Savvy marketing leaders recognize that AI is a powerful tool that can be used to reshape how teams operate. But even as AI tools rapidly improve, there are still limitations in today’s technology that demand titration in how it’s used. The best marketers are those who understand how far to push the AI envelope within their business and market context.
And now is the time for marketing leaders to expand their existing skill set and develop their AI intuition—when to use it, when to lose it—to make the most of AI’s transformative power and deliver the best marketing work possible. By combining broad AI fluency through adoption with a willingness to remain agile as the technology matures, teams can thrive and make the best use of AI for the biggest impact. With that in mind, here are AI-related “do’s and don’ts” every marketing leader should know.
AI as a research assistant, not a business strategist
If teams don’t understand the context in which their business is operating, they won’t be effective marketers. The best marketing leaders are absolute experts on their own companies, with knowledge of the details of their offerings, customers, competitors, and broad industry trends. When marketers understand their business this deeply, they can build programs that align with company priorities, connect with customers, and fuel their company’s growth, making it easier to secure budget and executive buy-in.
Do use AI as a cheat sheet to stay on top of the market and competitors, and to improve business intelligence across departments, like finance and product. AI can analyze mountains of internal and external data and content it would otherwise be impossible to comb through, like companies’ annual reports, customer and competitor earnings, press releases, and newsletters. At Guild, my teams turn to AI for tasks such as market sizing, benchmarking against other marketing organizations for budgeting, and business planning and competitive analysis. AI can also be helpful with pricing research and gauging customer insights.
Don’t expect AI to replace the nuanced understanding of a business’s priorities or its context. Ultimately, teams should create their own strategies, but using AI with business context will make those strategies better and more complete. AI can’t read betweenthe lines or predict the future—only meaningful conversations, deep curiosity, and astute understanding of one’s business can do that.
Use AI as a production designer, so creatives can shine
Campaign work in marketing can quickly become rote, tying designers and writers up with tasks that are far from strategic or highly creative. All variants of ad design or ad copy can be generated by AI. It can take a first pass at any blog content, social media graphics, or resizing assets for different platforms. Let AI bring ideas to life faster and more efficiently to free up creatives to focus on developing breakthrough campaign concepts and compelling brand stories.
Do use AI to rapidly prototype visuals, generate multiple design variations, and handle time-consuming production tasks. AI excels at replicating creative direction so take advantage and use in moments where multiple iterations are needed.
Don’t rely on AI for creative inception or novel campaign ideas. This is where creatives shine. Use AI to handle the heavy lifting and transform the creative work into end product downstream so creative strategy and brand decisions are owned by creatives themselves.
Use AI to accelerate pointed insights
With AI, leaders can access an abundance of real-time data, turning marketing into a velocity engine for optimization and peak performance. The speed to insights around what’s working and what isn’t, along with the ability to move with agility, is where the real power of AI lies for marketing leaders. Whether that’s analyzing customer data to spot engagement patterns, detailed segmentation in email open rates, or digging into a competitor’s recent launch, AI helps leaders get to the root of “why this matters” faster than ever before.
Do use AI to quickly analyze performance data, competitor portfolios, or deep segmentation analysis. Be specific and give AI the full context in your prompts. Instead of asking “How did this campaign perform?” try “What is variance by audience segment in each of these ad headline click-through rates?” This is a case where AI can be a game-changer when giving pointed insights.
Don’t treat AI-generated insights as final answers. AI may be able to determine if certain creative elements performed well, but it can’t determine if that approach aligns with your strategy and broader business objective. Just because AI quickly spots a pattern doesn’t mean it requires changing the work itself. Successful marketers will need to develop the skills to quickly decipher what insights matter and why.
The marketing leaders who will truly shine in the AI era will be those who master the art of balancing technology with their human instincts. In order to be successful, they’ll need to leverage AI’s power as it exists today, and be agile enough to adapt as the rate of improvement around that technology shifts. Today, that means letting AI handle much of the heavy lifting—research, data analysis, creative production work—to improve expertise and create leverage across the marketing organization. As AI technologies rapidly evolve and mature, the best leaders will dynamically change with it so that their organizations can deliver better, faster, and more novel results for the business.
Rebecca Biestman is chief marketing officer at Guild.
