AI has become an integral part of our lives in recent years. We are using it for anything and everything to make things a little easier. No doubt has also revolutionized consumer marketing by enabling personalized, data-driven strategies, automating repetitive tasks, fostering creativity, and enhancing the overall shopping experience.

Here we will discuss how generative AI can boost consumer marketing so you can create a result-driven marketing campaign that will deliver real results.

What Is Generative AI?

Generative AI is an artificial intelligence technology used to generate content like text, images, or videos based on analyzing large databases. Unlike traditional AI systems built to perform specific tasks or make decisions based on predefined rules and data, generative AI models are trained on large datasets to learn the underlying patterns and structures of the data.

Top Generative AI Tools for Consumer Marketing

With various tools out there you can utilize, you may be unsure of which ones to choose for your marketing purposes. We have provided a list of tools and their purposes that we believe will help you in your journey.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT by OpenAI has taken the world by storm with its usefulness and ease of use. One of the best tools to generate written content, you can use it for copywriting, blogging, and email marketing. `        

It is also a great tool to collect information on various topics. Be aware that the free version of ChatGPT operates on data up to 2021. If you want to use their updated version, known as ChatGPT Plus, you will have to pay a premium price of 20$ per month.

Midjourney

Midjourney is an image-generating AI tool that creates images based on text prompts, which are descriptions of what a user may want. The AI goes through neural networks consisting of large image datasets to study and generate an image based on the content, subject, art style, and many other factors that are input by a user.

Midjourney offers a limited number of image generations before they ask for a price to continue usage. Try the free version and see if it is to your liking. The pricing of Midjourney starts at $10 per month.

DALL E-2

Similar to Midjourney, DALL E-2 is also an AI image-generation tool made by OpenAI (the same team that made ChatGPT). It generates images based on prompts by a user that goes through networks of image databases to get close to what the user wants. The more descriptive the user prompt is, the more in line the image will be with their vision.

DALL E-2 uses a points system to allow image generation. You will need to register an account that will give you 50 free credits, with 15 credits each month if you continue using it. If you need to regularly use it, you may have to pay for their service, where you can buy 115 credits for 15$ at minimum.

Runway

Runway is a text-to-video creation AI tool that uses prompts and images to create a video close to the vision of the user. Similar to other AI systems, the more descriptive your prompts are, the more closely aligned the final product will be with what you want. 

Runway allows you to create videos, animations, images, and even edit videos you have. You can do complex tasks like removing objects or adding elements to your videos by using it. The tool works best in your favor if you have some visuals like images or videos to help it understand what you want.

Runway offers four pricing plans. The first basic plan is free to use with some limited usability. It will give you 125 credits which is enough for 3 video projects, 10 AI Magic Tools, 720p video exports, 5 GB of asset storage, and three editors.

The paid plans start at 15$ a month, with the most important feature being 4k video resolution and the ability to buy credits separately. The yearly plans offer a 20% discount which you can consider if you plan on using it long-term.

Adobe Firefly

Adobe Firefly is an AI tool integrated into Adobe products like Photoshop or Illustrator. If you are already using Adobe products for your work, you can seamlessly incorporate it within your workflow and make the processes you are already doing much easier.

It allows contextual image generation which can help in creating and editing photos in a great variety of ways.

How Generative AI Can Boost Consumer Marketing

AI is becoming commonplace with the passing of each year with varying thoughts on it by general consumers. About 60% of customers are open to the use of AI to improve their experiences.

According to a Hubspot survey, here are some common ways marketers are currently using AI.

While these are now mostly practiced by marketers, there are many ways you can utilize AI. Here are some other ways you can utilize AI for your marketing efforts to capture markets.

Accelerated planning stage

Consumer marketing requires a lot of planning before starting all the necessary activities. Some important things to plan out are market research, segmentation, targeting, and positioning (STP), product research and production, marketing campaigns, and whatnot. Generative AI can help in speeding up the planning stages in various ways. 

Through the use of a text-based AI tool like ChatGPT, you can ask it to create the plans for you. The plans they generate will be based on tons of databases consisting of instances where your situation is applicable so they will be a great starting point for creating a work schedule to get started.

The plans won’t work on their own; but with refinement and human supervision, you can chalk up a working plan by taking ideas and inspiration from AI. This will help you accelerate the planning stages of your campaign.

