Article's Content
Article's Content
Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a significant player in the marketing world.
Its applications range from predicting consumer behaviour to optimizing ad spend, and its influence is reshaping how businesses connect with their audiences.
This shift towards AI-driven marketing is more than just a trend; it represents a fundamental change in marketing strategies, offering new levels of efficiency, precision, and personalization.
So, how should marketing agencies respond to AI?
The best will respond with swift adoption and education.
As AI technology advances, it is transforming the way agencies support their clients, the way they structure their teams, and even the ways in which they operate. Traditional tasks, which often relied on a lot of manual work, can now be automated using AI, allowing agencies to focus on the activities that are more likely to serve them and their clientele.
As the founder of a content marketing agency, I know firsthand the impact that AI is having. Since the launch of ChatGPT, AI has been a part of the daily dialogue within our organization. Our clients have been asking questions about the role of AI and looking to us for guidance on how we can use it to serve them better and also recommendations around the tools they should use to get better results for their businesses.
In this blog post, we’ll explore how AI is reshaping the way agencies service their customers and some of the technologies and tactics we’re using to help our partners at Foundation.
Let’s get into it.
How Agencies Can Use AI
Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI, famously stated when talking about the future of AI and marketing: “It will mean that 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly, and at almost no cost be handled by the AI”.
Here’s what I think: AI isn’t going to replace marketing agencies. But marketing agencies that use AI will replace those that are resistant to embracing it.
Why?
Because it’s through massive efficiency gains that the agencies that leverage AI will be able to allocate more time and brainpower to the decisions that require human thought.
It’s through AI-related efficiency gains that agencies are going to be able to prioritize strategy, creativity, and insight gathering that leads to stories that shape culture and make an impact.
We’re one of the top B2B SaaS agencies in the world, and we use AI across every element of our business. We’re big believers in the idea that AI is an augmentation tool for marketers and should be incorporated into the mix as much as possible without diluting the final outcome.
In an episode of Create Like The Greats, I interviewed a series of marketers to discuss the role of AI in marketing and how it can influence the way we do our work on a daily basis. One of the overarching ideas that came from these interviews was simple:
Marketers who embrace artificial intelligence can do more in one hour than a marketer who relies exclusively on their own brain power.
Here’s the thing about AI and marketing agencies: It’s not replacing every element of our business, but it’s become a fundamental part of our day-to-day, allowing us to be efficient and effective and prioritize high-value tasks for our partners.
We recently held a survey amongst over 200+ marketers, asking them for their perspective on the role of AI in marketing. In this survey, we learned some key things about the tasks they think will be automated and what the impact will be on the marketing function at large. One of the most interesting pieces that came from the study was the confidence of the respondents. More than 50% were very or extremely confident that AI wouldn’t be able to replace them:
The data also showed what tasks marketers believed were most likely to be replaced by AI.
We used this data to map the tasks that marketing agencies do regularly that we believe will be the most difficult to replace by AI:
At the top of the list are things that are less routine and repetitive, while the items at the bottom, which are likely to be disrupted, are more routine efforts.
In this piece, we will dive deep into how AI plays a role across this full spectrum and the ways in which agencies can find opportunities.
Let’s start at the top.
AI and Account Management
The best account managers at an agency have deep relationships with their clients and a deep understanding of a brand’s ecosystem at large. The knowledge that an account manager has surrounding a client’s business doesn’t come from public information — it comes from deep conversations, strategy sessions, planning and collaborations with both the client and their stakeholders on a regular basis.
The biggest impact that AI will have on account managers is in their ability to be more efficient and effective than they were in the past. AI tools are able to support account managers in writing emails faster and more efficiently, creating reports in a fraction of the time it used to take, and managing budgets with a more accurate understanding of variables and influences.
If an agency runs on Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), then the opportunity to use the Google Workspace Marketplace and leverage AI-related plugins is huge. The library of AI plugins is significant, and these tools can give account managers the ability to do things that were once impossible to do manually.
My favourite plugins for account managers are those that bring GPTs directly into Sheets:
Why is this valuable?
You can leverage a GPT to conduct qualitative or quantitative thinking and analysis on your behalf for simple things if you provide it with the key logic.
AI and Marketing Strategy
The strategy process in marketing agencies involves the development of comprehensive plans designed to achieve specific business objectives for clients.
This process includes market analysis, setting goals, determining the best tactics, studying customer data, potentially interviewing customers, and then supporting the development of execution plans. AI is increasingly becoming a pivotal component of this process, but is unlikely to replace the entire strategy offering that agencies can provide their clients.
