Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the way we live. From virtual assistants to self-driving cars, AI-powered technology is transforming us into a more efficient species by automating mundane tasks, providing personalized recommendations, and helping us make informed decisions.

But while AI is helping us turn on the lights by shouting and making it easier to find a cool disco to boogie with friends, SEOs and content marketers could have a tough time adapting to the rapid changes. With the possibility of AI providing custom-generated responses to digital search queries, folks might soon be less motivated to click through to your website to find the answer they’re looking for. 

Tech giants Microsoft and Google are starting to roll out AI to power their search engines, making the experience of looking for stuff online more intuitive. From a user perspective, this is great. Why bother sifting through endless search engine results when you can have AI explain what you wanna know directly? 

But this change might not be so great for marketers. AI is coming to search. This could spell trouble for those of us who rely on how search currently works to rank our content and drive organic traffic to our site. What happens if or when today’s search engine results page (SERP) goes away? How do we—as marketers—get that organic juice back? 

How is AI changing search engines and SEO marketing?

So far in 2023, we’ve seen the fastest advances in conversational AI since the first iteration of ELIZA was created by Joseph Weizenbaum in the 1960s. Like, wildly fast. 

Today, generative AI chatbots can answer questions about almost anything. In fact, ChatGPT was able to pass the United States Medical Licensing Exam. (“That’s ‘Dr. GPT’ to you.”). 

At the forefront of this race to AI perfection sit Google and Microsoft. The creation of Bard and “the new Bing”, respectively, are part of a broader competition between the two search giants for dominance in the technology sector. And both companies are throwing down serious Benjamins in research and development in an attempt to come out on top. 

Microsoft came out swinging earlier this year with a commitment of $10 billion to OpenAI, continuing their partnership on GPT—the large language model (LLM) which powers ChatGPT and (now) the AI features of Bing.

Not to be outdone by Microsoft, Google invested upwards of $400 million in ChatGPT rival Anthropic, and news outlets predict it will invest approximately $300 billion in AI by 2028— including its own chatbot, Bard.

Said former Google VP Jim Lecinkski:

If we are the leading search engine and this is a new attribute, a new feature, a new characteristic of search engines, we want to make sure that we’re in this race as well.

While it remains to be seen which company will ultimately come out on top, it’s clear that both Google and Microsoft will continue to fuse artificial intelligence into their search engines and, in doing so, completely transform the way people find stuff online. 

With the merger of AI and search engines, the race to hit the top of Google’s page-one SERP could be a thing of the past. (And sooner than we think.) 

Here’s the skinny: What AI-driven search means for SEO experts and marketers

For years, marketers have focused on creating search-optimized content to generate organic traffic to our websites. 

Using SEO principles like keyword density and optimized title tags (and with a little bit of luck), we could appease the unknowable deities of algorithms and be blessed with a position amongst the top results. Let us pray.

But if Microsoft and Google start using AI to generate answers to queries (and links and ads disappear from SERPs), what the heck are marketers supposed to do? Will creating high-quality, informative, and engaging content that addresses the needs and interests of your target audience still help us drive traffic? Or should we tear down our blogs and sell the copper wiring for scrap?

Mike Kaput at the Marketing AI Institute explained the emerging challenge thusly:

Scary. And it begs another question: Instead of creating content for the current algorithms, will marketers need to start writing to appeal to (or appease) the AI? 

There’s no definitive answer yet on how marketers should handle AI in search—yet. As with most things, significant changes come with positives and negatives. AI can help improve a customer’s experience with a business by personalizing content and enhancing the quality of interactions. It can also increase competition as more companies turn to AI to churn out content. (Of course, the quality of said content can be a whole different story.)

AI-powered search engines for SEO folks to keep an eye on

Geez. Just when you’ve cracked the search algorithm code, in walks AI to screw it all up again.

But before you give up your day job and go work in a kibbutz, let’s take a quick look at how a few search engines plan to integrate AI into search results—and what it’ll mean for your organic traffic.  

Microsoft’s Bing

While the prospect of Bing integrating generative AI in search results is a lil’ worrisome, Microsoft claims its goal is actually to drive more traffic to publishers and assist in increasing revenue. 