Hyper personalized content creation

Personalized marketing is one of the most effective marketing campaigns any business can run.

According to a research by Salesforce, 65% of customers say they will stay loyal if a company offers them personalized experiences.

However, it can be difficult to implement for consumer marketing campaigns, especially if you have a large audience, as personalizing each of your content for a large number is impractical.

With generative AI, you can create personalized messages and campaigns for a huge number of consumers in a short time making it very practical to do so.

You can collect customer information by using various tools like surveys and questionnaires and use that data to create the most personalized content like emails or copies to entice sales out of them. By using AI, the process becomes much simpler and you can get a lot of conversions which in turn, will mean more revenue.

Email marketing is one of the most popular methods of personalized marketing. For effective email marketing, the subject line of the email needs to be eye-catching as that is the first thing a recipient will see along with the sender’s name. However, writing personalized, compelling subject lines for a large audience can be tedious and time-consuming.

Instead of manually scripting subject lines, you can use AI to do it for you. You can feed the AI databases with compelling subject lines and customer information and let it generate subject lines for your customers. This will not only save you time on scripting but also ensure compelling subject lines with a high chance of customer conversion.

Airbnb, Reebok, and Amazon utilize AI in their hyper-personalized marketing campaigns with great success.

Data collection and analysis

How you collect updated and relevant data for your business can be a difficult thing to determine. With the help of AI, you can collect and analyze datasets from around the internet that are relevant to you and create predictive models that can forecast sales or revenue. You can look for databases based on any categories you may need. 

For example, you can gather your audience data based on demographics, lifestyles, earnings, and many other publicly available data and save time in collecting information by researching or conducting surveys.

Along with the collection of data, AI can also analyze the found databases within minutes. This allows marketers to understand their target audiences and create optimal plans to capture the market much more quickly. 

Generative AI allows marketing teams to decipher data sets in a meaningful manner without the need for data specialists working round the clock.

Here is a step-by-step process given to visually demonstrate how generative AI can be used for your data analysis.

Improved customer experience

Whatever a business does is with a sole goal in mind – to ensure the best customer experience possible. Generative AI can also help you with that in different ways. 

For example, you can utilize AI to analyze customer’s buying habits and make product recommendations based on the likelihood of purchase. You can also deploy automated chatbots to ensure customers can ask and receive answers from your site 24/7. 

They can generate human-like responses, understand natural queries, and provide solutions based on the information they are given. 

H&M is a global retail giant that has implemented chatbots into its customer service system. They help customers with available products, FAQs, and setting up orders. The implementation of chatbots has decreased response times by 70% compared to humans and ensures customers have a smooth shopping experience. 

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important aspects of marketing these daysAI can improve your SEO by implementing various techniques and creating quality content. 

For example, AI can be a great tool for exploring competitive markets, researching relevant keywords across Google’s search engine result pages (SERP), and creating content based on those keywords.

You can also enhance technical aspects of SEO using AI by creating robots.txt rules, construct links, and generating structured data such as hreflang tags and FAQPage Schema markup.

LinkedIn, one of the most popular social media platforms in the world for professionals, launched an AI-powered program early in 2023 called “LinkedIn Collaborative Articles”. The program started with them launching AI-powered articles about various relevant topics. 

Through an invite-only system, the program allowed all kinds of industry experts to share their opinions on the articles. The idea was to find new ways of SEO by using AI-powered tools as LinkedIn does not always do traditional SEO.

The program can be deemed a success as throughout the program the site had a monthly average of 1.5 million organic visitors with around 141855 AI-written articles. Experts who contributed a significant amount of insight to these articles were given a “Top Voice” badge which also showed the credibility of the contributors.

The organic results peaked at 2.7 million organic clicks on September 2023 and even though traffic has started to fall off afterward, it is a great demonstration of how AI can be utilized for SEO.

By assessing your strengths and USP, you can implement creative programs like this with the help of AI for your SEO and bring in a lot of organic consumers for your business.

How to Use AI Effectively?

While using AI will definitely help you in many ways and speed up your activities, there are some guidelines you should be wary of to ensure the prevention of over-reliance on AI to the point of detriment.

