AI marketing is gaining popularity across industries. And when you use it correctly, AI can reduce your workload and increase your output.
This guide to AI for marketers explores different ways teams can use AI to improve productivity and achieve their goals. We’ll also discuss some of the best AI tools to help with different tasks.
What Is AI Marketing?
AI marketing uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate and optimize marketing tasks across different channels.
For example, a social media team might use AI to create posts or draft image captions:
And an SEO team could use AI to analyze written content and provide recommendations to help it rank higher:
Benefits of Using AI for Marketing
AI gives digital marketers extra “hands” to:
- Improve efficiency: AI can automate repetitive tasks and free up your time for more complex ones
- Make data-driven decisions: AI tools can analyze large amounts of data that teams can use to make informed decisions
- Scale: AI helps teams scale their marketing efforts without needing a big budget
- Stay competitive: AI can allow businesses of all sizes to stay competitive, even those with smaller budgets and teams
- Improve customer experience: AI tools like chatbots can provide fast and personalized responses to customers, helping them solve minor issues on the spot. Support teams can then focus their energy on more complex issues.
- Make faster decisions: AI can quickly process large amounts of data that teams can use to draw meaningful conclusions and adapt strategies as needed
12 Ways to Use AI in Marketing
Below are 12 ways to use AI for marketing, along with examples of AI marketing software to get the job done.
1. Write Optimized Blog Posts
Search engine optimization (SEO) involves using strategies to help you rank higher in search engines like Google. And one way to potentially rank higher is by writing optimized blog posts.
But this takes a lot of time and resources. Making it a prime use case for artificial intelligence.
AI tools like ContentShake AI help teams find keywords, write, and optimize blog content. So it has a chance of ranking high, even without deep SEO expertise.
Here’s how to do it:
Open ContentShake AI and enter a few words to describe your business. Then click “Continue.”
The tool will come up with different blog post ideas for you. It also gives you information for each article. Like its intent (the reason someone searches that keyword). And the topic’s “Efficiency.” Which is based on the topic’s search volume and ranking difficulty.
After choosing a topic, click “Generate article.”
Customize the information on the next page. Such as the audience’s location, article title, and word count.
Click “Show advanced settings” to adjust the article’s tone and readability level. When you’re ready, click “Create article.”
The tool will spend several minutes drafting an article for you. And it’ll give you a score. Improve the score—which might help it rank higher—by clicking “Go to editor.”
Along the right-hand side menu click “Improvements.” Here, you’ll see what you can improve in terms of SEO, readability, and tone.
Go through and apply each improvement to give your article the best chance of ranking high. This is also where you can add your own expertise and experience, and double check the content for accuracy before publishing.
Publish your article directly within the tool by clicking “Publish” and then connecting your site to WordPress. Or send it to Google Docs or share it with your team.
Further reading: Discover even more ways to incorporate AI in content marketing.
2. Generate Marketing Strategies
Marketers can use AI to automatically draft up strategies that strengthen their marketing funnels.
For example, say your team excels at driving awareness. But you struggle with converting readers into customers.
The AI Marketing Strategy app will develop funnel-specific strategies you can use to improve specific areas of your funnel. (The app also develops full funnel strategies for teams that don’t have marketing funnels in place, too.)
Here’s how:
After installing the app, follow the onboarding process. It’ll ask you questions about your business, audience, and goals to develop the most accurate marketing plan possible.
After you finish the onboarding process, the app will suggest a marketing funnel with tactics for each stage.
Pay attention to the area of the funnel you’d like to optimize. Click the “+” button to get the AI to come up with even more tactics for that specific stage. Then, click a specific tactic to open it for more info.
Each tactic has guiding tips so your team knows what they need to do.
For example, the tactic below has AI prompts to help you quickly complete each activity.
The app also has a graphics generator, content generator, and an integration to ChatGPT. So you can strategize and create content in one central place.
3. Solve Customer Issues
According to research by Forrester, customers are 2.4x more likely to stay when companies solve their problems quickly.
And teams can use AI to offer an immediate response for basic questions. Which lets users resolve issues faster.
Plus, it frees up support agents for situations where bots can’t help.
Here’s an example of the Semrush chatbot answering a question and guiding the user to the most suitable tools:
Tools like Sendbird offer AI support chatbots that you can customize and add to your site.
AI support systems can also act as search engines for agents.
For example, Guru is a tool that combines data from places like your knowledge base and company intranet to help agents find the resources they need to solve customer issues faster.
4. Analyze Web Analytics
Web analytics (from places like Google Analytics) provide marketing teams with useful insights. So they know what they’re doing right and which areas may need more attention.
