Generative AI has rapidly moved from a novelty technology to a staple of marketing tech – two out of three marketers surveyed by LinkedIn are currently using it. But only a quarter of marketers have an “extremely good” understanding of how to use AI in their day-to-day work.
Ready to move beyond the basics and delve into innovative, impactful ways you can use generative AI to make your job more efficient and enjoyable? We asked marketing leaders to share their favorite ways to use generative AI in their daily workflows, way beyond drafting LinkedIn posts. Some of their answers may surprise you.
How Do Marketers Use Generative AI?
Generative AI’s ability to automate routine tasks, analyze data, and generate content is freeing up valuable time that entrepreneurs, executives, and individuals can use to instead focus on more strategic decision-making.
1. Build and research an ideal customer profile
Understanding which buyers would be a good fit for your product or service, and knowing what makes them tick, is the cornerstone of good marketing. Coming up with the common qualities that make up your ideal customer profile (ICP) can take a lot of time and work — or it did, before generative AI.
Katie Robbert, co-founder and CEO of Trust Insights, is a big proponent of using artificial intelligence to fine-tune your ICP.
“My favorite way to use generative AI day-to-day is with an ideal customer profile. We created an efficient set of system instructions to use with a Large Language Model that will ingest data about your company, your competitors, and your customers, and give you back an ICP analysis.”
Generative AI is also useful for helping you refine your marketing strategy. “You can interact with it as a proxy for talking to customers,” Robbert says. “For example, when I’m writing a post or creating a new campaign, I’ll ask our ICP for feedback on how I can better align my efforts to address their pain points. For small businesses that don’t have resources to do intensive market research, it’s a good starting point.”
Customer experience strategist, researcher, and author Jay Baer notes that this type of research is becoming an increasingly common practice for savvy marketers.
“A well-known SaaS company built custom GPTs for each of their ICPs and trained them on customer attitudes and data. Then they ask these AI ‘customers’ to react to each potential piece of marketing and content. It’s a real-time focus group.”
2. Automate manual tasks
Eliminating busywork is one of the most powerful ways busy marketers can leverage AI. Mark Hinkle, founder and CEO of Peripety Labs, says he’s excited about creating AI agents to automate parts of his team’s workflow.
“It’s part of my ongoing effort to reduce manual tasks and improve our overall efficiency. By continuously experimenting with and integrating new AI tools, I’m able to stay ahead in our fast-paced environment and ensure that our workflows evolve with the latest technological advancements.”
Looking for an example of how you can implement AI into your workflows? Don’t obsess over taking notes while you’re brainstorming — simply record the call and put the transcript into ChatGPT or another generative AI tool to summarize and pick out action items.
3. Get a leg up on the competition
Chris Penn, co-founder and chief data scientist at Trust Insights, suggests using AI to analyze a competitor’s strategy and inform your next steps.
“We extracted 1,900 competitor job openings and fed them all to generative AI, then asked the model to infer their 12-18 month strategy based on their SEC filings plus the job openings. We were able to produce an incredibly detailed competitive analysis and an action plan based on it.”
You can also fine-tune your competitive messaging with the help of AI analysis. Check the reviews for competitor products and ask generative AI for a summary of the common negative review complaints and how your product can solve those.
4. Spot upcoming trends
Broaden the focus from discrete competitors to the broader market, and AI can help marketing teams of any size stay on top of — and even ahead of — industry trends.
“For my day-to-day work, the most helpful application of AI is research,” says Kyle Lacy, CMO at Jellyfish. “I use it for researching industry trends and formulating massive amounts of data.”
Follow his lead and use generative AI to analyze large datasets from social media, news articles, and other online sources to predict emerging trends. Then, you can create content or campaigns that align with these trends before they peak, positioning your brand as a leader in the space.
5. Research and strategize content
AI can analyze industry news, in-house and competitor content, and audience engagement data to suggest the types of content that will likely resonate with your target audience in the near future. This predictive approach can help B2B marketers stay ahead of the curve and focus on content that drives the most impact.
You can also incorporate data analysis into your content creation process by asking generative AI to analyze performance data and suggest content that aligns with proven, successful strategies.
“I’m not a math person by nature, so having AI in my corner has been a huge advantage,” says Curt Woodward, a content director at ZoomInfo. “We use AI to combine metrics like leads and pipeline into one easy-to-understand score for each asset. Then, we have AI analyze the scores and produce a value-packed memo that guides us through our next projects.”
And when it comes time to write the content pieces that are part of that strategy, AI is a huge research help.
“My favorite approach starts with using Perplexity for in-depth research. It’s incredibly efficient at gathering relevant data and insights, which forms the foundation of my content creation process,” Hinkle says.
6. Explore long-term strategies
Generative AI can also provide long-term, strategic research, delivering data-informed insights to power your marketing plans for the next quarter or next year. Prompt the AI tool to provide strategic advice for a specific period: for instance, you can tell it to “Analyze historical data and suggest marketing strategies for [insert goal] over the next [time period].”
“If you upload product or service details, ChatGPT does a fantastic job of forecasting sales under different possible economic conditions. It’s speculative, but it makes me think about possibilities I hadn’t considered,” says Mark Schaefer, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions.
With those possibilities in mind, you can apply the next-level creative thinking and specific insights that only an experienced marketer can bring to the table.
7. Repurpose content
It’s a smart move to repurpose the insights from a webinar, podcast, or other event into additional content formats. It’s even smarter to use AI to do it quickly.
