We recently listened to an interesting Social Pros podcast featuring Paul Roetzer, Founder & CEO of the Marketing AI Institute. Paul’s organization is “a media, event, and online education company making AI approachable and accessible to marketing and business leaders around the world.”
In this podcast Paul shared his perspectives on how artificial intelligence (AI) can impact social media marketers. First, Paul discussed how even though AI is very much here and now, we have barely scratched the surface of what AI can do for us. Paul shared that he sees AI as transformational, yet many leaders are missing the opportunity to bring smarter technology to the mix in their companies. This is mainly due to fear, mistrust, a lack of strategy, lack of awareness, and for most (70%), a lack of education and training.
Still, AI is forecasted to have trillions of dollars of impact on business and economy. What does it take for some marketers to shift their mindset and overcome their AI resistance? According to Paul, it’s the realization that AI is simply smarter technology with which you must experiment. For social media marketers, Paul gave a great example of using an AI tool, Lately, to help you generate social media content. We’re excited to explore this platform further.
Repetitive marketing tasks might be the perfect opportunities for AI. The Marketing AI Institute has a free tool on their website that helps you determine potential use cases for AI in your business and in your marketing strategies. Paul gave examples of how AI helps you be smarter about your marketing. For instance, instead of following general guidelines about the best time to post social content, AI tools can help you determine the best time to post based on the behavior of your own followers. This can change based upon how your followers’ click patterns change.
Without AI, we are guessing or following generalized advice. With AI, we are making decisions based on distinctly relevant information. For large companies, AI can be very helpful to social media marketers for brand monitoring and customer sentiment monitoring. AI can also help content strategist with republishing and repurposing strategies.
Another use case for AI in marketing is next-level personalization. Paul highlighted Netflix and how they use AI to analyze data points to gather intel on what we want to watch and consume. According to Paul, marketers are only in the beginning stages of putting that power to work in understanding behavior and predicting journeys. Personalization at scale cannot happen without AI.
Finally, Paul had encouraging words for those of us – regardless of age – who are ready to become “next gen marketers.” Paul defines a Next Gen Marketer as someone who embraces accelerated change and seeks technology that help us work smarter, work better, and technology that helps us become more efficient in our jobs. Next Gen Marketers embrace the technologies that give us the ability to be more creative, drive personalization, advance our careers, and build our businesses faster.
This was a thought-provoking podcast. AI will be a big part of our social conversations and marketing strategies moving forward. The more comfortable we get with AI and the more we explore how it can improve our work, the more we can talk about how AI can be used in the right ways for the improvement of our business. For more information, please visit the Marketing AI Institute online or check our Paul’s book, Marketing Artificial Intelligence.
