How to Optimize Agency Marketing With AI

Want to reduce agency operating costs? Looking for ways to streamline research, analysis, and ideation processes?

In this article, you'll discover how to leverage AI tools to increase efficiency and improve creative output.

Maximizing Efficiency and Effectiveness With AI Technology

In today's fast-paced, digital world, marketers are constantly seeking ways to achieve more with less. With budgets being slashed and resources limited, finding marketing strategies that allow teams to remain efficient and effective is crucial. 

Cathy McPhillips, the Chief Growth Officer at the Marketing AI Institute, shares her insights on how artificial intelligence (AI) can help marketers navigate these challenges and maximize their output. 

Cathy's marketing journey spans over three decades, starting in advertising agencies in the 1990s. She recalls her early days working with Applebee's International, where the focus was on maximizing broadcast media presence. At the time, the goal was to secure as many weeks of mass media exposure as possible, with little regard for the actual content being produced. 

Cathy remembers when her team spent significant time and money on a TV spot, only to realize it was the worst commercial they had ever seen. This experience highlighted the need for a more strategic and data-driven approach to marketing. 

As the industry evolved, digital marketing and social media became powerful tools. These platforms provided unprecedented opportunities to test, iterate, and optimize marketing campaigns in real time. Cathy embraced this shift, recognizing the potential for data-driven decision-making and personalized customer experiences. 

She also witnessed the rise of content marketing, working closely with Joe Pulizzi at the Content Marketing Institute. Through this experience, she learned the importance of creating meaningful, consistent, relevant content that truly resonates with the target audience.

The advent of AI in marketing has taken these capabilities to new heights. With the ability to process vast amounts of data and identify patterns humans could never detect, AI has become a game-changer for marketers. 

Cathy saw this potential early on and has been at the forefront of educating marketers about AI through her work at the Marketing AI Institute. She believes that AI is not just a trend but a fundamental shift in marketing, and those who fail to adopt these technologies will be left behind. 

#1: How to Identify AI Use Cases in Marketing

The first step in optimizing agency marketing with AI is to determine where AI can be most beneficial in your marketing processes. Cathy suggests taking a step back and identifying the biggest business problems and marketing use cases. 

Begin by creating a spreadsheet that lists all the steps involved in a particular process, such as producing a podcast. Then, you can pinpoint areas where you spend significant time and money or encounter skill gaps. From there, rank the value of intelligently automating each part of the process and assess the availability and cost of AI marketing tools that can assist you.  

This prioritization exercise helps ensure that you allocate resources to the areas where they will have the greatest impact. Cathy emphasizes that the most important use cases may not always be the most obvious, and this exercise can help marketers prioritize their AI adoption efforts based on their unique needs and goals.

For example, when McPhillips and her team at the Marketing AI Institute analyzed their podcast production process, they identified 13 distinct steps required for each episode. 

By documenting these steps and assessing the time, cost, and skill requirements, they identified areas where AI could help streamline the process. They discovered that tasks like audio editing, transcription, and even voice generation could be automated using tools like Descript, saving hours of manual work and allowing the team to focus on more strategic aspects of the podcast.

#2: Segment Your Audience for Personalized Customer Experiences 

One of AI's key benefits in targeted marketing campaigns is the ability to deliver personalized customer experiences. Cathy emphasizes the importance of segmentation in achieving this goal. 

By using lead scoring tools like HubSpot, marketers can segment their audience based on engagement scores, intent scores, and various other factors. This allows them to send the right message to the right person at the right time through the right channel, increasing the relevance and effectiveness of their communications.

At the Marketing AI Institute, Cathy and her team use demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data to segment their audience. For example, they look at job title, industry, company size, website interactions, email engagement, and event attendance to create detailed profiles of their subscribers. They then use this information to tailor their content and offerings to each segment, ensuring that every touchpoint is as relevant and valuable as possible.

Additionally, by tracking which pages and resources subscribers engage with on their website, they can identify those interested in topics like content creation, advertising, or customer service. They then use this information to deliver targeted content and promotions related to those specific use cases, increasing the likelihood of conversion and customer satisfaction.

Cathy also stresses the significance of considering agency clients who may have customers in specific industries, even if the agency is not directly associated with that industry. 

For example, a marketing agency specializing in professional services may have clients serving the manufacturing industry. By leveraging AI-powered marketing segmentation, the agency can identify these clients and provide them with tailored resources and support related to manufacturing marketing. This level of personalization helps the agency deliver better results for their clients and strengthens the agency-client relationship by demonstrating a deep understanding of their unique needs and challenges.