First, we want to drive more traffic to publishers in this new world of search. It is a top goal for us, and we measure success in part by how much traffic we are sending from the new Bing/Edge. 

Second, we want to increase revenue to publishers. We seek to do this by both driving more traffic to them through new features like chat and answers and by also pioneering the future of advertising in these new mediums… 

Lastly, we want to go about this in collaborative fashion working with the industry to continue to foster a healthy ecosystem.

Huh. Maybe this “AI search” thing isn’t gonna be so scary, after all?

Microsoft has already released a new version of Bing integrated with GPT, and continues to invest to make it a more competitive alternative to Google—which currently dominates the search engine market. As of March 2023, Google holds 85.53% of the market desktop share, while Bing clings to the bottom rung at 8.23%. But Bing has been faster to market with AI, and it’s got Google spooked—so, we’ll wait with bated breath to see what happens.

With these recent updates and improvements, Bing is becoming a more robust and versatile tool for users searching for information online. This opens up a whole world of opportunities for marketers to explore new channels and strategies.

Google’s Bard

For most of its 25-ish-year history, Google has comfortably claimed the majority share of the search engine market. There’s a reason why we use Google as a verb and Bing still makes us think of Chandler on Friends. 

But for the first time in a long time, Google is having their reign is threatened by AI-enhanced competitors like Bing. It explains why they scrambled to release Bard after ChatGPT amassed one million users in the first five days of its launch—and 100 million in its first two months.

Although perhaps not as sophisticated as some alternatives, Bard has the benefit of a more extensive database and can provide real-time, up-to-date information where other chatbots might not. (Version 4.0 of ChatGPT, for example, is only trained on data up to 2021.)

Since most of Google’s revenue comes from ads, many question how this will impact Google, marketers, and businesses relying on revenue from paid advertising. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, “Google executives have stressed that search products using conversational AI features should not upset website owners, in part by including source links.”

Again, good news for marketers—but until we know for sure, best be prepared for changes.

Waldo

Waldo is a new, AI-powered search engine—and it’s interesting because it does two noteworthy things. 

First, before providing you with results, it asks you to drill down your queries with a few clicks. Folks often use very generic keywords that could yield a number of different results, some of which are likely to be wrong. Waldo avoids that by trying to help pinpoint exactly what type of responses you’re seeking. 

Waldo also provides answers in the form of a conversation (instead of 10 links to random websites) and cites its sources. As it stands, this is fundamentally different from how Google and Bing work.

And—unlike other popular search engines—Waldo doesn’t rely on advertising as a primary revenue source. Instead, it operates on a subscription-based model, where users pay a monthly fee to access the search engine. (There’s also a free version if you’d like to take it for a test run.)

This approach allows Waldo to prioritize user privacy and level the playing field with organic search results without targeted ads or tracking. (What a concept!)

So, what does this mean for marketers? Since Waldo is (mostly) a paid service and allows users to hyper-tune their search, it encourages users to be more engaged and invested in what Waldo serves up to them. And isn’t that exactly the type of potential customers you would want to see your business’s name in the search result? (Go grab a cloth—you’re drooling.)

What can marketers do to remain relevant in the age of AI SEO?

As search engines continue to integrate AI chatbots to provide answers and information, what can you—the marketer—do to adapt and prepare for this seismic shift?

More thoughts from Mike:

Next, we’ll get into a few things you can do to stay relevant and continue to drive organic web traffic. (Spoiler alert: It mostly comes down to good content and effective storytelling.)

Create content that is high-quality and unreplicable

(Is “unreplicable” even a word?) If you create something totally original and true to your brand that no one can duplicate (irreplicable? unduplicable?) then you’ll always be at the top of search results. Full stop. This is usually best achieved with original research. Study or survey your audience to discover what they really care about and share the results with them. 

Quality matters, too. As search engines increasingly prioritize generating accurate and reliable content, creating well-researched, authoritative content is more critical than ever. 

