Is AI the Future of Marketing?

I am STOKED for you to meet today’s guest, Meghan Keaney Anderson.

Formerly the CMO at The Wanderlust Group and VP at HubSpot, Meghan has been at the intersection of Marketing and tech since day 1.

Now, Head of Marketing at Jasper, an AI content platform, Meghan is here to reassure all of us that we will not be replaced by Ai. Oh – and she is spilling all her tips on how YOU can leverage AI as a Marketer.

Here’s what she had to say on The Marketing Millennials Podcast, in her own liiiightly edited words.

1. How Marketers should use AI:

There are two extremes people rush into when talking about AI. One, they’re terrified of it because they feel like it might replace them.

Or they’re hype machines about it and feel like it’s the next best thing to magic.

The reality is much closer to the practical middle. 

AI is great for marketers to help accelerate portions of their work, but it should never be a one for one replacement for a writer or content creator (YES). 

It’s not good enough today, but even if it gets exponentially better, it’s still absent in its creative judgment, lived experience, and strategy.

Writing is putting words down on a page, so there will always be a partnership between creators, marketers, and AI.

Don’t use AI as a set it and forget it content creator. AI content needs editors, and original ideation. 

Without editors, you end up with a beautifully written post that has no substance behind it (and substance is everything). 

Google has come out and vocalized that they don’t mind if you create content with or without AI, but they do mind if your content is shallow and written in high volume.

It’s really important that writers play an active role in shaping the content they’re putting out, even as they’re leaning on AI to accelerate parts of it.

2. How AI is changing the way Marketers work:

It’s important to first understand the pain that AI is addressing.

Everyone has stared at a blinking cursor on a blank page. Everyone has gotten 90% through their blog posts and not known how to finish it (the story of my life – LOL).

When you look at marketers, the amount of content demands on them are unsustainable. They grow every year. 

It’s no longer enough to just have a blog, you need a newsletter, podcast, and a TikTok presence. You need to be able to react at the drop of a hat to a plethora of content demands. 

Teams are breaking as a result of it, people are getting burnt out, they’re leaving the industry. 

AI is a really useful tool for those teams to accelerate the hardest part of that content creation process and help them untap the ideas they have sitting in their heads.

AI is here to take writers off the content treadmill and put them into the editor’s seat, making them the strategist and holder of quality (ok I LOVE this).

This gives Marketers more room for original research and interviews.  

A parallel that I would draw is the digital camera for photographers.

Prior to the digital camera, photographers were doing everything manually. They were checking the aperture, making a bunch of tiny decisions to get the right shot.

The digital camera made that process faster for photographers, but it still took the eye of a photographer to decide what they wanted to editorially show and make a great piece of photography. 

It’s the same thing with AI. We’re in a hype cycle right now that we forget that this is just a tool and we need to put it in its right place.

3. Optimizing your use of AI:

It’s practice, it’s learning, it’s experimentation.

It’s giving a prompt and seeing what you get back, trying a different angle and learning what’s better. 

Jasper.ai has a template within it that’s a prompt generator, so you can put a prompt in that isn’t working for you and the template will make that prompt better so that you get more substance out of the response. 

But at the end of the day, keep carrying on the tool metaphor. Learn how to operate AI, so getting in there and trying things out is the best way to do that.

4. Most relevant use cases for AI in Marketing:

The biggest use case is to write long form content. 

Let’s say you have 3 blog posts to write today. You need help getting started, improving some of the content, and repackaging that content into different formats and tones. 

AI can supplement your creative process for writing blogs or emails.

A close second is for social captions or ad copy where Marketers want to create a bunch of variations to see what will generate the greatest number of clicks.

One of the coolest uses that I’ve seen is when people take a piece of content that they’ve written and leverage AI to repackage that into a bunch of different formats. 

(If you’re a one-person team marketer this can be a game changer.)

If you’ve written a blog post you’re proud of and want it to get read, you need a promotion plan. 

Using AI, take that blog post, turn it into a 15 tweet thread or a LinkedIn post. This will give more value out of that core piece of content that you’ve poured my heart into.

5. What your company needs to know before diving into AI:

You have to know what you stand for as a company, to know what you’re fighting for. You need a religious commitment to the problem you’re solving in the world.

Don’t get distracted by the millions of other things that people are talking about outside of you (focus on YOU).

Stay focused on the pain that you are trying to address, using it as a foundation from a messaging standpoint. 

It’s essential for having any sort of brand recognition around your company as a differentiated entity.

6. Quick masterclass in messaging:

On shared common spaces like a homepage, you need to create a hierarchy. 

You have to prioritize one audience and support the other. 

But make it really clear for your biggest audience, the best fit for your product, that you’re there for them.

On the homepage in particular, speak to your main target first and then build secondary messages for the others within channels.

You can get really personalized.

A lot of people don’t discover companies through their homepage, they discover them through landing pages or blog posts that they found when searching for their particular pain point.

In addition to your homepage, you need to build pain point pages around copywriting, SEO, and ad test variations.

But for your homepage, you have to pick one audience. 

Leverage that you’re not always going to know who’s coming to your home page, so you need to have a default that should be the audience you’ve prioritized as the best fit for your product.