We believe that AI can support you in getting a direction for your strategy, but it’s not at the point where you should trust everything it says to be the right approach. For example, I asked ChatGPT to develop a PPC for a water bottle company targeting basketball players:
In many cases, the overall high-level perspective that ChatGPT can provide you with on strategy might be directionally okay. But it’s in the fine details where agencies will still need to know the specific channels, customers, and products to deliver a strategy that isn’t generic and cookie cutter. The majority of the responses from ChatGPT will be very high level unless you have a deep understanding of prompt engineering. Check out this episode of Create Like The Greats where we dive into 30+ ChatGPT prompts that marketers should steal.
AI and Research
One of the most important parts of the strategy process is conducting market research.
The ability to understand exactly what type of information you need from a qualitative and quantitative lens is not something that AI will be able to replicate. It’s only through a deep understanding of the market and your brand goals, plus the ability to connect insight from data and use all of this to strategically make recommendations, that you can truly unlock strategic value.
All that said, one thing that AI can do really well is support you on your quest to identify answers and gain insight into certain things. You can ask ChatGPT to brainstorm or even support you in the direction you should take to find answers online.
But be careful.
I recently ran an analysis of 20 keywords that an SEO researcher working in the CRM space might target. I asked ChatGPT to give me their search volume, and I also used a well-known SEO tool to give me search volume estimates. The difference between the two was significant:
Let this be the sign you need to let your clients know that trusting ChatGPT for data retrieval could open them up to a huge mistake.
AI and Creativity
One of the most at-risk parts of the agency model is the production of creative assets. The creation of graphics, photographs, mock-ups, designs, and logos are all at risk due to AI. The thing that is a saving grace for creative agencies and marketing teams that develop creative assets is the fact that AI cannot replicate human taste. It’s on the creative using the AI to understand the nuances of their customers and audience to develop things that will move them.
AI tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are making it very easy to create visuals and images from nothing. It’s a fascinating time to be a marketer, and graphic designers are all starting to see the impact that generative AI is having on their roles and the industry at large.
Content creation is also being quickly replaced by AI tools. Tools like Hubspot’s Free AI Blog Writer allow marketers to generate blog posts in seconds, reduce their research time, and create content more frequently without hiring extra resources. It’s not to say that content is no longer valuable, but I believe that the future of content creation as an agency is going to look a lot different than it has for the past 10 years.
At Foundation, we’re embracing a model where AI is utilized to support the development of a brief and framework, but we leverage human writers, subject matter experts and editors to get it across the finish line. It’s our belief that amidst the rise of AI Overviews in Google, it’s becoming more important than ever for brands to create high-value content vs. mediocre content.
AI and Public Relations
Relationships are very difficult for AI to replace, but outreach is something that AI can support at scale very well. AI tools have the ability to help PR professionals conduct mass outreach with a level of personalization that wasn’t possible before. A PR team can use AI to create a series of emails communicating a story to an email list of journalists and use automation to follow up with an email script that is 100% generated by artificial intelligence.
AI and Data, Analytics, and Tech
The most significant changes in marketing will be on the technical side. According to Scott Guthrie of Microsoft, 40% of the code found in GitHub Copilot is AI generated. This means more and more developers are using AI to support their projects. The rise of AI tools is making it easier for non-technical people to create and develop projects as well.
But it doesn’t end there.
AI Analytics presents marketers with an opportunity to gather insight from data faster than ever before. The agencies that will have an advantage are those that use AI to support them in doing tasks that aren’t as high value as others. As an example, in Hubspot, agencies can now use AI to create reports based on their own data with just one click:
This type of task used to take 20–30 minutes to complete. It can now be done in a fraction of the time and deliver value to the entire organization as it relates to information gain.
The person who gathers the report can now spend more time doing higher value tasks instead of trying to figure out how to develop, source, and find a report on sales metrics. One of the tasks that might be a bit more high value is working with a spreadsheet to understand the ROI of a project or a certain marketing channel. AI now provides marketers with the ability to have every spreadsheet function at their fingertips in the matter of seconds.
These are the efficiency gains that marketers and agency owners dreamed about.
The Future of AI and Agencies
The future is going to look very augmented.
The best marketing agencies are going to realize that there’s power in embracing AI to augment their teammates and day-to-day work. The most profitable agencies will realize how AI can be used to be more efficient and effective. The agencies that serve their clients the best are going to be able to use AI to be faster with comms, more strategic with decisions, and more creative with their outputs.
Summed up:
The future of a great marketing agency is one that is part human and part AI. The possibilities of these technologies are endless. The opportunity is huge. The potential is massive. It’s a great time to be an agency and an even better time to be the client of those embracing AI.
