So, what did you think of the AI-generated title that made you click on this post?
Pretty cool, huh? Yes, I know it’s a gimmick, but AI is everywhere these days. It’s impossible to ignore the conversations, the AI tool testing, and, most horrifyingly, the ethics.
Don’t worry, this isn’t a post about AI ethics. But it is a post about AI case studies.
As we all learn about the potential benefits AI can offer, particularly in business, it’s only natural that we want to see what it all looks like in practice. But let’s narrow the focus down even further. Business is very broad, so let’s put AI marketing under the microscope.
In this post, we are going to look at five different uses of AI in marketing and dissect the case studies to see the effects it has on different areas of marketing.
Why businesses need to leverage AI in marketing
First, let’s take a look at why businesses are embracing AI in their marketing strategies.
In short, it’s how they can remain competitive. With all the benefits offered to businesses with AI, choosing not to adopt it will leave you in the dust.
Let’s take a look at three ways in which AI helps companies.
Automation
Automation isn’t a new topic anymore. It’s been around forever, and it’s proven itself to be a real time saver. Thus, it’s also a real money saver. Can’t have one without the other.
AI can do a lot in automating marketing strategies because it can help businesses with things like lead generation. It can find more customers in less time, allowing humans more opportunities to build connections with customers.
Personalization
AI has the ability to create profiles of the potential customers it finds for you, giving you the ability to launch more targeted marketing campaigns.
Those strategies have the ability to improve customer engagement and conversion rates, ultimately leading to higher ROIs.
Predictive analytics
Predictive analytics provide marketers with data from previous customer interactions and uses it to predict what their future buying behavior might look like. This can make a huge difference in customer retention rates.
And if you take the same method and zoom out a little, you can use it to forecast future business metrics like changes in revenue.
Incendium uses AI for email marketing
I sat down with the co-founder of Incendium, Nathaniel Houghton, to discuss the ways in which his company uses AI in its marketing strategy, and this is what he had to tell me:
The challenge
Incendium is a B2B growth studio that sends out and sorts through thousands of emails on behalf of its clients. Its team helps customers prepare to go to market, execute campaigns, and interpret data from them.
Nathaniel’s perspective was different than the common narrative spun around AI. He and his team didn’t search for problems within the company. They wanted AI to fix them. Instead, started experimenting with it as a sort of test for clients.
For them, it was about finding ways in which they could leverage AI to automate tasks that were time-consuming for their team. By doing so, they hoped to free up time to allow everyone to work on the more creative side of things.
The solution
To achieve this, they took a look at all of their recurring tasks and pinpointed the areas which could be automated. They didn’t want to force AI into any area it wouldn’t fit, and they didn’t want to use it just for the sake of using it.
They ended up finding two time-consuming tasks for AI to take over for them.
The first is email classification. They send hundreds of thousands of emails on behalf of their clients, and they receive thousands of responses. Those responses are integral in helping them learn and create even better email campaigns.
So they use AI to classify all the responses they get into two categories: a general unsubscribe and what they call “legitimate responses,” which are responses written by humans with valuable feedback. Doing this saves their team hours of time they would have otherwise spent sifting through responses they can’t learn anything from. They use Levity.ai to help them accomplish this.
The second thing they use AI for is lead generation for clients.
AI helps find prospective customers for Incendium’s clients based on certain criteria. AI doesn’t necessarily give them the email they need, but it points them in the right direction. They’ve found that the best tool for this is ChatGPT.
The results
Between Levity.ai and ChatGPT, Incendium has saved countless hours of work sifting through emails and looking for leads.
Nathaniel doesn’t see the need to use AI in any other area of the company at this time, but he would love to see the technology develop further to help them out even more. His dream is to use AI to find a way to ingest data from tens of thousands of email responses to find commonalities between the top performers.
As of right now, that’s still up to him and his team to do, and they would love AI to do it for them.
GoGoChimp creates YouTube content for clients
GoGoChimp helps clients with their marketing with the specific goal of increasing conversion rates. They do this in a number of ways, including making optimized landing pages and personalized email campaigns.
They also manage YouTube channels for some of their clients, and that’s where they’ve found great use with AI.
The challenge
YouTube is a very competitive platform regardless of the type of content you create. That’s why optimization is extremely important. Casual users on YouTube may not realize just how much work goes into making sure videos get suggested.
The actual content itself needs to be good, yes, but so do the title, the thumbnail, the description, and the tags. GoGoChimps manages the creation of those elements, which can take up a lot of time and limit the amount of content that can be uploaded.
So they wanted a way in which they could cut down on the time creating the optimization elements for the videos in order to get more content out and ultimately increase conversion rates.
The solution
Like with Incendium, GoGoChimp wasn’t necessarily looking to use AI for the sake of using it. Rather, they were just curious to see what it had the potential to do. So they checked out ChatGPT.
They tested it first by creating YouTube descriptions and found that it had the ability to make completely unique articles for each video that could be used as descriptions. From there, they had is analyze the top-performing videos within a given niche to help them figure out what the most optimized titles would be.
They have also found success using ChatGPT to help them create thumbnails. Though it can’t create thumbnails for them, it can describe the elements of the thumbnails in top-performing videos. They then use that information to put together thumbnails that have the biggest chance of going viral.