At the end of the day (at least for now), any content published on the web will still require a human touch. If you’ve used ChatGPT or any other large language models, you know the outputs can be functional, but sometimes dull or repetitive. AI-generated content is now the baseline for quality—so make sure yours is a cut above.

Build affinity for your brand

Your brand is the most important thing you have going for you, so use it to your advantage. Let your audience know what your company stands for—its values, and its philosophy. This helps build the emotional connection your customers want and is one of the best ways to create a lasting relationship with your audience. 

You can do this by telling stories that highlight the humans behind your brand. Think what TOMS did for the buy-one-give-one model. People flocked to buy TOMS shoes because they knew they were helping someone with their purchase. It resonated. Brand affinity was huge.

Connect with your audience

Build up your community by making lasting connections with your audience. Social media is the quickest and best place to start. If search is going the way of branded content, then make sure your brand is known to your audience. And rallying a community around your brand will help you get seen and heard, even through unbranded searches. 

Optimize your content

The bread ‘n butter of search engines is to help users find high-quality, useful content. So it stands to reason that the better your content is, the more likely search engines will surface it in response to searches.

“Well, sure,” you’re probably thinking. “I know my content is sick, but how do I convince the search engines of that?”

Optimize! (And stop saying “sick,” wouldya?)

• Structure your content so it’s easy for search engines to understand it and any relevant context.
• Keep your content well-organized with clear headings and a logical structure.
• Make sure your content is relevant and aligned with user intent by answering questions, addressing common pain points, and making it easy to read.

By optimizing your content, you’re giving it the best chance of being cherry-picked by search engines and displayed on results pages, whether those results take the form of snippets, free-form text, or interpretative dance video clips. (Hey, you never know).

Emphasize entity-based optimization

Generative AI models have a strong understanding of entities, such as people, places, and things. Leverage this by focusing on entity-based optimization and integrating it into your content naturally. 

Many content creators will return to storytelling as a way to bring products to life and capture the attention of generative AI. Don’t let your storytelling go to waste! Take advantage of schema markups to provide search engines with structured data about entities and optimize entity-related metadata. 

Marketers (and anybody who cares about SEO) need to embrace change in AI search 

As Bob Dylan so eloquently put it in the key of C major: Change is a-comin’. 

It’s impossible to ignore how rapid advancements in AI tools are revolutionizing the marketing landscape as a whole. We need to recognize the transformative potential of AI and prepare ourselves for the ch-ch-changes it brings. 

The rise of AI-powered search engines poses both opportunities and challenges. You can embrace ’em and become unduplicable—or you risk becoming nonessential. (That’s when you can start looking at flights to Haifa). Keeping up requires a shift in how you strategize for search, optimization, and engagement.

The key lies in finding the right balance between human creativity and AI-driven capabilities. And if you stay adaptable, open to innovation, and proactive in understanding and leveraging AI technologies, you’ll thrive in the age of AI-driven SEO.

Filling out a templated campaign brief. (What are the KPIs, dangit?) Scrollin’ endlessly through cheesy stock images. Drafting alternative email subject lines and ad copy. Not exactly Mad Men, is it?

So: What if you could just… not?

Not write that landing page. Not design that image. Not build that campaign strategy.

That’s exactly what our hosts, Pete Housely and James Thomson, aim to find out in the very first episode of Unprompted. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Smart Copy can spin up everything from copy and imagery to a full-blown advertising plan. Could AI actually, seriously, build a whole marketing campaign on its own?

Listen as we put robots to the test, and task our marketing team with building a campaign—using only AI. There’s uncomfortable laughter, startled gasps… and even a few elephants. Listen to the episode to find out whether AI marketing can compete with ol’ fashioned human marketing, or read the transcript below.

(We’ve also embedded a bunch of the stuff we talk about in the episode—so be sure to scroll either way.)

Episode 1: Can You Not?

[00:00:00] Pete: Hey marketers! Welcome to Unprompted: a podcast about AI marketing and you. I’m Pete Housley, CMO of Unbounce. Unbounce is a landing page builder with AI technologies to help you build landing pages and optimize, and lots of other very cool AI tools.

This week I’m delighted to have James Thomson co-host with me. James is our AI enhanced creative director who runs an in-house content and PR shop. James, how the heck are you doing today? 

