: 5) Impact with Automation
We used Make.com to create automations, which is an AI-enabled API tool like Zapier. It lets us create automation for almost any marketing-repetitive task. Here is one example of the five that we did.
AI is good at analyzing a lot of mixed-format data like customer reviews. I say mixed-format data, because people aren't filling out a survey with yes or no boxes to check, they are writing in free form of social media. AI can read those comments on our ads, which are tracked through ad IDs, and determine if the review is positive or negative.
As Marketers, we want to monitor those customer reviews in real-time on our YouTube video channel, in example, and post a thankyou for positive reviews, as well as forward all negative reviews to the team via slack, so the team can address and respond to any product or service problems that were mentioned by customers.
Above is the automation I created for that multi-stream task. Creating automations requires a lot of testing to make sure each piece and the whole enchilada works. AI can require a lot of tokens, which can be expensive, so when it's not necessary, you can create a simple API to connect and track systems, but when you need it, AI is a powerful tool when combined with automation.
You can do enterprise-level-demand gen with Hubspot like monitor prospects with Breeze, scrape, and forward materials to partners, as well as monitor and responding to social media comments. I've had my own Hubspot portal for 18 years, so I've seen Hubspot add a lot of functionality to many new versions. They have added a lot of AI in the past two years as well, obviously.
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I continue to watch AI reels to learn skills; Also, I use AI to learn about AI, haha.
I feel AI has made me more productive in marketing from day one, and I'm excited to know how to identify and automate repetitive marketing processes as well.
How is your journey with AI going? Are you more productive than you were pre-AI?