Some AI tools can automatically review your analytics and give you detailed recommendations. Letting you spend less time crunching numbers and more time executing big ideas.
For example, your team may want to analyze a low-converting landing page to understand why it doesn’t drive sales. Doing this for one page might be manageable.
But at scale? That’s where AI can help.
One tool that takes your web analytics and extracts meaningful insights is AI Narratives for GA4.
The app uses artificial intelligence to analyze metrics from Google Analytics and give you easy-to-digest, personalized summaries of your data. Along with recommendations to help you make the most of each summary.
To get started, open the app and follow the prompts to connect your site’s GA4 account. After connecting your account, the app will ask you for your objectives and priorities.
After finalizing the setup, the app will start generating useful narratives that you can use to prioritize tasks and inform your strategy.
For example, this data can alert you to any unusual changes in your site’s performance, like a sudden drop in average session time. This way, you can quickly investigate affected pages, identify the cause, and resolve issues before they become big problems.
5. Repurpose Your Content
Repurposing content is when you reuse and adapt content for other platforms. This process can save you time while boosting the potential reach of each piece of content.
You can repurpose almost any piece of content, like turning:
- Long-form videos into shorter TikToks, Reels, and Shorts
- Complex guides into shareable infographics
- Blog posts into YouTube videos
An AI tool that helps you turn text-based content into videos is the AI Video Marketing Automator.
Try it by opening the app and clicking “URL to Video.”
Fill out the prompt by adding a link to your blog post and setting your video’s criteria. Then click “Create video.”
The tool will take a few moments to draft your video. Once it’s complete, adjust the video by changing elements like the voice, content, media, and more.
6. Create Ad Copy and Creatives
AI can help you draft up more ads in less time. So you can test different ads and find winning angles faster.
And with AdCreative.ai, you can automatically create ad text and creatives. It’s integrated with AdLLM Spark—a tool that outperforms other generative AIs, like ChatGPT—to create conversion-worthy ads in minutes.
Open the app and set up your brand. (If you get stuck, follow these instructions.)
Then click “Create a Project” and select what you’d like to create. Let’s select “Ad Texts” for this example.
Add your website on the next page and the app will auto-populate the fields. Adjust them if necessary and click “Generate Texts.”
The app will create ad copy, and in the next steps, you can tweak the copy and upload your own media.
Finally, AdCreative.ai will give you ads with conversion scores. These scores let you easily identify the ones most most likely to perform well. So you can feel confident that your ad budget will be well spent.
Further reading: Discover more ways to use AI for copywriting and AI for advertising.
7. Write Social Media Content
AI tools make it easier to create content so you can scale your efforts and stay active across all the platforms your audience uses.
One such tool is the AI Social Content Generator app. It uses AI to create content tailored to your brand.
Simply open the app, enter your website, and click “Proceed.”
Go through the prompts for the “Business Details” page and the “Brand Details” page. (The tool will auto-populate these pages for you. Leave the details as is, or adjust if necessary.)
When you’re done, you’ll land on a custom content library page with different types of posts created by the AI.
You can also create new content from existing assets (like blog posts or ecommerce products). Letting you instantly repurpose content and expand its reach across a variety of different platforms.
Finally, publish or schedule each post and keep track of everything with the “Content Calendar” tab.
Further reading: See other ways you can use AI for social media.
8. Analyze Competitor Strategies
Monitoring competitors helps you stay one step ahead of them. And lets you understand what works for them (so you can do it better). Or what’s not working (so you can avoid it).
Keep tabs on the competition by reviewing their marketing activities with the AI Social Content Generator.
Head into the app and click “Competitor Analysis,” enter your competitors’ social profiles, and click “Done.”
You’ll get a report for each competitor that includes:
- Topics and post types with the highest engagement
- Their best hashtags
- Popular content themes
And more.
Identify which content themes generate the highest engagement. Then use the AI Social Content Generator to create content based on those themes.
9. Perform Market Research
Market research—the process of gathering information on your target market—is the foundation of many marketing activities.
It helps you build customer profiles, which are detailed descriptions of your ideal buyer. These can help you understand how to sell your products to your audience more easily.
Some types of market research (like interviews) are best done yourself. In these situations, you’ll want to speak to people and come up with questions on the fly as you listen to their experiences.
But you can lean on AI to help with other types of market research and learn more about your target audience.
Semrush’s Market Explorer is a market research tool that uses AI to collect, clean, and process data for you. So that you can skip the tedious steps of market research and immediately use the data to inform your strategy.
To get started, open the tool, enter up to three competitors, and click “Create and analyze.”
You’ll get a report with information on your audience. Like market size and traffic.