[00:01:30] James: Oh, great. Thanks, Pete. I’m not gonna share which parts of me are AI enhanced, but just know that it’s the best parts. 

[00:01:35] Pete: Just wondering if you had your AI Wheaties for breakfast today? Cuz you’re gonna need ’em. 

[00:01:39] James: I, I sure am, yeah. It took me 16 megabytes to finish that bowl. 

[00:01:43] Pete: For sure. Nice. So in today’s episode, we’re putting robots to the test. We’re sending off my team of marketing gurus to do a little exercise, which we’re gonna call, can you not?

[00:01:58] James: That’s right, Pete. AI is automating so many of our tasks as marketers tasks that used to take us days, maybe even weeks. It really does make you think like, are we able to just not do a lot of things we used to? Like design, like write, copy, strategize… As marketers, are we able to use AI and just not do those things going forward?

[00:02:19] Pete: We’re going to hear a little bit about that later. First, what the heck is going on in the world of AI marketing? 

[00:02:31] James: Wow. I think it’s moving so fast. So much is happening all the time. Sometimes it’s difficult to keep up, but very exciting time to be, especially in the creative industry where we have the ability to leverage some of these tools as part of our toolkits.

Um, speaking on behalf of someone who runs a, a bit of an in-house creative agency here at Unbounce, always looking for opportunities to adopt some of these new technologies and tools to augment our processes, get better results at the end of it as well. And I think AI-based tools are no different to that.

So I’m, I’m really personally excited for the opportunities this gives us as, as creatives, especially on my team. And how we may be able to do more with less and get better results at the end of it out of our campaigns as well. 

[00:03:13] Pete: James, I know for a fact in this series we’re going to be exploring a lot about the importance of the inputs in AI marketing and how we do have to structure our queries and our layers accordingly to really get the outputs that we’re looking for.

That reminds me of a great example out there of some of the best AI marketing that we’ve seen, and it happens to come from a purpose-driven brand called GoFundMe. And I think most of us are aware of the incredible work that GoFundMe does to be able to help people and communities in times of need with a very, very powerful marketplace platform. They have developed and produced one of the most sophisticated AI marketing outcomes that I’ve seen in a long time.

And with that in mind, James, I’d love you just to tell us a little bit about what they did and how that applies to the world of AI marketing. 

[00:04:20] James: Yeah, super exciting campaign.

They wanted to do a bit of an end of year wrap up to showcase a lot of the great work which had happened over the previous year. So they went to AKQA San Francisco, a big powerhouse of an agency, and worked with them on creating this two-minute ad, which a culminated in this big sprawling mural, showcasing a lot of that great work so it could be, you know, Ukrainian refugees, families being reunited or pets being rescued from hurricane devastation, all of which was accompanied and represented in this big mural. It’s what they’re billing as the first AI generated advertisements, which is unique in itself. And what I, I think is really interesting in that it doesn’t feel gimmicky.

It feels like a really great, compelling ad. 

[00:05:06] Pete: I’ve always loved animation and advertising and spent a lot of my career working for top ad agencies and have produced a number of animated campaigns, and the barriers always, of course, were the extraordinary expense associated with producing animation and incredibly long lead times, literally months and months and months of production. In this case, I believe they were able to have the production sequence in less than about six weeks, which is unheard of, and the quality of animation is absolutely visually arresting.

And we talked a little bit about plagiarism in as a risk in AI. In this case, they actually shot models on a white screen and then layered the model over these murals that you just referenced and created this entirely unique animation sequence, which just anchored their brand and their fundraising stories. A remarkable piece of work.

[00:06:11] James: A couple of the tools they used just for reference were Dall-E, which is open source AI software, and also Stable Diffusion, which sounds like it did a lot of the heavy lifting in the production process. So at the end of the day, it’s this balance between some of these tools and then the human element as well, being able to ensure that it does tell a story and it is effective in the end. 

