
The role of AI in future marketing strategies for agencies
By Mike | 02 Aug 24
- How AI systems are shaping the future for digital marketing agencies.
- Personalisation at scale.
- Enhanced data analytics and insights.
- Optimised ad campaigns.
- Enhanced customer service and engagement.
- Content creation and curation.
- Predictive customer insights.
- Streamlined campaign management.
- AI tools you need to be using in your marketing strategies
- Ethical considerations and transparency.
- Key takeaways.
As marketing continues to evolve at a breakneck pace, artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a game-changer for agencies seeking to stay ahead of the curve. We actually have two webinars discussing how agencies can use AI to improve their marketing services already!
For agency owners, integrating AI into marketing strategies isn’t just an option—it’s becoming a necessity. But how can AI help your marketing strategies and even help with website development? Well, whether you own a digital agency or work in one, here’s everything you need to know about the role AI could play in your future marketing strategies.
How AI systems are shaping the future for digital marketing agencies.
Personalisation at scale.
One of AI’s most significant contributions to marketing is its ability to deliver personalised experiences at scale. Traditional methods of personalisation often fall short, relying on broad demographic data and manual segmentation. AI, however, leverages advanced algorithms to analyse vast amounts of data in real-time, enabling hyper-targeted marketing strategies.
What does this mean?
It means that machine learning can help you do away with boring, generic buyer personas and offer existing and new clients more tailored personas based on facts and data allowing your teams to tailor content on the site and on social media to real people that are really interested. This can lead to new opportunities and strategic partnerships for your agency.
Actionable insight.
Now’s the time to invest in AI-powered tools that can analyse customer behaviour, preferences, and interactions across various touchpoints. Then use these insights to create highly personalised content and recommendations that resonate with individual customers within the target audience. Enhance engagement, increase conversion rates and attract quality leads easily!
Enhanced data analytics and insights.
AI excels in processing and analysing large datasets far beyond human capacity. We aren’t taking anything away from your team here, but there’s only so much coffee in the world! Predictive analytics, powered by AI, can uncover patterns and trends that inform future marketing strategies. This capability allows agencies to make data-driven decisions rather than relying on gut feeling.
Why stop there?
Heather Murray, the CEO of AI for Non Techies, and absolute powerhouse of an AI genius, discussed stacking your AI tools to build automations for tasks that could take hours when relying on the mite of human creativity alone on our Cut through the AI Hype webinar. We give an overview in our Drive Growth For Your Agency Using AI blog post too.
Building automations into your own strategy, and into marketing services for clients, can save you so much time on repetitive tasks, not to mention, the human errors that may be avoided.
Actionable insight.
Implement AI analytics platforms that offer predictive modelling and trend analysis and don’t be afraid to stack the tools to get more out of them. These tools can help forecast market shifts, identify emerging opportunities, and refine marketing strategies based on data-driven insights. They can even help you identify which influencers to target during an influencer marketing campaign. In fact, agencies around the world are even using AI to help gather insight to help with more traditional advertising campaigns!
As an agency owner, you know the value of data and how it can help with your business goals, so just imagine if you could automate large parts of the process and get even more actionable data that will deliver exceptional results to your clients! Combine that data with your marketing skills and you’ll be unstoppable!
Optimised ad campaigns.
AI algorithms are increasingly used to optimise advertising campaigns, from keyword bidding in PPC to programmatic ad placements. AI can automatically adjust bids, target audiences more precisely, and allocate budgets efficiently to maximise ROI.
Actionable insight.
Now, we’d be cautious with this one. You’ll still need experienced paid people to manage the accounts as the human creativity side of ads is very much needed for this. Still, AI can help your paid peeps speed up certain aspects of account management and deliver results fast for existing and new customers alike.
Plus, with many AI tools having built-in natural language processing, you can leverage AI to help target audiences perfectly, especially if you use AI to develop enhanced data insights!
Enhanced customer service and engagement.
AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants are revolutionising customer service by providing instant, round-the-clock support. These tools can handle a wide range of customer enquiries, offer personalised recommendations, and even facilitate transactions.
These tools can help your agency battle the endless stream of enquiries on your own website, but also your clients. No matter what industry your clients are in, virtual assistants and AI-powered chatbots can be invaluable and offer more opportunities to help their customers and ultimately generate more income.
Actionable insight
Integrate AI chatbots into your agency’s customer service strategy and encourage your customers to do the same. They can improve response times, help with queries and resolve issues – all of which improve customer satisfaction.
Remember to focus on creating seamless handoffs between AI and human agents for complex queries that require a personal touch.
