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Ever since Open AI released its first public version of ChatGPT in late 2022, marketer enthusiasm for generative AI and its potential applications across industries exploded and has only continued to dominate the conversation around the (often virtual) watercooler.

While many have written lists of potential applications, innovations, & use cases for marketing, I wanted to contextualize the landscape and trends to map them back to how marketers work to deliver results for their brands.

What follows is my attempt to highlight what is driving real utility for marketers today and what is on the horizon they should consider in their strategy for the future.

Discovery & Research

At the beginning of every marketing campaign is the critical work to uncover the customer insights that drive the big idea. Historically, this was achieved through qualitative (interviews, panels, and open-field survey responses) and quantitative (multiple-choice questionnaires) means. Alongside this brand-led research, companies like Yelp, Trustpilot, and marketplaces like Amazon, the Apple App Store, and the Google Play Store capture millions of unfiltered customer reviews.

As this open-field text feedback continues to proliferate, it has become an increasing challenge to sift through it all and make any sense of it (the best some could do were basic word cloud exercises) — until now.

Opportunity: Use a large language model like ChatGPT to mine your customer feedback for insights

Whether asking the tool to review publicly available data or uploading your internal customer verbatim response data, ask the platform to generate insights from that customer feedback, such as:

• What do your customers love and hate most about your product or service?
• What problem are they trying to solve?
• What recommendations do they have to improve your offerings?

Using these tools to synthesize your customer feedback can be incredibly powerful in triggering new ideas and ways to reposition your brand offering in the most compelling way possible.

Briefing The Team

Once you’ve gathered your customer insights, it is now time to prepare your strategic plan, brief your team, and kick off your next campaign. At this stage, some struggle with how to structure their project document to ensure it addresses all the key elements your stakeholders need to do their best work and hit the goals of the campaign. Thanks to AI, no longer do team members need to stare at a blank Google or Word document while figuring out where to start.

Opportunity: Use embedded tools in word processing platforms like Google Docs’ Gemini, Chrome extensions like the ones Reforge or Grammarly offer, and custom GPTs to accelerate the planning process

Google’s new “Help Me Write” feature and Reforge’s recently launched Chrome extension, for example, can help generate templates for your team for project briefs and planning exercises. Beyond the initial templates, these and other tools can review your work and provide instant feedback, suggestions, and ways to improve your writing for clarity. For less experienced team members, these tools can quickly raise the bar for their initial draft proposals and planning documents when time with their managers may be limited. There are even tailored GPTs now that can provide tailored growth product and marketing feedback directly that you can chat with to refine your thinking as you build your plan.

Developing Creative

Now that you’ve done the customer research and kicked off the project with your marketing team, it’s time to bring the ideas to life! More than ever, speed to market and a consistent, rapid creative pipeline of digital assets are critical to building and maintaining momentum for your brand. One essential pillar for many brands’ creative strategy is user-generated content and testimonial ads through paid social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Google Shorts. Here, creative fatigue can happen far more rapidly than advertisers may be used to with legacy channels like linear television. So, how does a brand with resource-constrained marketing teams keep up?

Opportunity: Enable non-technical team members to generate and edit video creative

Whether workshopping ideas or developing final ad copy, AI-based tools have been proliferating to speed up different steps of the ad development process.

• Some solutions, like Uplifted.ai, enable the immediate capture of customer testimonial assets and transforms them into ads instantly, inclusive of polished edits of the footage alongside product imagery.
• Others, like descript.com, allow marketers to edit video creative as easily as a Google or Microsoft Word doc, no longer requiring skills in video editing software to cut out or rearrange lines in a video creative.
• Beyond these novel emerging tools, ad platforms Google and others continue experimenting with embedded features to achieve similar goals. Google for example now has functionality within Youtube and Performance Max campaigns to natively generate and edit video and display assets.
• Even if you don’t feel ready to test these tools, you can use LLMs to quickly help with script and copy ideation to start.

While you shouldn’t expect perfection, these tools can rapidly accelerate the speed of concept development and ad generation.

Serving the Ads & Optimizing the Campaigns

With creative in hand, you now need to get your message in the market. The digital ad platforms you’ll be running on are constantly working to improve their targeting capabilities to help you drive performance at scale and automate as much of the execution as possible. However, the downside of this effort is that as they try to make it easier on marketers, they’ve built effective black boxes that brands cannot peer into, understand, or improve upon based on their business context. You are effectively left to trust that the advertising oligarchy is delivering the best possible performance for you, allowing them to spend some of your budget on low-quality inventory and audiences. Here, instead of highlighting a new trend, I want to issue a word of caution.

Opportunity: As you scale spend in your campaigns, segment them by intent-based customer cohorts.