[00:06:29] Pete: I’ve stumbled across this expression, taming the beast or controlling the chaos that is AI, and I think our fears, of course, are that we won’t have control of the outputs and it’s going to be scary or wrong or inaccurate. And I do think that what we’re learning as we go through this process is back to the inputs and making sure you’re very structured on what you’re telling AI or asking it to do.

As marketers, it’s incumbent on all of us to research the technologies that are available to us and to explore the many facets that AI can enhance on our life. And that’s not just as marketers in a marketing world, but it’s also as individuals and humans and how we’re all getting along in 2023. I’m looking forward to going on this journey of seeing what AI tools can be.

And with that in mind, today we’ve brought three of our finest marketing gurus to this show.

[00:07:45] Pete: Today with me, I have Garrett, Ceci and Caoimhe. And team, how about you just introduce yourselves?

[00:07:51] Garrett: Hey, I’m Garrett. I am the Content Marketing Manager here at Unbounce. I lead the content marketing function and our team of content creators. In terms of of AI, I would say that I was very much a skeptic until super recently, and then frankly, I started paying attention and actually using the tools.

[00:08:09] Ceci: Hi everyone. I’m Ceci Martinez. I’m the art director in, the brand team here at Unbounce. I supervise the art direction of most of our campaigns, and I work with a group of three super talented designers and they are super excited about what everything that is happening with AI. So with the team, we have been exploring and discovering what’s happening with these new AI tools like Dall-E and Midjourney.

[00:08:40] Caoimhe: Hi, my name is Caoimhe. I am the Manager of Marketing Campaigns. I am responsible for the omnichannel marketing that Unbounce runs. I’m a bit of an AI skeptic. I very much ad hoc use AI at the minute. I’m not fully convinced that it has all of the capabilities that I need because a lot of my role is to do a strategy but open to changing my opinion and yeah, ready to be convinced otherwise.

[00:09:06] Pete: So I want to give a creative challenge out here, and this is pretty fun.

So, Unbounce is our company name and we’ve got a pretty strong culture in and around the brand. Our boardrooms are named after things that can’t actually bounce. So we have Piano and we have Cinder Block, and we even have a boardroom named Elephant.

So today’s challenge is I want to launch a trampoline for elephants so that they land safely when they bounce, so marketing gurus, I am going to give you 24 hours to do a complete campaign around the trampoline for elephants.

[00:10:00] Caoimhe: Oh God.

[00:10:01] Garrett: Oh boy.

[00:10:02] Pete: So you say, all right AI, I’ve got a thousand bucks here and I wanna run paid search, little paid social, a little bit of retargeting, you know, et cetera, and we could see whether or not AI can in fact give you a channel plan or not. 

[00:10:19] James: I mean, we talk about the advantages of AI-based tools in shortening the timeframe and augmenting some of those tasks, but it feels pretty tight, 24 hours. But I’m excited to see how the teams tackle this problem and this challenge and what they come back with. Super exciting challenge, Pete. 

[00:10:36] Pete: All right, let’s do this.

… 24 hours passes…

[00:10:45] Pete: Hey marketers, we are back.

So Caoimhe, we gave you and Garrett and Ceci a bit of a task for 24 hours. Before we get into creative development and design, can you just talk a little bit? Bit about the process and the framework for the task.

[00:11:04] Caoimhe: Yeah, absolutely.

So it has been a very busy 24 hours for the team. We approached this campaign like we do all of our campaigns with a solid strategy behind it. The team came together, we figured out our ICP, our messaging, our product description, product benefits. From there we went and we defined our channel plan. The team also worked together on creating the messaging for our new product. And Ceci worked on designing all of the different assets that we need for our creative channels.

So yeah, we’ve been super busy on implementing everything. We had no little to no involvement, which sounds like we sat back and did nothing, but there was a lot of work that we also had to do. But yes, AI completely created this campaign and can’t wait to bring you through the ins and outs.

[00:11:54] Pete: So that, that was helpful in terms of some of the overall process, but walk us through specifically the workflow now.

[00:12:01] Caoimhe: Yeah, absolutely.

