How to (Actually) Build Your AI Marketing Strategy

There’s a common thread among marketing teams who are finding it tough to fully adopt AI: They hit a snag or are unsure how to scale individual results and… momentum is lost. Forever.

Meaning you’re stuck in experimentation land without ever getting a real AI marketing strategy in place.

How can you get unstuck? In this article, I’ll walk you through five actionable steps to launch a ROI-driven strategy, courtesy of Jasper’s Head of Marketing, Meghan Keaney Anderson. But first, let’s get clear on what an AI marketing strategy is and isn’t.

An AI marketing strategy is all about using advanced tools to:

• Streamline tasks
• Do more in less time
• Enhance your brand value

An AI marketing strategy is not:

• A substitute for brand awareness
• A shortcut to instant fame and riches

Got it? Great. Let’s get started by taking a quick look at why marketing teams may be stalling out with AI before diving into how to use it for maximum results.

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Why Are Marketing Teams Stalling Out With AI?

As we’ve touched on, many marketing teams are stuck in what Anderson calls experimentation land, unable to push past individual adoption of AI to achieve team and business acceleration.

There are many reasons you might stall out at the individual stage, but the most common culprits include lack of a growth mindset, scattered efforts and uncertainty about how to effectively use AI.

Speed vs. performance

Many marketers think AI exists to make things faster, but they’re not focusing on how to use AI to affect the performance of a blog post, email campaign, social media caption, etc.

Yes, using AI saves you a few hours writing a short blog post, but what if you approached AI from the performance side instead? Use it to analyze and repurpose existing blog posts into 20-30 social media captions, which will drive more traffic to that blog.

Performance-driven tasks affect growth the most and that’s where AI can play a critical role in your marketing strategy.

Scattered individuals vs. coordinated teams

Maybe a social marketer on your team uses AI tools to split long videos into social media-size shorts. Or a content writer starts fleshing out article ideas with ChatGPT.

These could both be great uses of AI for your company, but they’ll fail to generate noticeable ROI unless many more people adopt these tools. Plus, everyone on your team needs to unite about when and how to use AI in their roles. (More on this a little later on!)

Uncertainty about responsible or effective use of AI

If you start using AI, will your customers be able to tell? Will they judge you? Will your brand voice suffer? Will AI make a horrible factual mistake and cause a PR nightmare for you? By using AI, are you contributing to an inevitable future where AI evolves beyond their robotic, inorganic stage into sentient beings hellbent on destroying human civilization?

Not to fear: Follow the step-by-step process below and you won’t have to worry about any of those things (except maybe the last one).

How to Design an AI Marketing Strategy

Step 1: Define use cases

There’s no wrong way to use AI in your marketing strategy. Some companies use it much more than others. Some are okay with posting 100% AI-generated content, and others are okay for it to start that way but want a human to revise it before publishing.

However you decide to use AI, it’s important to set clear expectations with your team. Create a do’s and don’ts list to eliminate any potential confusion.

Will you use AI to respond to customer comments, or do you want only humans to interact with your customers?

Will you use AI to repurpose content, but not create it from scratch?

Will you use AI to generate content, except for (insert one channel here)?

This should be a living document, updated regularly, that everyone on your team can refer to if they’re ever left wondering, “Hmm, should I use AI for this task?” or “How do we do (insert task)?”

Step 2: Set quality standards

Quality standards are involved in everything you do but become especially important for an AI marketing strategy.

This should be part of your AI marketing strategy document, along with the use cases mentioned above. Detail each step in your AI marketing workflow, along with any brand guidelines or specific policies to follow.

For example, who will check each blog post or social media post before it’s published? Who’s in charge of final approval before something goes live?

What are your standards? Besides proper grammar and factual accuracy, who’s in charge of ensuring any generated content matches your brand voice?

What constitutes “good” AI content? What constitutes AI content that needs revision?

How will you “feed” your AI partner new ideas, so that you’re not relying on it too much for something it cannot do (e.g. originality, fresh perspectives, etc.)?

What will your internal project management process be to ensure any AI-produced content passes all of these “checks” before it goes live?

Your process will probably change a lot, especially in the first few months of fully adopting your AI marketing strategy, but the important thing is to have documented quality standards and ensure they’re enforced.

