AI in Digital Marketing: What Smart Brands Are Doing Differently

AI in marketing refers to using artificial intelligence technologies to enhance and automate various aspects of the marketing process. By leveraging data, machine learning, and advanced algorithms, AI can simulate human intelligence to make decisions, predict customer behavior, personalize experiences, and streamline campaign execution.

In today’s digital world, consumers expect brands to understand their needs and deliver relevant content in real time, AI enables marketers to meet these expectations efficiently by analyzing vast amounts of data, identifying patterns, and responding with tailored messaging at scale.

From predicting trends to generating personalized content, AI marketing transforms how brands interact with audiences, optimize performance, and drive growth.

What is AI in marketing?

AI in marketing uses machine learning and deep learning to analyze data, recognize patterns, and simulate human decision-making. It gets smarter over time, learning from interactions to predict customer behavior and personalize content.

There are two key types:

1. Predictive AI

forecasts future outcomes based on past data, such as what a customer might buy next.

2. Generative AI

creates new content-like text or images based on what it has learned, enabling marketers to produce personalized, human-like materials on scale.

 Together, they help marketers automate tasks, target the right audiences, and deliver tailored messaging efficiently. As AI evolves, understanding how it works is key to using it confidently and unlocking its full potential in marketing.

Ways to Use AI in Digital Marketing

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing how brands connect with customers, making digital marketing smarter, faster, and more personalized than ever before.  By analyzing massive amounts of data in real time, AI empowers marketers to deliver highly targeted content, automate repetitive tasks, and improve decision-making with predictive insights.

From content creation and customer segmentation to chatbots and personalized recommendations, AI is no longer a futuristic concept- it is a practical tool being used across every stage of the digital marketing funnel.

Understanding the various ways AI can be integrated into your marketing strategy is essential to staying competitive in today’s data-driven landscape. Whether you are a small business or a global brand, leveraging AI can boost efficiency, optimize user experience, and drive stronger results. Below are the ways to use AI in Digital Marketing:

1. Data Analytics

Struggling to make sense of large data sets? Most digital marketing tools give you analytics, but marketers often have to export and piece together data from different platforms like puzzle pieces to get the big picture.

AI can collect and sift through large amounts of data from multiple marketing platforms and summarize the findings.

This will help you save time when strategizing and developing marketing assets for your campaigns.

2. Content Creation

Digital marketers can instruct AI to write marketing content, including captions, social media posts, email copy, and even blog copy. Beyond writing, marketers can use AI for multimedia like images, audio, and even video.

It’s important to note that most AI-generated content isn’t ready for publishing immediately. Most marketers today use generative AI as a starting point — whether that’s ideation, an outline, or a few paragraphs to ignite your creativity.

Just 6% of marketers using AI say that they publish AI-generated content with no changes. You should always fact-check, edit, and adjust AI’s writing to make it sound more human and on-brand.

3. Reducing Admin Work

Like any professional role, digital marketers spend a significant amount of time sitting in meetings and doing administrative tasks.

Business professionals save an average of two hours and 24 minutes per day by using AI and automation tools.

AI tools can tackle manual tasks like scheduling meetings, summarizing articles and research, and taking notes.

For example, 63% of marketers are using AI tools to take notes and summarize meetings. These functions aren’t sexy, but they free up a marketer’s time to spend on more important, creative parts of their jobs. Or take Superhuman, the email known for its speed. Its AI features save hours in your inbox by summarizing whole email threads, preparing draft replies in your voice, and an AI search 2-3x faster than Gmail’s or Outlook’s.

4. Content Personalization

Of marketers using AI, 71% say it helps them personalize the experience customers get with their company.

This means AI can change the customer’s experience depending on their online behavior or whether or not they’ve filled out a form for your company.

For example, dynamic content changes depending on the user their name, occupation, online behavior, etc.

AI analyzes a user online and gives them a more personal experience with marketing assets, including web pages, social media posts, and emails.

6Sense is one example of a tool that leverages AI to sift through intent data. You can then understand who in your audience is looking to purchase, so you can personalize the marketing experience.

5. Media Buying

Another way to use AI in marketing is through media buying. Gone are the days when junior media buyers hand-select websites or billboards to advertise on.

Instead, adtech platforms use AI to choose the most effective ad and media placements to reach a target audience and maximize ROI.

If you use Google Ads, you’ve already encountered the AI feature that assists with the auction process.

Other standalone AI tools like Pattern89 provide recommendations on your ad spending and enable you to target the right audience to increase performance.

