Since ChatGPT’s emerger, generative AI has been a no. 1 topic on everybody’s tongues. And by “everybody’s,” I mean not only those in the tech world, who have been actively interested in artificial intelligence for a long time now, but people from various industries, with all kinds of backgrounds, many of whom didn’t even know much about AI until recently. That’s not surprising, though. After all, we’re talking about the groundbreaking technology that has every potential to significantly impact various aspects of everyone’s lives, including — or should I say starting with — the way we work.
And it’s not just a matter of some indefinite future anymore. The generative AI revolution is here. Especially during the past few months, the list of companies that have invested in this technology has been expanding rapidly — and it still does, to be precise. According to the report by MarketsandMarkets, currently (2023), the Gen AI market value sits at around USD 11.3 billion and is expected to reach USD 51.8 billion by 2028, growing at a CAGR of 35.6% during those five years!
One of the fields where generative artificial intelligence is gaining particular traction is marketing. No wonder, considering that even though currently available models are still quite far from perfection, they’re already showcasing awe-inspiring abilities in automating tasks, personalizing experiences, and generating creative content.
And clearly, marketers notice and appreciate those abilities. More and more of them happily incorporate gen-AI-powered marketing tools in their everyday work — and all indicate that this trend will continue.
So, let’s take a closer look at generative AI in marketing to better understand why it is gaining such popularity, how exactly it impacts marketers’ work, and what kind of gen-AI-powered tools are currently available on the market.
Generative AI’s marketing skills
The growing popularity of generative-AI-powered marketing tools seems to be somewhat natural. I mean, there’s this field that requires tons of content, creativity, data analysis, drawing conclusions, smart decision-making, optimization, etc. — and then comes the technology that can help us with all of that. Better, in some cases, it can almost do it for us.
Why almost? That’s an important thing to note. Even though powerful and impressive, in its current form, generative AI is not yet ready to take over marketers’ tasks. It still hallucinates, still makes mistakes, and therefore is far from replacing experienced content creators or any other marketing specialist. However, it can give them strong drafts to work on, significantly speeding up the process of preparing marketing materials, allowing teams to focus on more demanding tasks, and — consequently — boosting their efficiency.
What’s also crucial here is how generative AI’s users phrase their prompts. The better they specify their requests, the more accurate outcomes they can get. Yes, generative AI models are trained on vast data sets. Still, they don’t know the internal details and nuances of campaigns run by marketers, such as their target audience characteristics, the campaign’s background, business goals, etc. This said, taking time to prepare a detailed prompt is key. Think of it as explaining the campaign assumptions to a new marketing team member that needs to be properly introduced to the topic before they can bring value to the project.
Okay, but now, precisely — what kind of support can marketers expect from generative AI?
Generative AI as a content writing assistant
Thanks to its ability to generate diverse text forms, Gen AI can support marketers in various content-related tasks. It can help them figure out the next topics to cover on the blog, come up with catchy titles for new articles, product names, product descriptions, or interview questions, but also create content briefs or outlines. Of course, generative AI is also highly useful while writing social media posts, emails, articles, and other content. Actually, it could just generate them and relieve marketers from writing tasks, but, as mentioned before, at this point, in the vast majority of cases, such AI-generated content still needs a human writer’s touch (in fact, usually lots of it).
Read also: Is Llama 2 Better Than GPT Models?
Generative AI for SEO
Generative AI can also support marketers in terms of SEO. Give it a content brief, and it’ll suggest phrases worth using in the text. Give it an article along with the required phrases, and it will analyze the current keyword saturation and even suggest how to enhance it. It can also extract the keywords from existing articles — so marketers can check what phrases were used in older articles on their blog or what phrases competitors use in their content.
Generative AI for sound, image, and video creation
We’ve already discussed Gen AI’s abilities in terms of creating written content but what about sounds and visuals? Of course, there are models for that, too! E.g., DALL-E-2 or Midjourney for image generation, WaveNet for sound generation, and BigGAN, StyleGAN, and NVIDIA GauGAN2 for video generation, to name a few. With those, marketers can quickly create audio and video content for websites, social media channels, ads, or other marketing activities.