Research opportunities

Before you go on to implement AI, first do extensive research on related topics like how AI works, which sector will it best help you, your target audience’s stance on AI, and whatnot.

Just like any tool, misuse will not get you the results you will be hoping for. Be sure to know the success rates of using AI, for separate departments or target audiences.

Determine business objectives

Having your goals fixed will help you see the path ahead of you and help you understand how AI will help you accomplish them. Be as specific as you can to help you determine necessary actions and figure out the best AI tools and models that can help you.

Set up test environments

If you have created AI models to automate certain processes, then you should set up test environments to check if they work as you have intended. Deployment of automation processes without verifying their effectiveness can cause you losses that you may have to spend resources to recover from.

Establish rules and regulations

With copyright laws, various ethical issues, and many other issues surrounding the use of AI, there should be established rules and regulations for your business on how to use or limit your use of AI so that you do not find yourself facing any negative consequences.

Refine algorithms

AI runs on various algorithms to generate the most accurate results. The accuracy of the results will depend on how authentic the observed databases are. Keep running checks to analyze results and refine the algorithms to get the best possible models for your business.

Monitor performance

While AI will make your job easier, it does not mean you can leave everything to AI and hope for the best. You will need to regularly monitor your performance, see how much improvement you are seeing, and how impactful the use of AI is.

Depending on your observations, make all the necessary adjustments, like if an AI model needs tweaking or if a different model needs to be implemented entirely.

Train your teams

All of your automation processes will need human supervision to ensure optimal performance; otherwise, you may run things poorly due to negligence. Train your teams on how your models work and what to observe specifically to understand results. That way, your operations will run smoothly without any major issues.

Downsides of Generative AI

With all the wonderful things AI can do for us, there are a lot of concerns and downsides that come along that you need to consider if you decide to implement it into your campaigns.

Information inaccuracy

Despite all its advancements, AI is still not 100% accurate, especially on niche topics that have not been researched extensively.

You will be able to discern the accuracy of any tool if you look up information that you are knowledgeable in yourself. Once you do, you will find a lot of holes and inaccuracies in the answers provided.

If you blindly follow information and plans provided by AI, you may find yourself operating on false information and wasting efforts and resources on fruitless endeavors. Always have an expert present to verify the legitimacy of anything you generate through AI before you proceed to action with them.

Legal and copyright issues

A lot of the data AI bases its results on comes from a lot of independent and well-established artists. As a result, there are a lot of potential legal troubles that can happen when using AI art as that might be deemed as art theft.

Currently, there are nine different ongoing class-action lawsuits against some popular AI firms, such as Meta, OpenAI, and Alphabet (Google’s parent company). Due to these AI systems being developed very recently, there is a lack of regulations and legislation. It is best to cautiously approach the use of AI till more solid rules are put into place.

Ethical issues

Even if you can avoid copyright issues, there can be a lot of ethics involved in the use of it. Aside from legal problems, AI art is generally seen as art theft among a lot of the art community, and not “real art” among top personalities.

Renowned artist, Ken Lee, who specializes in long-exposure photography with a lot of posts in a lot of magazines, states that it undermines the techniques required in a lot of art forms.

According to this article by Yale Daily News, he says, “My tinge of sadness is more about the state of affairs, people already have a deep mistrust for photography. Already, “Photoshop” is used as a verb: ‘I wonder if that’s Photoshopped?’ In the not-so-distant future, we might say, ‘Not sure if it’s real … that could be totally Midjourneyed!’”

There is also the issue of AI being utilized for malicious intentions. With ease of use and the ability to create seemingly convincing photos and videos, it can be used to spread misinformation and fake news or manipulate people with fake images or videos.

Insensitive content

AI does not possess the tact and cultural awareness of a real person. As a result, it might be a bit biased towards more commonly available data that might generate content that can be viewed as insensitive.

For example, an Asian woman named Rona Wang once prompted an AI to take a picture of her and make it professional. Because the database it studies has a bias towards more Western data, the AI changed her features to that of a white woman, which can be thought of as discriminating towards Rona. You can read this story about the AI’s seemingly insensitive side here for more details.

Due to the available data that AI currently has, the possibility of biases and insensitive content generation is significant. A human should oversee the content generated such that you do not use such content or you might upset a group of people who might be interested in your business.