Step 3: Make space for experiments

Early in her presentation, Anderson talked about how most marketers get stuck in experimentation land when they first start exploring AI:

Most marketers are stuck in the individual acceleration phase. In this world, we’re experimenting. Maybe we’ve seen some individual efficiency gains… but most companies are stalling out there.

Meghan Keaney AndersonHead of Marketing at Jasper

These individual experiments may be how you first start using AI, though they don’t amount to an actual marketing strategy. To develop a full strategy, you need to strike a healthy balance between having repeatable, department-wide AI use cases and running new experiments.

Like anything else in marketing, you’ll discover the best growth opportunities by making space for experiments. Just remember to create a process for getting successful experiments out into your production workflow ASAP so you can benefit from them across the business.

Step 4: Get everyone on the same page

AI is a tool, not a communication system on its own. Everyone needs to agree on how you’ll use AI, your brand standards, and why you’re using it in the first place.

Sure, AI speeds up many tasks, from content generation to automating reports. But your team needs to understand how using AI effectively in their role directly contributes to the company’s success and, ultimately, bottom line.

And please, please assure them: By embracing AI, they’re not working themselves out of a job. They’re learning a new skill that will make them even more valuable and the company even more successful. It’s a win-win.

Your job as the human, as the creative, is to bring the human judgment, the lived experience. And together [with AI], those two things can be really powerful.

Meghan Keaney AndersonHead of Marketing at Jasper

Step 5: Revise your workflows

Adding AI to your marketing strategy will dramatically change your team’s workflows. Before AI, you probably spent most of your time creating content and marketing assets.

Using AI means spending less time on content creation and more on distributing and promoting content, research and ideation—the things that can really move the needle.

When you’re not spending an entire day writing a blog post, you can strategize better content promotion strategies.

When you’re not spending four hours writing social media captions from scratch, you can conduct competitive research and brainstorm new campaigns to make you stand out.

These are the places that we need to see humans amplify what they’ve done historically and become a better partner to AI in this process.

Meghan Keaney AndersonHead of Marketing at Jasper

Example of an AI Marketing Strategy in Action

In her /PROMPT presentation, Anderson shared how Jasper’s AI marketing strategy works in practice.

It all starts with a detail-rich, human-created brief.

This brief is incredibly important content. This is where we put all the knowledge, all the facts, all the research that we’ve done. The actual strategy lives here and that’s all human-created.

Meghan Keaney AndersonHead of Marketing at Jasper

As Anderson said, briefs contain a lot more than just what to create, like “make a 1,000 word blog post about our latest product launch.” She shared that at Jasper, their briefs include positioning on issues, competitive intelligence, audience research and more.

In Jasper, you can store briefs to use later by attaching them to any new project or prompt. Putting in the effort to create detailed briefs at the beginning of implementing AI into your marketing strategy will pay off in the quality of your generated content in the future.

Once the content has been reviewed and approved by the team, they get Jasper to create alternate versions and formats. For example, they could turn a blog post into LinkedIn posts, translate it into Spanish or adapt it for specific industry segments—all while keeping the core messages consistent.

From there, Anderson’s team moves content forward to final review and publishing. With all the time saved on content creation, their distribution and promotion strategy gets a lot more focus.

Top AI Marketing Strategy Takeaways

Don’t AI alone

For your AI marketing strategy to succeed and really drive business results, everyone needs to get onboard to use AI strategically and for the right reasons. Create a documented strategy, quality review process and set standards.

Go a step further and form an AI Marketing Council where members of your team can help lead the adoption and evaluation of AI across your organization.

Experiment with new use cases

AI can help you scale up rapidly, as long as you prove your concept first. If you notice a new opportunity to use AI in your marketing strategy, try it out on a small scale first. If the results are positive, quickly move to production.

Focus on human work

Thanks to AI, your human team will have much more time to focus on the things that matter for growth: Content distribution, promotion, ideation and engaging with your audience.

Use your new time savings wisely to focus on the great ideas and research that will make your AI-generated content original.

Kick Start Your AI Marketing Strategy

Whether you’re creating content, iterating on ads or investing in events, AI can be an invaluable tool to help your team get the most out of all your marketing strategies… but to do that, you need an actual AI marketing strategy!

So, stop stalling and start strategizing with Anderson’s five simple steps. And if you could use a hand with creative execution, Superside’s got your back.

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