A great example of the above capabilities is quite an unusual marketing campaign launched recently by the Polish brand Half Price. Why unusual?
First, the entire campaign was based on AI-generated content (precisely, AI-generated images). But okay, even though that’s not a standard yet, that shouldn’t be surprising considering what we’re discussing here. The thing is, the “photos” used by Half Price were so realistic that most likely nobody would ever know they were generated by AI — if not for the fact that the company used that information to emphasize its marketing message. What they did was they captioned the photos with texts saying, “The only real thing about this photo is emotions (…); for the rest, we thank artificial intelligence.” That’s a pretty smart way to underline the power of generative AI while successfully conducting the campaign’s message, don’t you think?
Generative AI in conceptual work and brainstorming
Gen AI can also be helpful in conceptual work and brainstorming. Say a marketer gets stuck while planning a new campaign and needs someone to talk their vision through or turn it into an action plan. They can share their thoughts with generative AI and get suggestions to help them move forward with the project. In this context, generative AI serves as an additional team member who can convey a fresh point of view or help marketers develop new ideas based on what they’ve already prepared.
Generative AI’s marketing data analysis skills
Gathering and analyzing data to make informed decisions and optimize marketing activities is fundamental to every marketer’s work. The good news is that generative AI can make it much easier, saving specialists tons of precious time and eliminating potential oversights. It can go through big amounts of data in no time and help them draw conclusions, identify trends, prepare summaries, write down highlights, and so on. Just like that, those tough, time-consuming tasks can be done in a matter of minutes.
Read also: Open-source vs. OpenAI. 8 best open-source alternatives to GPT
Generative-AI-powered marketing tools worth trying
Let me start with a note here: the deeper you dig, the more generative-AI-powered marketing tools you’ll find. The list of such solutions is already shockingly long; hence I wouldn’t be able to cover them all without turning this article into an ebook. Also, there are plenty of tools with similar capabilities, and my goal here is not to list everything that’s out on the market but rather to give you an idea of what kinds of tools are available.
Well-known marketing tools adopting generative AI
Apart from all the new solutions emerging on the market, many brands that marketers are already familiar with are incorporating generative AI into their offers.
Generative AI in SurferSEO
SurferSEO uses a Gen AI model trained on a massive dataset of websites that have been ranked well in search engines to analyze a website’s content and suggest ways to improve its SEO. Thanks to that, SurferSEO can help marketers by:
- identifying keywords that are relevant to a website’s content,
- suggesting ways to improve the use of keywords in a website’s content,
- identifying opportunities to improve a website’s structure and navigation,
- suggesting ways to improve a website’s loading speed.
Grammarly’s generative AI feature
This popular writing assistant has been using artificial intelligence since 2015, but lately, its creators enhanced it with a new generative-AI-powered (precisely, GPT-3-powered) feature called GrammarlyGO. The feature (currently available in the beta version) comes with a wide range of abilities, such as generating polished content drafts, ideas, and outlines, rewriting, suggesting content structure, and more. Apparently, it can even summarize emails, understand their context and prepare contextually matched responses! Moreover, it can communicate from within any application or system on which it is installed.
Generative AI in Canva
Canva introduced its first generative-AI-powered feature — Text to Image — in November 2022. Since then, the tool has been enriched with three more GPT-3-based features:
- Magic Edit that helps the users improve the quality of images;
- Translate, which, as the name indicates, can translate text from one language to another,
- Magic Write, which can generate text adjusted to the user’s requirements regarding topic, style, and tone;
Generative AI in Microsoft tools
Earlier this year, also the well-known tech giant introduced its generative-AI-powered tool — Microsoft Copilot, which uses Megatron-Turing NLG — a model based on the GPT models family. As we can read in Microsoft’s article dated March 16th, 2023:
“Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 in two ways. It works alongside you, embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps you use every day — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more — to unleash creativity, unlock productivity, and uplevel skills. Today we’re also announcing an entirely new experience: Business Chat. Business Chat works across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps, and your data — your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and contacts — to do things you’ve never been able to do before. You can give it natural language prompts like “Tell my team how we updated the product strategy,” and it will generate a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails, and chat threads.”