Privacy and security concerns

With AI not being able to discern between general and confidential information, there are concerns about AI using them to generate content. As a result, there is a risk of AI-generated content releasing private and sensitive information out in the open, causing harm to a lot of people and companies. Be careful of what type of data you are inputting into the system. And keep the private information of your customers especially safe.

Lack of a personal touch

Sometimes, AI-generated content can feel robotic or too direct. While the information may be solid, or the design or image generated might look authentic, a lot of customers can tell if something is AI-generated or not. 

In fact, across all demographics, about 54.64% of participants in a study by Nexcess were able to tell the difference between content created by AI and humans. Some people might have an issue with that.

Also, you need to keep in mind that AI is not faultless. It can base response on incorrect information. This is why a human touch is needed to perfect the results that AI generates for us.

How Much to Rely on Generative AI for Consumer Marketing?

We have listed a lot of ways AI can help immensely in your consumer marketing efforts. We have also listed the risks and issues you will be potentially facing when using AI in your general workflow.

So, you might be wondering, how much AI should you use? Or what procedures to avoid in the process?

As we have mentioned a few times, generative AI, while developed in the 1960s for chatbots, only started to reach its potential today after the introduction of generative adversarial networks, or GANs, a machine learning algorithm around 2014. Its widespread use by the general public has started to bloom after around 2021.

As a result, many legal and ethical concerns have popped up with the use and misuse of AI. Things like spreading misinformation, art theft, malicious content creation, and many other negative things can be accomplished with it at the hands of an evil person.

With the potential to harm, even unintentionally, and the lack of legislation and regulations to keep controversial incidents in check, it is best to cautiously approach the use of AI. Make sure to thoroughly check the AI-generated content with the supervision of an expert to avoid any sort of mishaps.

AI as a tool should make your job easier, and not cause unnecessary problems. Be ethical in the use of AI, do not use it as a means to replace human work, and avoid potential copyright infringement laws. If you practice all these when implementing AI, it will decrease the workload of your company and help you achieve your marketing goals.

Will AI Remove Emotions From Consumer Marketing?

How generative AI can boost consumer marketing? With recent developments, AI has taken phenomenal steps in creating content that is almost as authentic as a human-created one. However, different content like think pieces and artworks have a close connection to human emotions, which a lot of advertisements rely on to connect with their audience. 

AI and neuroscience researchers agree that AI cannot have their own emotions, they can only mimic them.

So, the question becomes whether using AI-generated content will remove emotions from marketing material.

While it is true that AI cannot have emotions and the content generated by them will not have the same impact as a human-created one will, AI-created content can be almost close to real. With human supervision and touches, they can be transformed into emotional pieces that touch the hearts of your target audience.

Conclusion

Whether you decide to utilize AI or not, its impact on modern society cannot be ignored. At the very least, consider it a tool to help further your goals.  Hope this article gives you an idea of how AI works and how you can utilize it for marketing purposes.

The application for AI is currently and the current version of AI you are seeing will be the worst version you will see. Meaning it will only improve as time goes on. It will be beneficial for you to learn the intricacies of this tool, and be cautious of the negative sides so that when more improved AI versions are released, you can effortlessly implement them into your workflow.

FAQs 

Q. What is the difference between AI and generative AI?

Ans: AI is a broad division of computer systems that operate in particular ways they are programmed to. AI, in general, is a huge part of computer studies and covers a lot of grounds in that particular field.

Generative AI, on the other hand, is an artificial intelligence system that generates content like text or images that are based on studied databases. 

Q. Are generative AI tools free to use?

Ans: Most AI tools have a lot of their features free to use for general users. However, a lot of important features can be locked behind a paywall. If you do not have any particular features in need, you can make do using the free versions but for advanced features, you will need to pay a small amount of subscription fee to unlock them. Research which features you will need and what payment plans are available before you decide to start paying. 

Q. Can I automate my marketing campaigns using AI?

Ans: Yes, you can automate campaigns using AI. However, we advise against that as AI is not a replacement for the expertise of a marketing officer. AI, as advanced as it is, is not perfect and can base some actions on unverified or wrong information. A watchful human eye can detect such situations and can prevent you from incurring preventable losses. Make sure a qualified person is there to verify the authenticity of every action taken.