Campaign Assistant is a free AI-powered app that can help you generate ad copy for Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn with ease, all with just a few simple prompts.

6. Chatbots

One use of AI in marketing that we’ve seen for years is chatbots. Chatbots, created with natural language processing (NLP), can answer common questions, nurture leads, schedule demo calls, and more.

A chatbot can personalize the customer’s journey during the stage when they’re consuming marketing content. This tool can also answer customer questions.

Let’s look at Drift, for example. The company has trained its chatbot to answer questions, even outside of a pre-programmed path. This way, if a person has a question that isn’t loaded into the system, the user will still get an answer.

7. Automated Email Marketing Campaigns

Automated email marketing has also been around for years. However, AI tools can help produce more engaging email content and learn about your email list’s behavior.

The goal is to have your marketers spend less time researching and brainstorming so they can focus on sending successful campaigns.

As AI expands and improves, automated email marketing software becomes even more important to include in your marketing stack.

Artificial intelligence is no longer just a trend- it is a transformative force in digital marketing, from automating repetitive tasks to delivering hyper-personalized content and predicting customer behavior, AI enhances every stage of the marketing funnel.

Pros of AI in Digital Marketing

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an essential asset for marketers aiming to drive smarter, faster, and more personalized campaigns. With its ability to process massive amounts of data, learn from user behavior, and automate complex tasks, AI empowers marketing teams to make data-driven decisions and deliver a highly targeted experience. AI not only streamlines campaign execution but also improves overall performance, reduces operational costs, and frees up valuable time for creative strategy. Whether it is optimizing customer journeys, forecasting trends, or improving ROI. AI gives brands a powerful competitive edge in the digital space. Here Pros of AI in Digital Marketing:

1. Increased ROI

As you can see, the main goal of using AI in digital marketing is to increase performance and ROI for your campaigns.

Rather than running an ineffective ad for an entire campaign, you can harness data analytics and insights to produce better marketing assets in real-time.

This saves your marketing team time and money, allowing them to work more efficiently and increase profits. Cutting staff time and production costs also boosts your ROI.

2. Speed and Efficiency

I’ll say it again: Two-thirds of marketers say that time savings are the biggest advantage of generative AI in marketing. How much? Marketers report that they save over three hours for every piece of content that they produce with AI.

This frees up your time and capacity to do more and invest your time where it matters most, but it also helps your brand.

All marketers know that being first in a market is a major advantage.

Whether you’re spinning out social media campaigns based on pop culture moments or launching digital campaigns, the ability to pivot and launch campaigns in days or even hours is pure gold.

3. Better Customer Experience

Another advantage to using AI in marketing is that it can improve your relationship with your customers.

The more personalized your recommendations are and the deeper your relationships are, the more likely they’ll become repeat buyers.

AI can also identify customers at risk of churn and put them in an automated marketing campaign to get them to re-engage with your company.

4. Data-Based Marketing Decisions

AI can make scaling your business easier, using data to analyze, predict, and create marketing assets that sell. 

Artificial intelligence has become a game-changer in the digital marketing world. Its ability to automate tasks, analyze massive datasets, and deliver highly personalized experiences gives marketers the tools they need to optimize performance and achieve better results. From saving time and reducing costs to enhancing customer engagement and improving decision-making, the benefits of AI are both strategic and practical.

Cons of AI in Digital Marketing

While Artificial intelligence has transformed digital marketing by enhancing efficiency, personalization, and data analysis, it also comes with a set of challenges and limitations. From potential job displacement and loss of human touch to data privacy concerns and dependence on technology, AI is not without drawbacks. Understanding these limitations is crucial to using AI responsibly and balancing automation with creativity and human insight. Top Cons of AI in Digital Marketing:

1. Content Quality and Accuracy

While generative AI has come a long way, its content isn’t flawless. Factual errors are a particular issue: 47% of marketers say that generative AI has provided them with inaccurate information.

If you’re going to use AI to generate content without having a human edit it, you may see a drop in the quality. The success of AI is reliant on high-quality data that is accurate and timely.

Without a human editor, AI can produce content with factual inaccuracies, bias, or a divergent tone from your brand. Using AI requires human oversight, so these types of mistakes don’t happen.

2. Privacy

As marketing assets have become more personalized over the years, customers are beginning to value privacy more and more.

With AI, some of these techniques require using a customer’s cookies and previous internet behavior to predict future purchases.

