Marketing budgets are tight and time is limited, so it’s no surprise that our clients are wary of shiny new stuff like AI. Content demands keep increasing, though, and overwhelmed marketing directors often ask us: What is the value of AI in marketing?

My short answer: It won’t replace the expertise of human marketers, but AI does a couple of marketing things well:

• It can make marketing teams more efficient in producing content.
• It can help optimize that content to boost brand visibility and help people AND machines discover your content.

Getting started with AI

Providing AI with quality inputs (better prompts) and detailed information will get you better outputs. Better inputs also lower the risk of hallucinations — that nasty little habit AI has of not just getting things wrong, but making things up.

This is why you should use a paid account on your AI platform of choice. It’s worth the investment. A paid account protects your inputs and outputs from being kept and used for machine learning.

I do not recommend ever inputting brand, company or client information into a free account.

The case for AI efficiency

There’s never enough time, right? AI helps by speeding up research and production.

For example, use it to:

• Summarize interviews and reports
• Generate topic clusters, outlines and first drafts
• Produce meta descriptions, image alt text, FAQs and social variants
• Personalize at scale with audience segment-specific copy
• Repurpose long-form assets into emails, scripts and posts

That said, always apply a human edit for brand voice, fact-checking and compliance, and to enrich the AI draft in ways only humans can.

Teams adopting an AI-assisted, human-optimized content workflow report dramatic improvements in time to execute. What that looks like for you will require measuring your experience with and without AI assistance.

Digital marketing and AI

At this point, most of us know and understand the value of SEO, or search engine optimization. Through quality content, a keyword strategy and links, SEO helps boost your website’s ranking and discoverability.

AI is adding a whole new dimension to optimization — not just by helping with SEO (think basic keyword research and drafting optimized content), but now it’s becoming necessary to optimize FOR AI to boost your brand visibility in AI search results and citations.

Here are three acronyms to know and understand in this area. Old MacDonald would be proud of this E-I-E-I-O soup:

• AIO, or AI optimization, uses artificial intelligence to help optimize content.
• AEO, or answer engine optimization, structures content so answer engines — featured snippets, voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, and AI chat results — can extract direct, accurate responses.
• GEO, or generative engine optimization, targets AI systems that synthesize answers (like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot) so your brand is understood, trusted and cited.

AIO vs. AEO vs. GEO isn’t an either/or. They and SEO are all different and yet related. And best practices are already shaping up for these new forms of optimization, but that’s a topic for another blog.

In the meantime, start with what AI can do for marketing and marcomm team efficiency. Practice better prompt writing and create a library of the best that can be shared across your team. Track your content creation time and velocity with and without the AI tools. And you’ll see the value of AI in marketing.

Want to nerd out with me on this topic? I’m happy to discuss. Prefer to talk about how Amperage can help with all these shiny new optimization practices? I can help with that, too. aschulte@amperagemarketing.com

Author Annette Schulte is Vice President of Content, an experienced writer and a subject matter expert in messaging and content strategy for Amperage Marketing + Fundraising.