Generative-AI-powered Google apps
Of course, Google has some hot gen-AI-powered news for us, too. The experimental version of the first one, Google Bard, is already available in the US. It’s an LLM-based chatbot that can conduct human-like conversations and generate various texts based on a wide range of prompts and questions. It works similarly to ChatGPT; however, it has one significant advantage over Open AI’s tool — it’s connected to Google Search, which means it can access up-to-date, real-world information and thus provide more accurate answers. When asked, it claims it can also process images — except… it can’t. It couldn’t process any of my prompts related to images, each time explaining that it’s still learning and can’t help me with that yet. Well, hopefully soon enough!
But that’s not all from Google. They’re also working on AI-powered writing features in Docs and Gmail, but sadly, those are available only to, as Google calls them, “trusted testers” now. The project was announced already in March this year, but it looks like not much has changed since then. All we know now is that the company plans to go beyond Docs and Gmail and integrate generative AI into other Google Workspace apps, such as Sheets and Slides. And, from what we can see in the below video promoting those new AI-powered features, we sure have something to look forward to.
There’s one more! The last (but not least) of Google’s ongoing plans is adopting generative AI into its advertising business to create novel, more personalized ad campaigns. Sadly, this feature isn’t available yet, but the company states it will be rolled out in the coming months.
HubSpot’s generative AI tools
The first generative AI HubSpot feature, the Content AI tool, was launched in 2019. Since then, the company introduced a few other gen-AI-powered features, such as Sales AI and Customer AI. What’s interesting, each of them is based on different generative AI models:
- Content AI, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, can generate blog posts, social media posts, and other types of content.
- Sales AI, based on Google’s BERT neural network, is aimed at helping sales teams close more deals. Its abilities include generating personalized sales emails, identifying and qualifying leads, and creating presentations.
- Customer AI, powered by Microsoft’s Turing NLG natural language generation model, helps customer service teams provide better support by generating responses to customer inquiries, identifying and resolving customer issues, and creating knowledge articles
Generative-AI-powered Jasper.ai
Jasper is a generative AI tool that can generate various creative content, suggest content ideas, answer questions, translate languages, and more. Initially, it was powered by a so-called rule-based system which was much less effective than generative AI. The company switched to Gen AI in 2021 by adopting the GPT-3 model, which was later (2022) upgraded to GPT-3,5.
ChatGPT in marketing
Although ChatGPT doesn’t really fit into the category of “brands incorporating generative AI into their offer,” it is well-known and widely used by marketers, so it deserves to be mentioned here. The free version of this tool is currently based on the GPT-3,5 model.
Just like the aforementioned Google Bard, ChatGPT can conduct human-like conversations and generate a wide variety of texts, including artistic and creative content, answers to various questions, summaries, etc. It’s worth remembering, though, that it is trained on data reaching only back to 2021, plus it doesn’t have access to the internet; thus, its answers may not always be as accurate as we’d wish. Still, it is a powerful tool that can support marketers in content writing, conceptual work, brainstorming, processing large amounts of data, etc.
What’s worth mentioning here, ChatGPT is also available in an upgraded, GPT-4-based version — however, this one can be accessed only through a paid subscription. It’s worth considering, though, as the GPT-4 model comes with many improvements, including widened knowledge and broadened capabilities — e.g., accepting images as inputs, which opens up a great range of possibilities for using ChatGpt in marketing.
20 examples of generative AI tools for marketing
Let’s move on to the lesser-known generative AI tools. Some have been present on the market already for a while but are gaining popularity only recently; others first saw the light of the day barely a few months ago. But most of them have one thing in common: they’ll most likely be developing along with the generative AI models, so we can expect them to get better and better in time.
Soundraw allows users with no music production knowledge to create music, sounds, and effects. It is based on WaveNet, a generative AI model developed by Google AI.
Kaiber AI is an AI creative lab consisting of several tools for creating and editing various types of audio and visual content, such as visual stories, music videos, animations, songs, etc. The tool is powered by Diffusion Models.