If your marketing team downloads and uses AI software, you’ll need to be sure you comply with privacy laws, such as GDPR.

3. Copyright Concerns

As a new technology, the legal framework for AI is still being built. Generative AI tools are trained on public content from thousands of companies, so it’s possible they could generate content that’s a little too close to your competitor’s.

Copyright laws are written around human authorship, so it’s unclear if you own AI-generated content in the same way.

4. Evaluating non-quantifiable KPIs

It might be hard to get buy-in to invest in AI at your company because there are non-quantifiable KPIs at play.

Certain metrics will be easy to track, but others — like improving customer experience, increasing brand awareness, or improving reputation — will be much harder. That’s why it’s important to have the right measurement tools.

The platform lets you track KPIs across all your marketing channels under unified dashboards — from website traffic and page views to the number of leads generated through ad campaigns, and more.

While Artificial intelligence offers remarkable advantages in digital marketing, it is important to recognize and address its limitations. From the potential loss of human creativity and personalization to privacy concerns and high implementation costs, AI presents challenges that marketers cannot ignore.

How to Use AI in Digital Marketing

If you haven’t started deploying AI in your digital marketing strategies, this is your year. Now, 46% of marketers feel overwhelmed by the prospect of integrating AI tools into their daily process or workflow.

But the best way to eat an elephant, as Desmond Tutu once said, is one bite at a time.

1. Define your goals.

Before starting, determine what goal or objective you want to reach. Do you want to make your campaigns more effective? Do you want to save your team time or money?

Don’t skip this step — you can’t determine success without defining your goals and quantifiable KPIs.

2. Audit your infrastructure.

To start, put together a small team to analyze your current tools and infrastructure and find opportunities for adoption.

Write a report with all possible areas of implementation, potential outcomes, and what resources you would need to make it happen.

Assess the quality, quantity, and accessibility of your data to see how suitable it is for AI applications. Don’t forget to identify potential challenges or negative outcomes along with the positive.

You can’t throw out your marketing playbook and replace it with AI strategies overnight, so identify your top two to three areas where you want to test initially.

These don’t all have to be huge initiatives like overhauling your email marketing — small things can add up. For example, I love using AI tools for note-taking from meetings and transcribing interview recordings.

3. Audit staff capabilities.

Another area you should assess is whether your staff has the training and knowledge to implement these programs.

You’ll likely need to invest in training for your current staff, hire a consultant, or create a new position to drive forward your AI initiatives.

Case in point, 62% of marketing leaders say they’ve already considered hiring an employee specifically for AI, and 40% of those who haven’t say they plan to.

Your team likely already has some worries that they could lose their jobs to AI, so make sure to position this as an opportunity for your team to reskill, learn, and become better marketers.

4. Select the right AI marketing tools.

Once you’ve identified your goals and top areas for implementation, it’s time to build your toolbox. Your current tools may already offer an AI feature.

For example, if you are a customer on a platform, it also offers online chat with the built-in chat builder. You can set up AI chat programs that qualify, or pods and more through an uncoded interface. But it’s smart to look at all the options in the marketplace..

First, decide whether you’ll use an out-of-the-box AI solution versus a custom one. An example of an out-of-the-box AI solution would be Jasper, ChatGPT, or Google Bard.

A custom solution, which you can create with APIs for an open-source AI like Llama 2, can be a powerful solution for long-term success. You can connect and train AI on your proprietary data or train a GPT on your voice and style.

This approach takes additional expertise, so you’d need to work closely with a consultant or your IT department.

5. Test and analyze AI.

At last, it’s time to test the water. Take your top two to three areas of implementation and launch your programs. Set a timeframe and some target KPIs to watch so you can compare the results.

For instance, if you want to test AI-written and AI-placed social media ads, run a trial period of a month. Monitor and edit the content throughout the month and document the process.

Once you’re done, compare the performance of AI-generated, human-generated, and AI-assisted content to see how it did and create a plan moving forward.

6. Build a culture of innovation.

As I mentioned, getting your team on board is key with any new technology change. Ask your team for feedback, bring them along in the process, and assure them that AI is intended to make them better, not replace them.

Harnessing the power of AI in digital marketing isn’t just about staying up to date with the latest technology. It is about unlocking new levels of performance, personalization, and strategic insight. From automating campaigns and analyzing customer behavior to generating control and improving targeting, AI empowers marketers to work smarter and deliver better results.

What are AI marketing analytics for tracking?