So we had no concept of the target audience, product name, product description, product benefits. AI had to come up with all of those things. So the very first prompt, I was using ChatGPT and I asked it, or I told it that we’re launching a trampoline made for elephants who want to be able to jump. So can you create a hypothetical target audience, product name, product description, and benefits, and immediately we hit a roadblock. The first thing the ChatGPT came back with was that it was completely unethical to make elephants jump. As they’re highly intelligent creatures, a trampoline would be completely unreasonable.

So it’s clear that the ethics of AI were very much coming through, that it’s been trained or programmed to just not allow elephants to be promoted as a form of entertainment.

[00:12:54] Pete: So you got, you got a full campaign strategy out of it. Tell us about the campaign strategy that you turned over to the creative team.

[00:13:02] Caoimhe: Once we had all of that outlined, eventually we were in a much better place to be able to ask it for creative concept, visual referencing, key message guides. So they were the key things that we obviously needed to pass over to the creative team before they could begin working on the messaging and the ad copy, and building the landing page and building the supporting assets.

Obviously the first thing that we needed was a channel or a campaign goal, so I told it we had a thousand dollars to spend, what would be our best use of that a thousand dollars. It advised us to do influencer marketing and it also advised us to do a social media campaign. It was able to write a press release for this trampoline. It was able to create a breakdown of a channel strategy across social.

Everything was incredible as soon as we crossed that initial roadblock.

[00:13:51] Pete: And generally speaking, like, was the quality good? Like is it as good as you could do yourself?

[00:13:58] Caoimhe: I would say for the most part, yes. And again, I think it comes back to just the nature of the product and the ethics of AI. It was very careful about what it said. It kept referring to fake elephants and had disclaimers at the bottom of every single thing it generated, but also it’s very specific what we were trying to do in general.

The caliber of the content it created was, yeah, absolutely usable.

[00:14:24] Pete: Amazing. 

[00:14:25] James: Hey Caoimhe, I had a question. Obviously we’ve, managed to create a campaign within 24 hours, which is unheard of. How much different is this to the usual sort of process we would follow, um, on the creative team and on the campaigns team? Like how much money are we, would we be saving in theory or how much time would we be saving as well through using some of these AI space tools to create the campaign, uh, and also generate the creative from it as well?

[00:14:47] Caoimhe: So our usual approach to campaigns, it would probably take about a week to generate the amount that we were able to generate within 24 hours. From a strategy perspective, it’s probably one to two days of looking into the competitive landscape, figuring out what are we trying to do, the product benefits, the long term vision, all of those things.

Yeah, there’s a lot of manual work involved, so I can see just how quickly AI was able to support and come up with some really, really strong strategies in a way shorter time.

[00:15:20] Pete: Garrett, can you kindly present the creative concepts to us?

[00:15:26] Garrett: Can we get a AI generated drum roll?

[00:15:30] Garrett: So what you’re looking at right now is the landing page for Elebounce, the only trampoline built exclusively for elephants.

The landing page is live. People can go and check it out at podcast.unbounce.com/elebounce. That’s ELEBOUNCE.

We’ve got a little logo here. It’s a cute little yellow elephant sort of illustration style on this circle that represents the trampoline. These colors, entirely recommended by AI.

The headline for the landing page is, “Elebounce, the Ultimate Trampoline for Elephants.” We cut to some supporting copy here: “Designed specifically for elephants, Elebounce is the only trampoline on the market that offers a safe and engaging way for your elephant friends to jump and play. Say goodbye to boredom and hello to a new fun way to stay fit.” And you can see the hero image is a very happy elephant, bouncing on a, a great big orange trampoline.

As we scroll down, we get to our key benefits. “Elebounce offers numerous benefits that keep your elephant happy, healthy, and entertained.” We’ve got this three card layout with three benefits and accompanying images, and the three benefits are, “Burnoff energy with a fun and engaging activity, improve physical health through low impact exercise, prevent boredom and attention seeking behavior.”

And at the bottom here we’ve got our final footer CTA. “Get your Elebounce today. Don’t let your elephant miss out on the fun and fitness benefits of Elebounce. Order now and transform your elephant’s playtime like never before.”