Marketo is a marketing automation platform for lead management, email marketing, social media marketing, and marketing analytics. It’s based on a generative AI model called Generative AI Services.
LivePerson is a platform providing several generative-AI-powered products, including two marketing tool suites. LivePerson Marketing Automation — for automating marketing campaigns (sending email campaigns, creating landing pages, and tracking results) and LivePerson Customer Journey Analytics that helps businesses to understand how customers interact with their brand across multiple channels.
Article Forge is a tool that uses generative AI to create human-like, grammatically correct, and semantically meaningful marketing content (articles, blog posts, and other types of written content).
Evolv AI Platform is a tool suite for text, image, and code generation — according to its provider, all tailored to the specific needs of a given business. The platform is powered by a proprietary generative AI model.
Scalenut is a platform for content research, analysis, and generation. It can be used for both written and visual (no video, though) content creation, keyword research, and other content-creation-related tasks. E.g., it can identify potential content issues and provide recommendations for improvement. The platform uses a generative AI model called LaMDA.
AI Enrich for Acrolinx is a generative-AI-powered solution for enterprises, allowing them to use Gen AI as part of their larger content supply chain. It can be used to generate or improve audience-focused content, as well as segment it by intended use and target audience.
Chatfuel allows its users to create chatbots able to hold natural-sounding conversations. The tool is based on a number of different models, including GPT-3, GANs, and Transformer.
Pro Rank Tracker is a strong SEO tool that uses various AI technologies to track websites’ performance in search engines and provide users with information on their website’s ranking, traffic, and keywords.
Personalize helps its users personalize their website’s content for each individual visitor. To do so, the tool analyzes the visitor’s past behavior and interests and then uses this knowledge to select the content which is most likely to resonate with this person.
Abtesting.ai is a tool for testing different versions of the website’s copy to see which performs better. It uses GPT-3 to generate alternative text variants; however, it can handle A/B tests thanks to combining GPT with other technologies, including machine learning.
Usetopic helps content writers in finding topics to write about. It analyzes existing content on the website and suggests related topics. It uses GPT-3 to generate content briefs.
Synthesia allows its users to generate videos with realistic text-to-speech voiceovers. It also uses lip-syncing to ensure that the generated voices match the movements of the avatar’s mouth. It uses Google’s Text-to-Speech (TTS) generative AI model.
Descript can be used for editing and transcribing videos. Thanks to AI, it automatically transcribes videos and then enables the user to edit the transcripts. Descript uses several Gen AI models, which are not publicly disclosed.
Type Studio helps in creating custom fonts. It allows the user to customize the look and feel of existing fonts or create their own fonts from scratch. The tool uses several generative AI models and NLP.
Designs.ai allows its users to create custom designs. They can do that by customizing existing layouts or creating their own designs from scratch. The tool, similar to the two above, uses a mix of several Gen AI models.
Rephrase.ai, as the name suggests, can rephrase written content. It simply generates a new version of the text provided by the user. The tool uses various generative AI models, including GANs and Transformers.
Phrasee is another tool that combines several various generative AI models. It helps marketers find the right words to use in their marketing copy — it analyzes the user’s target audience and suggests words that are likely to resonate with them. Sounds like a helpful tool for improving the click-through rate of marketing campaigns!
Read also: Building a generative AI platform in practice — read the interview with Caju AI
Generative AI in marketing — final thoughts
If you had any doubts at the beginning of this read, I’d risk assuming that now you’re ready to agree with me: the generative AI revolution is here. Gen AI stormed into the world of marketing with a bang and wasted no time in making itself at home.
The thing is, most of us here in this marketing world have nothing against it. As a marketer myself, I can tell you that the scale of support that generative AI brings into our work makes this fine piece of tech really hard not to like. Even if sometimes we get a little worried it may steal our jobs one day.
But that day is not yet here. Today generative AI is a super powerful, priceless tool that significantly speeds up and eases many tedious tasks and allows specialists to focus on more important things. And, consequently, to be more productive than ever before.
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