Click through the different tabs along the top for more detailed breakdowns. Like audience demographics and their interests.
Use this information to learn more about your ideal customers. And build campaigns tailored to their preferences.
10. Find Influencers to Partner with
Influencer marketing is when brands work with notable people in their niche to promote their brand or products. But manually finding and reviewing influencers to work with can be tedious.
To find influencers faster, try the Influencer Analytics app. Open the app. Click “Influencer Discovery,” select a platform, then click “Use AI-powered search.”
Describe who you want to work with and click “Create magic.”
The tool will find influencers relevant to your request. You can review their stats, including an estimated price. So you know which ones fit within your budget. Then, save the ones you want to work with to a list for future reference.
11. Write Your Marketing Emails
Email marketing involves sending emails to promote your business to people who subscribe to your email list. Think customers, users, or prospects.
There are different types of emails you might send to subscribers. For example, if you sell software, someone might sign up for a free trial. And you might send a follow-up email to remind them when their trial ends. And nudge them towards a paid plan.
Another popular email is a welcome email (an email used to build rapport with new subscribers).
A tool like the AI Writing Assistant can draft different types of emails for your email marketing campaigns.
First, open the tool, click “All Tools” and search for “email.” We’ll show you how to write a welcome email, so we’ll select “Welcome Email.”
Fill out the prompt and click “Generate.”
The next page contains the AI-generated email. Check each email for plagiarism, copy it (to paste into your email marketing tool), or save it.
12. Perform Link Building Outreach
Link building is an SEO strategy where you try to get other websites to link to yours. Backlinks from relevant, reputable websites can help you rank higher in search results. And while link building can be rewarding, it’s also time-consuming.
But AI can make link building easier.
Mentioned - Outreach Wizard is an app that automatically scans your blog posts and identifies people or brands you’ve mentioned. Then, the app finds their contact information so you can email them to ask for backlinks or social shares.
The idea is that, if you’re mentioning them in your post, they might be happy to share it with their audience. Either on social media or, ideally, in their own blog posts with a backlink.
To get started, open the app and enter a URL (like a blog post) that contains mentions. Then click “Scan.”
Select the contacts you’d like to email and click “Send an email.”
The app will open your email service provider with a drafted email with each contact as a Bcc recipient. Edit your email and send it when you’re done.
This lets you send more outreach emails faster. Boosting your chances of getting backlinks.
Further reading: There’s more to backlink building than just outreach. Read our link building guide to learn the best practices.
How to Build a Strong AI Marketing Strategy
Now that you know how AI helps marketers, it’s time to pull it all together with your own strategy.
Here’s how:
Choose Your Areas of Focus
Determine which areas AI will make the biggest impact on your business. Here are some ideas:
- Identify where competitors excel: If your competitors are consistently posting on social media while you struggle to keep up, consider integrating AI into your social media marketing strategy to automate content creation and scheduling
- Assess budget gaps: AI can step in to handle roles you can’t currently afford to fill (such as drafting blog articles or social media posts)
- Delegate repetitive tasks: Let AI take over time-consuming tasks like data analysis or basic customer support, freeing up your team to focus on bigger-picture initiatives
Pick the Right AI Marketing Tools
The AI tools you use depend on the tasks you need help with.
Use a tool suite like Semrush so that you don’t need to jump back and forth between different software. Letting you build a streamlined tech stack.
This makes it easy for you (and your team members) to access the tools they need for different tasks.
You’ll be able to try lots of great tools for free by checking out the AI app collection in the App Center.
Plus, a free Semrush account lets you combine these apps with powerful tools for other areas of your marketing. From keyword research and competitor analysis to link building and PPC campaigns.
Set KPIs and Measure Performance
Setting key performance indicators (KPIs)—metrics that help you understand if you’re reaching your goals—lets you measure the impact of your AI marketing workflows. So you can track progress and see where it’s working and where its impact is lower than expected.
The metrics you track and the KPIs you set depend on your business, goals, and your marketing channels.
For example, if you decide to use AI to create content for social media, you can use a tool like Semrush’s Social Analytics to monitor and track performance through metrics like engagement and shares.
Implement, Test, and Iterate
Regularly review your KPIs and gather feedback from your team to understand what's working and what needs improvement.
AI won’t manage to do every marketing task perfectly.
For example, you might want to review AI tasks that miss your KPIs. As these tasks might be better suited to humans carrying them out.
This iterative approach helps you refine your strategy to achieve better results over time.
Leverage AI in Your Marketing Strategy
Whether you're a large or small business, using AI for marketing can help you scale and reach your goals faster.
And Semrush has a range of AI tools for marketing that’ll make the process easier.
Want to see for yourself? Try Semrush for free today.