AI's Helping Hand for Smarter Marketing

I’ve heard many people comment that “AI’s going to take your job”. I’m sure, as fellow marketers, you’ve probably been told the same. With all the advancements in AI technology, it can seem like this is a likely possibility. But I was told the same thing when computers were introduced to graphic designers…and here we still are.

Maybe it’s time we reframe the conversation and start thinking of these technologies as helpful tools instead of threats. New technologies don’t always need to be feared. AI is not sophisticated enough to completely take over marketing, but it is powerful enough to be able to help with different tasks on your to-do list.

We’ve already started to adapt to new AI software here at Iris. It not only helps us stay on top of our to-dos, but it also helps us boost our creativity. Here are a few ways we’ve adopted AI into our processes:

Class/Article Name Generation

Did you notice the title of this article? A human did not write that.

When we’re struggling to come up with a catchy article title or name for a class, we give the task to ChatGPT from OpenAI . It’s not always perfect and we’ve definitely been known to “Frankenstein” some options — using the first half of one and the second half of another. But even when we don’t use the names we receive, they give us a starting point that jumpstarts our creative juices.

Email/Subject Line Copywriting

If you’re on our email list, there’s a good chance at least one of the emails you’ve received from us wasn’t technically written by us.

Our CRM platform, Ontraport , has an “AI Copywriter” tool that we’ve been experimenting with. This tool allows us to put in a prompt detailing what kind of email we need and any specifics about the content. We can also ask it to generate subject lines and preheaders to go along with the email.

Like ChatGPT’s name ideas, we don’t always love what we get back. So, we tend to add the human touch to it by splicing and dicing, keeping aspects we like, rearranging the order of things, and sprinkling our own personality throughout.

Social Media Caption AI Assist

Some social media scheduling platforms (we use Sprout Social, Inc. ), have incorporated AI caption generation into their scheduling tools. This application is one we’ve, admittedly, used the least. Sprout Social’s AI Assist tool can either generate 3 caption options for you or suggest rewording options to change the tone of the caption to “confident”, “friendly”, or “professional”.

Sprout Social doesn’t allow you to put in a prompt to get a caption, instead, you have to type out at least 3 words of your caption for it to complete it. In theory, this helps the tool more accurately generate a caption that communicates your desired message. While this tool is helpful in finding different ways to say what we want, it doesn’t help get us started or give us ideas based on a concept, which is what we find ourselves using AI for.

The AI tone change tool, however, is extremely beneficial to us. Sometimes we find ourselves writing about one of our processes and it ends up reading way too much like a research paper. Asking AI to rewrite the caption in a friendlier tone has saved us a lot of time and keeps our messaging approachable.

When we first began incorporating AI technologies into our work, we weren’t getting the answers we needed. Most of the copy we received was stiff and didn’t match our brand voice at all. These responses went too far against our brand guidelines, making them unusable for us.? But through some trial and error — and a lot of research — we’ve discovered formulas to craft prompts that help us get what we need.

Join us on September 13 at 2 p.m. for our newest Master Class, Cracking the Code: Getting Results from Smart Prompts, to learn how to make AI work for you by using these formulas!