“Generative AI is great for performing mundane tasks efficiently,” says Avrohom Gottheil, founder and CEO of AskTheCEO Media.
“I have AI transcribe audio from my podcasts and generate summaries, highlights, and graphics which I then use to create posts and a newsletter.”
“Previously, I would need a whole team to do what I can do on my own in about an hour. Essentially, generative AI frees me up to do what I do best — to get my clients heard over the noise on social media,” he says.
8. Fine-tune writing
Using generative AI to create mountains of hasty content can result in generic pieces lacking human insight. The real power of AI in content creation comes from its ability to make your own writing stronger.
Instead of prompting AI to create a full first draft, consider feeding it what you’ve written and ask it for ways to improve what you already have.
“I’m a writer and love having a talented editor by my side,” Schaefer says. “I don’t use AI to create drafts, but it helps me ‘sweeten’ my writing by making clumsy sentences clearer, more compelling, and fun.”
“I’m a writer and love having a talented editor by my side. I don’t use AI to create drafts, but it helps me ‘sweeten’ my writing by making clumsy sentences clearer, more compelling, and fun.”
9. Fill in the gaps
Many marketing teams are getting by with less — fewer tools, fewer team members, and smaller budgets. Whether you work on a team of dozens or act as a team of one, the power of AI can act as a force multiplier and help fill gaps.
Ann Handley, chief content officer of MarketingProfs, uses AI to create frameworks and visuals for her ideas.
“Like many B2B marketers, I’m a communicator and a writer first; it’s how I think. So an intuitive tool that fills in the blanks and shores up skills for me — in this case, it helps me have a more visual brain — is incredibly useful.”
The best use case of AI, according to Handley, is acting as a reinforcement. “That, to me, is the true innovation of AI: the small but important ways that it can help us be stronger, better communicators, helping us unexpectedly access those parts of ourselves we thought we didn’t have,” she says.
10. Streamline video creation
While videos are a high-performing content format, creating them can be much more time-consuming and expensive than other formats. But AI tools can streamline and optimize much of the surrounding work, creating videos more efficiently than ever.
“We find new AI-powered video editing platforms extremely helpful in streamlining production while enhancing creativity and efficiency,” says Irene Lyakovetsy, founder and principal of SaugaTalks.
The benefit of AI for video production is that it enables Lyavkovetsky’s team to maintain strategic focus instead of getting lost in technical details.
“These tools enable us to quickly create polished, engaging content, allowing us to focus more on delivering impactful messages and less on technicalities.”
“By automating repetitive tasks and providing smart editing suggestions, AI empowers our team to bring innovative ideas to life with greater ease and precision.”
Hinkle has also found value in using AI to create short-form videos as a content multiplier.
“Another use case I’ve encountered combines AI tools to clone oneself for short-form video content, allowing marketers to maintain their brand consistently across multiple platforms while dramatically increasing their content output,” he says. “It’s a game-changer for creating personalized client outreach, marketing campaigns, and even internal communications at scale — all while preserving the authenticity of the presenter.”
11. Customize and repeat
If you can’t find a tool to do what you need, the beauty of generative AI is that often, you can create your own solutions.
“Building custom GPTs with ChatGPT is an often overlooked superpower in B2B marketing,” says Paul Roetzer, founder and CEO of Marketing AI Institute.
A custom GPT is basically a personalized AI assistant that you train to perform a specific task. Then, when you need to do the task again, you don’t have to start a new prompt from scratch. Here are some of the things you can build a custom GPT to help with:
- Content written in a specific style or around a specific event
- Acting as a particular persona for instant feedback
- Analyze data to generate reports
- Branding activities
- Strategic planning
“With some knowledge and experience, plus natural language, anyone can build a custom GPT to drive efficiency, productivity, and innovation.”
12. Boost your account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns
A successful ABM strategy is all about focusing on the right accounts and hitting them with a personalized campaign. Lacy likes to use AI to speed up the process of researching those key accounts.
“Gen AI can sift through massive amounts of data to deliver reporting on targeted accounts’ earnings reports, organizational structure, and anything you can think of. This has freed up massive amounts of time for reps, marketing, and research teams to focus on other projects.”
Generative AI can also craft highly personalized content for ABM campaigns, such as custom emails, landing pages, and even tailored whitepapers. By leveraging AI to create bespoke content for key accounts, B2B marketers can scale their efforts while maintaining a high degree of personalization.
Tools like ZoomInfo Copilot drive relevant personalization at scale with lightning speed. Now, go-to-market teams can rely on Copilot to surface target accounts that are showing a high likelihood to buy, based on real-time data and insights — and use Copilot’s AI email generator to craft outreach that speaks directly to the account’s goals and priorities.
The Role of Data Quality in Marketing AI
Without quality data, companies risk creating inconsistent and inaccurate results at a speed and scale that quickly gets out of control.
Quality data is the essential ingredient for generative AI to fulfill its highest potential. Because GenAI is based on large language models that are primed to give human users satisfying answers, it’s disturbingly common for models working with the wrong data to “hallucinate” inaccurate results at scale, amplifying run-of-the-mill errors in ways we can’t always understand.
Integrating your own team’s data with comprehensive, constantly updated, privacy-compliant sources like ZoomInfo, on the other hand, can help ensure that GenAI efforts for business are working with the best possible inputs and giving you the most trustworthy results.
With over 300 data points and attributes on each company profile that reveal insights you won’t find anywhere else, we make it easy to make the right decisions based on a solid foundation of data.