Will Artificial Intelligence Replace Marketers?

A year ago, in a post for Influence & Co., Cortex CEO, Brennan White said, “It’s time we let data and software direct our creative teams.” 

That couldn’t be more true today.

With the exponential growth of digital and social media platforms, brands have to work much harder to get their message in front of their target audiences. The marketer’s job has grown so much, it requires the help of computers to keep up and scale successfully. But with improvements in AI, will those computers eventually steal our jobs?

All the Channels!

Marketers need to maintain a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, a blog (or several!), Snapchat, etc, with new platforms emerging all the time.

On average, that entails publishing at least once per day per channel – over 2,100 times per month!

Marketing Automation Lifesavers

Software can help ease the load by automating repetitive tasks.

Many marketers already rely on automation to help with their workload (ex: email drip campaigns, content publishing tools, social media software, triggered events, like IFTTT and Zapier). In fact, “On average, 49% of companies are currently using marketing automation, and more than half of B2B companies (55%) are adopting the technology.” 

But it isn’t perfect.

Automation helps, but only to some extent. While you can use automation to publish social media posts from a content calendar, you still need someone to write those posts and create that schedule.

Even with enough resources, finding new, different ways to say the same thing, multiple times a day, is a mind-numbing task after a couple months.

Optimizing those posts for engagement is a whole other challenge. 

Most of us can agree data and analytics help guide us toward creating better content. We measure how well each post performs in order to improve the next post. Gathering data for social media and digital platforms is another very manual, resource-heavy process for most companies. There are many dashboards and tools that exist to bring data from each social network and digital platform into one place, but often marketers need to pull reports from multiple places, dump everything into excel and look for patterns and insights.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in digital marketing can help

Instead of exporting all your social media data, scouring for insights and applying those learnings to your next tweet yourself, AI marketing solutions can do all of that for you, and much more quickly.

With advances in machine learning and neural networks, AI is now capable of pulling more weight without sacrificing quality – in fact, it does just the opposite. Machines can do natural language processing well enough to write books and news articles.

You might be wondering:

How will one of these AI content marketing tools make my job easier?

Intelligent automation doesn’t only create efficiencies by taking work off a human’s plate, but also by directing the human activities to be more impactful. Just as you would take the learnings from historical post performance and apply it to future content strategy, AI takes the information, makes a prediction and feeds the outcome of all activity back into analysis to improve the next prediction.

Think of it this way:

Imagine having Data on your team. He computes the performance of each post on your profiles, plus what your competitors and your industry are doing, and recommends what to publish next. You can correct him if he’s wrong or help him understand new concepts.

Artificial Intelligence Takeover

If we can automate the repetitive tasks and use AI to tackle the tedious work, will computers eventually replace marketers?

Absolutely not!

While data can help you predict trends and understand what resonates with your target audience, it can’t produce new ideas. Using software to direct creative efforts in specific, data-driven and narrow focuses improves the creative output by eliminating the guesswork and creative block of repetition.

Keeping customer’s attention requires ingenuity, creativity, imagination, inspiration that algorithms can’t replicate. If you want to cut through the competition with your content, you need to produce something your customers actually WANT, something they find interesting and useful.

AI content marketing tools can tell you what was interesting and useful in the past, but only you can imagine what will work in the future. Using AI for content marketing and automation for methodical actions, you can devote your time instead to planning future campaigns, product launches and researching, writing, editing and promoting great content your customers will love.

At Cortex, our goal is to free up marketers’ time so they can focus on elevating their brand’s digital presence and grow revenue.

So, will marketing jobs eventually be replaced by AI marketing software?

No. Instead technology advances will continue to allow marketers to be more strategic and effective at their jobs.