As these platforms move towards all-in-one offerings like Google’s Performance Max or Meta’s and programmatic’s broad targeting algorithms, you must remember they are optimizing for their revenue maximization — not your incremental customer acquisition maximization. As a result, their platforms inherently have an embedded conflict of interest. They are not incentivized away from potentially high-cannibalization activities like branded search bidding or site retargeting advertisements. Nor are they motivated to ruthlessly cut low-quality (or even unviewable) ad inventory. As a result, as you begin to spend more, it is imperative to consider structuring your campaigns to manage your spend, reach, and campaign outcomes accordingly - from pure prospecting to retargeting and beyond.

Maximizing Customer LTV

Now that you’ve acquired the customers, it is time to maximize their revenue potential by boosting product adoption, repeat purchase habits, upgrades, and reducing churn. Historically, the marketing arm of this strategy has been executed by a robust manual set of structured CDP logic and CRM drip campaigns with pre-defined and rigid if-then logic for customers based on their tenure, actions, and other triggers. But is there a better way?

Opportunity: Leverage the emerging AI-based campaign automation logic

CDP and CRM platforms like Aampe and Braze are breaking new ground in how a customer marketing team can increase their influence on sales. They are building a new way to think about the ideal sequence of customer touchpoints across SMS, email, push, and in-app notifications. Instead of rigid logic based on fixed rules, some platforms can constantly test the timing, frequency, and sequencing of messages to maximize ROI at a user level. This accelerates the potential path to revenue maximization much faster than the old way of doing things - where brands are trying to optimize a local maximum KPI for a large customer segment - through A/B testing that can take weeks to execute, learn from, and roll out. (Imagine a world where AI has solved customer frequency questions and there is no more internal debate on how many emails are too many to send to your customers!)

Analyzing The Results

You’ve taken a marketing campaign from idea to execution, and now the campaign is over. Did it hit your goals? Did it result in better outcomes? As you dig into the data, the sheer volume of metrics to review can be overwhelming. (Side note: Some marketers have argued that Marketing is a more analytically demanding discipline than Finance within an organization - but I’ll leave that debate to another time.) So, how do you make sense of all the data with limited time and resources and know where to focus? Let’s go back to where we started, with LLMs like ChatGPT.

Opportunity: Provide your structured campaign data to a large language model and ask it about trends

While these services cannot replace your team’s intuition, context, and understanding of your business and marketing data, they can help spotlight the best places to look. Use these tools to get ideas of the trends, what anomalies stand out, and where you might want to dig in further. It may surprise you what metrics you didn’t think to focus on might be the key to unlocking why your campaign over- or under-performed expectations.

Final Thoughts

Advancements in AI to increase your marketing team’s leverage are increasing at an ever-accelerating rate, and so many of them are available for you to use today. They will enable your team to do more with less and drive greater outcomes for your business at a rate previously thought impossible.

As you experiment with these capabilities, I recommend you keep in mind a few tenets along the way:

• Don’t Wait: If you are not trying out these new tools, your competitor is. Don’t let AI be their competitive advantage over you. Don’t be timid - jump in!

• Set Proper Expectations: These tools are perpetual works-in-progress. Don’t expect transformation at the start; proceed with caution, take what’s useful, and leave the rest. They can help deliver “good,” but it is still on you to deliver “great.” And while you may make AI tools your competitive advantage, it will only last so long before it becomes table stakes.

• Remember Incentives: Any AI-enabled company you work with has their own business metrics they are optimizing for that may not always align with yours. Know what they are, and consider them when evaluating their capabilities and results. Ad platforms, in particular, will continue to drive better performance but will naturally and slowly raise CPMs accordingly and reduce efficiency gains for brands. Any short-term reductions in brand customer acquisition costs will continually have to fight the paid advertising “laws of reverse gravity.” All else equal, CAC always goes up as you scale.
• Trust Yourself: All the wonders of this technology aside, it cannot replace your experience, intuition, and understanding of the market and your customers. The brands that will win with AI are the ones that use it to amplify the inherent talent, creativity, and strategic thinking of your team. It will make you better, faster, and stronger - but it won’t replace you…at least not yet.

Notes: I am not affiliated with any of the brands mentioned in this article. And no, I did not use AI to write the article. About the Author

Anthony Scarpaci is a seasoned growth marketing advisor with over 12 years of in-house experience leading consumer and B2B marketing teams at high-growth subscription, fintech, and app companies, including Acorns, Nerdwallet, and Betterment. He has managed customer acquisition budgets exceeding $100 million, demonstrating his expertise in scaling, optimizing, and diversifying customer acquisition and onboarding to maximize ROI. Anthony's proficiency covers a wide range of growth strategies, including digital and offline media, influencer marketing, referrals, partnerships, affiliate marketing, CRO, ASO, SEO, and lifecycle marketing. For more information, visit his LinkedIn profile or at Tunomatic.com.

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