[00:17:19] Pete: And Garrett, I’m assuming you used Unbounce Smart Builder, the AI landing page builder to do this, and I’m just looking at the structure of your layout and your sections and the simplicity and boldness of your copy. This is how I would’ve advised any of our customers to build a landing page. Like to me, this is really industry best practice.

I’m pretty excited by the quality of the landing page, even for such a fictitious topic. 

[00:17:48] James: It’s kind of mind blowing what, what we’d be able to create in just 24 hours. 

[00:17:52] Pete: Well, and, and James, we talk about the inputs and the outputs, and of course this is one of the first, uh, efforts that the team has done. They’ve been using AI, but to actually, you know, build a campaign with it. 

[00:18:03] James: Garrett, on the content side, what has the last 24 hours looked like for you? Have you found that your process has changed by using some of these tools?

[00:18:11] Garrett: Yeah, I think that like certainly when you give an AI copywriting tool like ChatGPT or Smart Copy or Jasper, a prompt, you get content back super fast, right? Within seconds. In a way that you can write a, a full landing page or get the content for a full landing page within just a few seconds when it would normally take an hour, two hours, longer.

I think that the time consuming part of working with AI is the level of iteration that you need to go through with the AI tool that you’re using in that. Sure, ChatGPT can give me copy for a whole landing page in a few seconds. But on first pass, it’s not necessarily something that I would be happy with, you know? So you’re applying this layer of critique to what AI is giving you, and you can say, okay, well this part is good, this part, let’s try it again. And it ends up, I, I don’t know that it would take as long to create a landing page using AI tools as it would manually, but there is still a fair amount of manual work involved in terms of iterating with the tool.

You know, like you’re not removed from that process at all, but you do need to prod it along and steer it and provide some of that human direction to hopefully end up with something great.

[00:19:33] Pete: Did you compare the capabilities of Smart Copy versus ChatGPT, and do you have any initial thoughts on that?

[00:19:41] Garrett: Yeah, so I use Smart Copy to write our Facebook ads, and that’s really what that tool is for, right? It’s for marketing use cases. I mean, we’ve got templates for a bunch of different stuff, but that’s where Smart Copy excels.

I think that ChatGPT is great right now for having a conversation in like that iterative work. Whereas Smart Copy, it gets to know your business profile. You can set the tone of the ad, you can say like specifically what you’re selling and what your brand attributes are, and it’ll create content for, uh, something like Facebook ads using those inputs so it’s more impactful in a marketing use case.

[00:20:24] Pete: Well, I think that’s super helpful. I, and I was, What I was interested in, some of the landing page copy is, of course trampolines for elephants isn’t a thing that exists, but ChatGPT was able to go to the internet and search trampolines and weight bearing, and the fact that it needs a heavy frame and so it’s able to introduce almost like scientific evidence, which in just the body copy land wouldn’t understand that. So I do believe Smart Copy is great for building ad copy, but if you do need to do research as a part of what you’re looking for, this is where ChatGPT certainly takes things to a very, very different level.

And I think we’re all getting used to that. And even in terms of search engine usage, I think many of us are now going to ChatGPT versus Google for the exact same reason.

[00:21:12] Garrett: And I think that’s one of the things that I realized through this exercise is no one tool does it all, right? I think that in terms of actual work that we did, the bulk of it was moving information or content from one AI platform to another.

So it’s interesting, like I don’t think it’s ChatGPT or Smart Copy or Jasper or Notion or any number of tools. I think they’ve all got their use cases right? And some are better at particular use cases than others.

[00:21:44] Pete: Ceci, I’m really interested to learn about the art direction of the campaign. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what you did and what you achieved, and maybe describe for us some of the, uh, creative assets that you were able to, to pull off.

[00:21:58] Ceci: Yeah, it was interesting. Because when I started, like I got very excited because of the brief and I just started like experimenting with Dall-E and then with Midjourney, and I just started playing like with the prompts and all the details, but at the beginning, because I didn’t know exactly what we wanted, the results that came back, they were pretty bad.

But eventually when, uh, we started getting more information around visual references, the brand colors that we wanted. So I came back with some color codes that we could use and combine. Having all this information, it helped me to provide more details for the prompts in Midjourney and Dall-E.