AI-powered algorithms and machine learning techniques help marketers process and analyze datasets fast. Unlike traditional analysis, AI analytics can handle and sort larger datasets in real time. It can also identify complex patterns and correlations within the data, uncovering valuable connections and trends.

Marketers who use AI tools built directly into software platforms can track attribution modeling, performance insights, and customer insights.

• AI attribution modeling assigns credit to various marketing touchpoints that contribute to a desired outcome, providing insights into the effectiveness of different marketing channels and campaigns.
• AI performance insights provide comprehensive and actionable information on the effectiveness of your marketing strategies and campaigns.
• AI customer insights analyze customer data, predicting behaviors such as propensity to churn, propensity to buy, and suggesting next-best-action for personalized engagement and retention strategies.

The ability to process large datasets helps marketers make data-driven decisions that lead to optimization of strategies for improved performance and R.

Find out More: The Future of Marketing: How AI is Revolutionizing Content Creation and Strategy

How using AI in marketing can improve ROI

We know businesses can expand their audience size and reach with AI-driven insights and targeting capabilities. We also know how using AI in marketing can enhance conversion rates by delivering personalized content and product recommendations. The same is true for audience retargeting, in which AI nurtures relationships with tailored messaging.

On top of that, AI’s advanced reporting and analytics capabilities enable in-depth and real-time insights into campaign performance. As a result, you can make decisions based on better data. With the power to automate tasks and streamline processes, you can handle larger workloads without additional operational burden.

Automation frees up time for marketers to focus on innovation, such as:

• Immersive technologies like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR)
• Voice search optimization and voice-based marketing strategies
• Sustainable and ethical marketing practices
• Influencer marketing and the development of targeted content for niche audiences

When marketers have the time to focus on strategy, their business is more likely to find repeat business and increased ROI

Best practices for using AI in marketing

1. Ensuring the quality and accuracy of data

AI-driven solutions are only as strong as the quality of the data they are trained on. Regardless of how technically advanced a tool is, if it was trained on inaccurate and non-representative data, it is unable to generate high-quality and effective answers and decisions. To prepare for successful AI marketing initiatives, many businesses take the time to standardize and clean their datasets to help ensure accuracy and efficiency. 

2. Investing in robust data infrastructure

The efficacy of AI is reliant on moving data seamlessly across systems. To maximize these tools’ efficacy, businesses typically try to ensure data integration across all platforms and systems, including CRM software, website analytics, and sales platforms. Implementing robust data pipelines and cloud-based infrastructure allows for real-time data processing, enabling AI to deliver accurate insights and personalized customer experiences. 

3. Training AI on the right data

Just like humans, AI requires significant training to learn a new task. For example, if a business needs an AI solution that engagingly talks to its customers, it needs to invest the time and resources necessary to teach it. To build an application like this, marketing departments often need a large amount of data about customers’ preferences and potentially, data scientists who specialize in this field. Increasingly, leading businesses are designing purpose-built AI tools that are trained on task-specific or company-specific datasets, increasing the technology’s efficacy. 

4. Practicing good data governance

Because AI is trained in personal customer information, the laws surrounding what is usable must be strictly followed. Companies that deploy AI for marketing purposes are responsible for adhering to consumer data regulations or risk incurring heavy fines and reputational damage. Practicing good data governance and providing transparent explanations of how AI is built and deployed facilitates consumer trust. 

5. Continuously monitoring and optimizing AI tools.

Before successfully implementing AI integration, marketing leaders and stakeholders across an organization typically set well-defined goals. This provides a systematic process through which to evaluate an AI tool. Following deployment, these technologies must be continuously monitored to help ensure that they’re meeting benchmarks. 

6. Upskilling marketing employees

Integrating AI can change the fundamental nature of an employee’s job. Laying out training programs and change management systems can help ease the transition toward AI and help ensure that marketing departments get the most out of the technology. It will also help them know which tasks must be done by a human rather than a machine.

Artificial intelligence is no longer a luxury in marketing is the engine driving smarter strategies, sharper insights, and unforgettable customer experiences. But using AI effectively isn’t just about the tools. It’s about the mindset, the strategy, and the leaders behind the scenes. If you are ready to level up your marketing game to build data-driven campaigns, personalize at scale, and make confident, creative decisions-then Marketing Chiefs is where you belong. Join the minds that are shaping the future of marketing. At Marketing Chiefs, AI isn’t just a tool, it is your competitive edge.

Ready to load the change? Join Marketing Chiefs today and turn your marketing vision into reality.