The results
AI has saved GoGoChimps so many hours of work that they have been able to take on more clients and increase their profits.
Not only that, but their clients have seen the benefits AI has brought to their channels. One of them went from 390k views to 789k views in just a 30-day period. Incredible results like that then help to attract more clients.
It’s a cycle of profitable positivity!
Heady finds success with trend forecasting
Heady was founded in 2021 with the idea of being a “one-stop shop” for all things digital marketing. But being that for clients means taking on an incredible amount of work, and by 2022 they realized they needed help.
The challenge
Heady seeks to provide every digital marketing service you can think of, like:
- CRM
- SEO
- Paid media
- Website development
- Digital advertising
In order to deliver so many services with excellent quality and scale, they had no choice but to turn to AI to help them automate. They struggled to keep up with manual reporting and trend analysis, two things that left a lot of room for human error.
The solution
They saw how much potential AI had to help them solve these problems by streamlining processes and sorting through vast amounts of data. And by going through all that data, they would receive actionable insights in real-time.
They slowly phased in the use of AI in their daily tasks to make sure the implementation was smooth. They began by using it in the area where it would bring them the most value, data analysis, and reporting, and moved on from there.
They found the predictive analytics capabilities of AI to be particularly useful in their business strategy. It’s helped them to identify upcoming market trends, giving them time to adjust their strategies as needed. The information given to the team at Heady from the AI analytics has also given them the ability to customize content for their clients’ customers, which has yielded great results.
The results
By taking data analysis off their plate, the team has been able to focus on higher-value tasks, such as creative strategizing. They are also able to make better decisions much faster. AI delivers useful insights to them quickly, which they can take advantage of and make data-driven decisions, not opinion-based ones.
“AI has essentially made our operations more efficient and agile.” – Ryan Bradley, Co-founder of Heady
Because of the predictive analytics and personalized marketing strategies, they have seen an overall increase in the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. As a result of that, they have been able to scale their operations without sacrificing any quality.
Venture Smarter finds its target audience
Venture Smarter is a consulting firm that aims to help startups and small businesses grow and scale. Marketing plays a massive role in that, and they found that traditional marketing methods just weren’t cutting it.
The challenge
The team at Venture Smarter had a few problems with their marketing strategy. Firstly, they struggled with reaching and engaging their target audience. They found the digital realm to be oversaturated and fast-paced, which was difficult for them to keep up with.
Because of this, it was difficult for them to optimize their marketing campaigns. And as a result of that, they couldn’t personalize any part of their strategy or messaging, which made it even more difficult to tap into their target audience.
The solution
Venture Smarter ultimately found three main uses for AI: analytics, predictive modeling, and automation.
They used to analyze large volumes of data, and from that, they were able to identify trends that led them to extract actionable insights. Those insights allowed them to better understand customer behavior and preferences. That was the missing information that they needed in order to create the personalized campaigns of their dreams.
They also began AI in their workflows, helping them to automate the tasks related to lead scoring, data analysis, and campaign optimization.
The results
With the information given to them through AI, the team at Venture Smarter was able to create more targeted campaigns that resulted in higher conversion rates and increased customer engagement.
Not only that, but it allowed them to grow their customer base by finding new opportunities in different markets.
With the success AI has brought them in marketing, they have begun using it in other areas of their business, including operations and customer service.
GameDayr utilizes content generation
GameDayr is a publication dedicated to all things American football. Its target audience is anyone and everyone who loves the sport, and it provides fans with game analysis and player profiles.
(By the way, I’m just going to refer to it as football from here on out, but please know that Process Street does recognize that football is actually the game you play with your feet).
The challenge
Being a platform that relies heavily on content, their biggest challenge was producing all of it.
Relying solely on human writers to do the data analysis and predictive analytics as they relate to both football and SEO was expensive and time-consuming.
They wanted to streamline their content creation process and hit their target keywords, all while maintaining the quality of their content.
The solution
They began using AI to write evergreen articles based on high-volume keywords that didn’t need much research. They then used human editors to read through the articles, make sure everything was correct, and read like a human wrote it.
They still use human writers to create more research-heavy articles, or ones that may need more frequent updates.
The results
By using AI in their content generation, GameDayr was able to increase the efficiency of the process, get more content published, and save money by employing fewer writers.
With the increased volume of SEO-friendly content, the website has reached a larger audience which has led to an increase in user engagement.
What we can take away from these AI marketing strategies
Based on these five case studies, we can boil down the key uses of AI in marketing strategies to be:
- The only limit to its uses is your own creativity
- AI saves employees time
- It can help find new customers
- It can create content
- AI optimizes marketing, no matter the area
- It leaves humans room to be more creative
Really there’s no excuse for businesses not to give AI a try in their marketing strategies. Not when the results are so powerful. You don’t have to force AI into your company, but ignoring its potential to help you grow and scale sustainably is foolish. And I know you’re not a fool because you made it to the end of this article.
What are your thoughts on AI? Have you started using it in your business? If so, tell us how in the comments below, and let us know what results you’ve seen.
The post 5 Proven AI Marketing Examples to Inspire You first appeared on Process Street | Checklist, Workflow and SOP Software.
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