Content creation and curation.
AI is making strides in content creation, from generating written content to curating multimedia assets. Tools like natural language generation (NLG) can produce articles, reports, and social media posts, while AI-driven content curation tools can recommend relevant content to engage audiences.
Actionable insight.
AI isn’t fool-proof when it comes to producing content, but it often helps bring ideas to life and is ideal for a first draft. AI is a long way off from replacing your content team! Still with the right tools, and the right people using those tools, you can even create videos and photos, turn podcasts into presentations and a whole lot more!
Explore AI content creation tools to streamline your content production process, create briefs, ideate and plan the content that will help your clients succeed. AI is a powerful tool that helps you maintain a consistent flow of high-quality content if you add in the right amount of human creativity.
Our webinar – AI advantage: building profitable agency products with eight&four, a social and content agency, dives deeper into leveraging AI to boost their competitive edge – so it’s well worth a watch if you’re interested in doing the same!
Predictive customer insights.
Understanding customer behaviour is crucial for effective marketing as you know. One of the best ways of understanding customer behaviour is to look at the past. Well, guess what? AI can help you analyse historical data to predict future customer actions, such as purchasing trends or churn rates. This foresight enables agencies to tailor their strategies proactively rather than reactively.
Actionable insight.
Using AI to help understand your client’s customers is an excellent way of doing research and ensuring everything you do for your clients is targeted to their audience. No matter what industry they are in, implementing AI solutions that provide predictive analytics to anticipate customer needs and behaviours will provide key insights into the market and how you market your client’s services.
So, develop proactive marketing strategies using AI tools that address potential issues before they arise and capitalise on emerging opportunities. Ultimately, this will add the greatest value to your clients and ensure success in any and all campaigns you run.
Streamlined campaign management.
Managing multiple campaigns across various channels can be complex and time-consuming. AI can simplify this process by automating campaign management tasks, such as audience segmentation, content scheduling, and performance tracking.
AI can also help transform content into new resources for other channels. A great example of this is repurposing blog content into social media posts and email marketing campaigns.
With a few simple prompts, using some of the most basic (and cheapest) AI tools you can quickly offer your clients more assets to ensure they can target their customers in as many ways as possible.
Actionable insight.
Adopt AI-based campaign management platforms that offer automation and integration across multiple channels and use simple AI tools to create content for different channels. This will help your agency streamline operations, reduce manual effort, and ensure consistency across all marketing initiatives.
AI tools you need to be using in your marketing strategies
Now that you know what AI can do for your agency, you likely want to get started using these powerful tools. So, here’s a list of essential AI tools that you should be using in your marketing strategies moving forward whether you’re like help with content creation, scheduling, training staff, presentations or productivity, there’s an AI tool that can help.
- Chatbots (ChatGPT, Claude, Bing AI)
- Content creation (Jasper, Copy.ai, Anyword)
- Grammar checkers and rewording tools (Grammarly, Wordtune)
- Video creation and editing (Descript, Wondershare Filmora)
- Image generation (DALL·E 3, Midjourney)
- Presentations (Decktopus, Beautiful.ai, Slidesgo)
- Task and project management (Asana, Monday.com)
- Transcription and meeting assistants (Fireflies, Krisp)
- Scheduling (Reclaim, Clockwise, Motion)
- Automation (Zapier)
These AI tools will get you started on the road to perfecting your agency marketing strategy. Don’t be afraid to try new tools and explore your options, as you may just unlock the tool to boost your productivity and deliver even better services to your clients.
Ethical considerations and transparency.
Just before we leave you to start playing around with some AI tools, we wanted to mention ethical considerations and the transparency you should have with your clients.
As AI becomes more prevalent in marketing, ethical considerations and transparency are paramount. Agencies must navigate issues related to data privacy, algorithmic bias, and the responsible use of AI to maintain trust with their clients and audiences.
Establish clear guidelines for the ethical use of AI in your marketing practices within your team. Ensure transparency in how AI tools are used and communicate openly with clients about data handling and decision-making processes.
Key takeaways.
AI isn’t just about asking ChatGPT to tell you a funny joke (anymore), it’s a pivotal force reshaping the future of marketing. For agency owners, understanding and leveraging AI’s capabilities is critical to delivering more clients and streamlining in-house deliverables.
Don’t forget to check out our other resources about using AI in your agency and agency growth! AI is nothing to be scared of, it’s an extremely powerful tool that can help your agency grow. Oh and we’re Nimbus, by the way, we provide the best web hosting services for agencies in the UK!