If you are a B2B Marketer, how are you leveraging AI tools to streamline your marketing process??
AI-powered chatbots have made everyday tasks at work, such as content creation and video transcription, faster. However, keeping up with the latest AI tools and trends is a challenge. So, how do you know where to start? At EI, we have been exploring AI, identifying use cases and potential pitfalls. We recently put three of the most popular AI tools – Gemini (formerly Bard), ChatGPT, and Copilot - to the test, using the free versions of these platforms to identify ways in which they can help marketers. Here are our thoughts, based on our experience trialling them.?
How can these tools help marketers??
- Writing & Editing Marketing Copy: Consider AI tools as your marketing content assistant, helping you to overcome writer’s block and inspiring you with creative, attention-grabbing ideas. Although AI-generated content requires editing, to inject your brand voice and reflect your thoughts accurately, it gives you a great starting point and reduces the time needed to get the content ready to publish. To get started, tell the AI that you’re a marketer looking to create a post on a particular topic. Include some bullet points on what you’d like to talk about and details on the format and style of the post you are planning to write.?
- Conducting Basic Market Research: AI tools can also serve as your marketing research assistant. In fact, AI can often be more useful than Google when searching the web because it provides context to its answers, as well as suggestions on further connected searches which you wouldn’t get from a search engine. Try asking AI platforms to give you examples of where your named competitors are speaking in the media on a particular topic.?
- Administrative Tasks: In addition to generating new content, AI tools are great at collating information you already have and making connections within a big dataset. AI tools can help you save time on formatting or organising long lists of data or pieces of text by copying and pasting them directly into the AI chatbot. Offloading these time-consuming tasks to AI means you can free up your time to work on tasks that require human skills, such as critical thinking. We have been using AI to format lists and tables, saving us time and helping us focus on more strategic work.??
What are the challenges associated with using these tools??
- Accuracy & Reliability: AI tools are prone to hallucinations and inaccuracies, so you can never fully rely on the output, and a human eye is needed to fact-check. No matter how convincing a GenAI tool’s answers might seem, if you ask it why it has said something, it can’t explain.?
- Lack of Consistency: Despite being user-friendly by generating responses based on simple prompts, AI tools are inconsistent in that repeating a prompt, or using a very similar prompt, will not generate the same output twice.?
- Token Limit: When working with publicly available AI models, there is a maximum token limit, so there is only so much data you can feed in one go. This could potentially defeat the purpose of its time-saving characteristics in that you have to repeat the same process multiple times to get through a dataset.?
- Quality Control: AI tools are not good at evaluating the strength or quality of the ideas they put forward. This comes as no surprise, as these tools have been devised to take a persuasive stance, so you really need to interrogate the suggestions they give. A critically trained human brain is needed to advise on the strength or suitability of the output.??
- Getting the Prompt Right: When using AI to polish or improve your writing, it can be difficult to give AI the correct instruction to set the right tone and give you the best possible output that will require the minimum amount of editing. This can be time consuming, requiring multiple tweaks to your prompts and assessment of the output to get it right.?
- Identifying what is Interesting: AI tools often produce lengthy responses with valuable nuggets of information dispersed throughout, which means you must wade through them to find what’s valuable. AI is by no means as good as a human at identifying what would actually be interesting to an expert.??
- Content Ownership: Although we advise editing any AI-generated content, the question of ownership of the content remains. How much editing is required to deem the content original???
- The Jagged Frontier of AI: The jagged frontier refers to the concept that AI performs well on tasks that you wouldn’t expect it to know, such as analysing a list of companies and arranging these by industry categories, and not as well on tasks that seem simple, such as formatting. This makes it difficult to work out when to apply AI tools vs. doing tasks manually.?
EI Showdown: ChatGPT vs Gemini vs Copilot?
- Gemini (formerly Bard) is great for polishing marketing copy and as an alternative to Google searching. EI found the output was better written and varied more in style compared to the other tools. It’s also great for analysing a page’s on-page SEO performance and generating customised marketing advice. Gemini is also more up-to-date than ChatGPT’s free version as it is web-connected, so if your questions require up-to-date information, Gemini is a stronger option. However, Gemini often needs instructions to be phrased in a much more specific way than ChatGPT, to give the desired output. That said, it is more ideal than ChatGPT when it comes to objective statistical analysis, as it is better at sticking strictly to what the user has asked it to do, e.g., sorting a list of items into defined categories.?
- Chat GPT is versatile. It’s great for writing support, generating creative ideas for content such as blogs and articles as well as punchy titles, writing content drafts, or creating summaries of existing content. It’s also good at formatting, as it provides a wider range of options than the other tools. ChatGPT is generally better at handling the output token limit and remembering earlier instructions than the other tools. It also seems to be better at ‘understanding’ what the user wants from their request. However, with objective statistical analysis, ChatGPT can sometimes get overly creative and therefore is less fitting to quantitative analysis compared to Gemini. The free version of the platform is limited as its information is not up to date, but GPT-4 is web-connected, although it still often requires the use of a plugin to fetch results.?
- Copilot is great at generating content ideas, writing content drafts, and researching a topic. The research piece is most interesting and may be considered its strength compared to other tools, as, while not internet-connected, Copilot provides seemingly accurate data and links to sources, so it’s good for providing up-to-date information on a specific question or topic, similar to a search engine. The connection to Microsoft apps via the Copilot license also looks to be a game-changer for productivity and efficiency, and we can't wait to trial it!
As mentioned above, these views are based on the use of the free versions of these AI platforms, as we know that, currently, ChatGPT-4 is widely proclaimed in the media as the leading AI tool.?
EI’s experimentation with AI tools suggests that AI is great for automating low-brainpower tasks, but anything requiring subjective, human judgement should be approached with caution. These tools are popular for a reason: they are user-friendly, take simple prompts to generate content, and can be trained to understand what a user wants, resulting in better output over time. While these tools have not yet reached a place where they can inform marketing strategy, there are certainly use cases for marketing applications, such as drafting articles from notes, brainstorming creative ideas for content, researching topic areas, and generating summaries of presentations, provided these are then polished by a human. Between Gemini, ChatGPT and Copilot, EI has not experienced huge differences, and seeing as they are developing so quickly, much of our initial findings may be subject to change.??
This article assumes that you can access AI platforms, and we know from clients that corporate firewalls do not always allow this. Can you use AI tools at work? How do you find these? We would love to hear from you!?
#FutureReady #AIInnovation #EIAdvisory #B2BMarketing?