#3: Balance Efficiency and Effectiveness 

One of the biggest challenges marketers face when adopting AI is striking the right balance between efficiency and effectiveness. While AI-powered tools can automate many tasks and save significant time and resources, it's important not to lose sight of the human element that makes marketing truly impactful. 

One tool Cathy swears by is Descript, an AI-powered audio and video editing platform. Users can edit their content with Descript by manipulating the transcript rather than the waveforms directly. This makes the editing process much more intuitive and efficient, as marketers can simply delete or rearrange the text to change the audio or video. Cathy estimates that Descript has saved her team countless hours of manual editing work, allowing them to produce more content in less time.

However, Cathy also emphasizes that just because AI can automate a task doesn't mean it should replace human input entirely. For example, while AI-powered writing tools like ChatGPT can generate content quickly and easily, Cathy and her team prefer manually writing their blog posts. They believe their unique voices, experiences, and perspectives make their content valuable to their audience, and relying too heavily on AI-generated content could dilute that value.

To find the right balance, Cathy recommends using AI to assist with specific tasks within a larger process rather than trying to automate the entire process from start to finish. For instance, AI can generate ideas, outlines, or rough drafts, which can then be refined and enhanced by human writers. Similarly, AI can analyze data and provide insights that inform human decision-making rather than making decisions autonomously.

#4: Leverage Data and AI for Success 

Data has always been critical to marketing success, but the rise of AI has made it more valuable than ever. With the ability to process and analyze vast amounts of structured and unstructured data, AI tools can help marketers gain insights and make predictions that would be impossible for humans to achieve alone. 

One powerful application of AI in marketing is predictive modeling. By mining large datasets and identifying patterns and correlations, AI algorithms can accurately predict future outcomes. 

For example, a company might use predictive modeling to identify which customers are most likely to churn and then proactively engage those customers with targeted retention campaigns. A retailer might also use predictive modeling to forecast demand for specific products and optimize their inventory and pricing strategies accordingly.

Cathy highlights the importance of leveraging unstructured data, such as social media conversations and customer reviews, to gain insights into customer behavior, sentiment, and preferences. Tools like Brand24 can help marketers monitor and analyze social media mentions of their brand, competitors, and industry keywords. By tracking sentiment scores and identifying trending topics and influencers, marketers can stay on top of the conversations that matter most to their audience and adjust their strategies accordingly.

You can also use AI to optimize lead scoring and qualification. Traditional lead scoring models rely on manual rules and criteria, which can be time-consuming to develop and maintain. 

However, tools like Akkio and MadKudu use machine learning algorithms to analyze historical data and identify the characteristics and behaviors most predictive of a lead's likelihood to convert. 

Of course, leveraging data and AI for success requires more than just investing in the right tools. It's essential to have a strong data foundation and a culture that values experimentation and continuous improvement. Marketers need to ensure that they are collecting and storing data in a way that is accurate, secure, and accessible. They also need to be willing to test new hypotheses, learn from failures, and iterate based on the insights they gain from their data.

#5: Maximize Your Marketing Team’s Output 

AI has the potential to revolutionize marketing efforts by automating tasks and enabling teams to work more collaboratively and creatively. 

One key strategy is to foster a culture of experimentation and innovation. Cathy encourages her team to dedicate time each week to exploring new tools, testing out ideas, and pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI. By creating a safe space for experimentation and failure, she believes that teams can unlock their full creative potential and discover new ways to solve problems and drive results.

Another critical factor in maximizing team output is empowering team members to take ownership of their work and make decisions autonomously. For example, Cathy gave one of her team members full creative control over the podcast production process, encouraging them to tear it apart and rebuild it more efficiently and effectively. By trusting her team to innovate and improve existing processes, Cathy freed up her own time to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Cathy also highlights the importance of cross-functional collaboration in an AI-driven marketing organization. With so many different tools and technologies in play, teams must work closely to ensure everything is integrated and aligned. 

For example, the data science team needs to work closely with the marketing team to ensure that the insights generated by AI algorithms are actionable and relevant to the business goals. Similarly, the content team needs to work closely with the SEO team to ensure that content is optimized for search engines and driving organic traffic.To facilitate this collaboration, Cathy recommends using tools like Slack and Trello to keep everyone on the same page and ensure that tasks and projects move forward smoothly. She also suggests holding regular “hackathons” or brainstorming sessions where team members from different departments can generate new ideas and solve problems creatively.

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