How to Use AI in Your Digital Marketing Strategy  

AI Today 

AI technology has been present in our everyday lives for years through our devices, facial recognition, voice assistants, streaming recommendations, and social media feeds. AI has made waves more recently via chat platforms like ChatGPT. Also AI has made a very noticeable impact in the search landscape lately, though AI has been powering aspects of search engine experiences for a long time.  

The key to technology adoption is understanding its capabilities, limitations, and best practices. We have discussed the technologies and the difference between AI platforms and AI search experiences. One update from our previous discussions is that Google Bard, the company’s answer to ChatGPT, is now Gemini. Additionally, this week Google has officially started rolling out AI Overviews into search results pages in the US and is expected to have it completed by the end of next week. With these discussions on capabilities and limitations in place, let’s focus on best practices. 

Here’s the biggest hint on AI usage for digital marketing: it’s about starting points. In this blog, we look at the essentials for successful implementation including:  

• AI for content generation  
• AI for data analysis  
• Why prompts matter   

Our best practices will focus on using chat platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini, but the same principles can apply to search generative experiences (SGE) and image and product generators. 

How to Include AI: Content Generation 

Using AI for copywriting or content generation is a big topic in digital marketing, and while AI can help, a “cut and paste” approach is never advised. Search engines are now scanning to stop spam and other websites that do so. Beyond search engines and rankings being affected by the direct use of AI-generated content, you risk your user experience. 

For instance, when asking ChatGPT or Gemini about stainless steel 316 during a TopSpot training exercise, many Team Members received the same result, meaning if copied and pasted onto a website, this content would not be unique. Errors were also spotted during this exercise, with the tool using “bars” versus the industry-standard term “bar”.

AI crawls and consolidates results from the Internet and existing accessible data, so it will come across what’s used the most—information that is broad along with generic phrases. Large Language Models (LLM) powering AI also work on probability, so after receiving thousands of questions at a time it will generate an incorrect answer after a while.  

Finally, while results for stainless steel 316 gave grades, finishes, and custom lengths, they cannot predict what your business provides. This content is a fictional and generic representation but can be tailored to reflect the specific strengths and offerings of a company with human oversight and reworking.  

Digital marketers looking to create content should consider AI for:   

• Content considerations and ideas  
• Information for content guides  
• Identifying content gaps   
• Generating blog topics  

It’s all about starting points that can help Teams large or small get the ball rolling. Taking any AI content and then revising it by adding specifications, brand voice, and other things special to your business creates unique content for a helpful user experience. 

How to Include AI: Analysis 

AI is excellent for extracting elements from digital marketing tools or lead forms and quickly finding patterns and trends you can apply to your online strategies. AI can also offer predictive analysis or recommendations pending your questions or prompts. Always take caution when uploading data and avoid adding private or sensitive information to the tool. Despite encrypting data, these tools save inputted data, so consider reformatting the desired data set before uploading.  

Examples of using AI for analysis include:  

• Trends in lead data like industries, job roles, or applications  
• Compare common requests, capabilities, or similar keywords used  
• Competitive analysis of a competitor’s site based on a URL provided  

By using machine learning, these tools can help Teams save time (especially with large data sets) and find areas needing a deeper dive, trends, and other information that could improve digital marketing tactics with data-driven decisions. 

Why Prompts Matter 

What you input into any AI tool greatly affects the output, so the question or prompt you enter is key to receiving accurate and useful results. When adding a prompt, remember to:  

• Be specific and use industry terminology  
• Add business value and uniqueness where possible to differentiate results  
• Ask follow-up questions to create a conversation with the tool  

Three tactics that work well for prompts are “act as” (using personas), action statements, and B-SMART.  

For “act as,” ask the tool to assume the various roles of your customers to help understand their perspectives and pain points. For example, prompt the tool to “act as” a purchasing agent.  

By having results that reveal possible applications, challenges, and other factors important to this role, you can expand to create content that will address that users’ search queries.  

Using action statements like “outline” or “compare” can help instruct the tools to give you a usable output and avoid confusion. Additional details like adding an amount can help ensure you have plenty to work with. For example, you can use “generate five email subject lines” in your prompt, offering you options to mix, match, and make your own.  

Finally, prompts are a place for the B-SMART Method®. This proven methodology helps structure audience targeting and is useful beyond SEO and PPC. By asking for common brands, shapes/sizes/SKUs, materials, areas of industry, requirements, and types, you’re considering user intent and will receive content that will be the foundation for better intent-based content. 

The beauty of using B-SMART in AI prompts is that the tool will pull relevant searches from online, creating results that can be tailored for your customers, placed on your website and then effective in SEO efforts. It’s a feedback loop—using intent-based prompts can help create intent-based content that feeds AI systems and SEO, attracting leads in both channels. 

What’s Your Takeaway 

TopSpot’s inclusion of AI and its keys to successful use includes:  

• Ensuring output and input accuracy by checking sources (not all tools cite sources, so additional verification is required) 
• Checking potential bias in AI responses  
• Not inserting personal information and data  
• Being transparent when AI is used  
• Human review is always required 

With care and these best practices, using AI tools in your digital marketing can help Teams spark creativity and gather data to create valuable content that can impact your SEO and PPC programs.  

Still have questions? Contact your Account Team if you are a TopSpot Partner, or contact us if you want to learn more about TopSpot and how we navigate digital marketing in the age of AI.