What I noticed is, for example, for Dall-E the images that came back, they were very real, which was nice, but I felt like they weren’t that exciting. And with Midjourney, you can also add styles.

So I was like, “Oh,” like, “Show me an elephant with the style of a Wes Anderson movie.” And it came back something similar to that. So that was a pretty cool thing to do.

For the images that we use for the landing pages, the hard part is, as an art director, as a designer, is to make sure like all the images are consistent and aligned to your brand. And I believe that’s the part where like a designer comes in.

I think everyone can make an image now with these AI tools, but a designer will have like the trained eye and will have the knowledge to make sure, like which are the images that you wanna pick, which are the brand colors you want to use, and so on.

[00:23:33] Pete: What I’m hearing from Garrett, Ceci and Caoimhe is that after going through it once, you probably would be even more efficient on a second and a third iteration.

I know Caoimhe, you and I were talking this morning, you certainly feel a lot more adept at the inputs and the outputs now having gone through it. Why don’t you just talk a little bit about that?

[00:23:53] Caoimhe: Yeah, absolutely. I think that is the biggest challenge. It’s knowing what to ask for and how to ask for it, and I think that’s something that once you have mastered, there’s no limits to what you can do.

It’s almost a human limitation of not knowing yourself what to ask for. How can you rephrase what you’re asking for so the model actually understands? Or you know, how can you find a workaround to get what you actually want that it’s okay with, and it’s been trained for?

[00:24:23] Pete: In terms of the campaign elements, you talked about social, and I’m assuming we’re doing organic and paid social. Tell us a little bit about that piece of the campaign.

[00:24:34] Caoimhe: Yeah, absolutely.

After we had gone through the actual overall product and everything to do with it, I said that I have a thousand dollars to spend. Can you give me some like tangible goals for this campaign? And it said selling 50 units of the trampoline would be a realistic goal. On a thousand dollars budget over a six month period as well as a hundred thousand impressions.

I think those numbers might be a little bit loose, but it’s great to see that it’s thinking a breakdown over a channel strategy given a budget,

[00:25:07] Pete: Garrett, that landing page was really amazing. Can you now walk us through the campaign elements in terms of the ad creative?

[00:25:14] Garrett: Yeah, absolutely.

What I ended up doing was using the landing page content as an input, asking it to generate 10 potential Facebook ad headline and supporting copy combinations. And that includes, uh, headline copy, body copy, CTA. From the 10, I asked it to refine that list into the best three. And then we also had it recommend some potential accompanying imagery ad variant one.

The image is a herd of elephants playing on a trampoline together was the recommendation from AI. The accompanying copy, the headline is, “Give Your elephants the gift of excitement with Elebounce.” Body copy, “They won’t be able to resist. Elebounce is the trampoline designed specifically for elephants with a durable frame and ample space for bouncing. Order yours today and see your elephants unleash their inner child.” CTAs “Get yours today.”

Another ad is an image of multiple elephants jumping on a trampoline together with a clear blue sky in the background. The headline is, “Bounce your way to a happier herd with Elebounce. Designed just for elephants, Elebounce is the trampoline that will take your herd’s playtime to the next level with its sturdy frame and ample bouncing space. Elebounce is a must-have for any elephant, sanctuary or zoo. Order yours today and watch your elephants bounce their way to happiness.”

So you can see it was starting to make these connections between ad copy and uh, the recommended images.

[00:26:45] Pete: Incredible. 

[00:26:46] James: Ceci, Would you be able to speak to some of the images which we were able to generate to support this campaign and what that process looked like?

[00:26:53] Ceci: Yeah, when I start putting some of the prompts into Dall-E, if I just jump in blindly and these were the first results that I got. They were very cartoonish. There’s a lot of illustration in there. Then I start like playing with 3D as a visual style, and I got this results.

This was Dall-E, and then eventually what happened is, We got all this, uh, additional context and information that is so good to have as a, for a creative campaign and as a creative concept. So then that’s when we started getting like maybe the images that go are closer to the end result.

We have a happy elephant jumping here and there. It’s daylight. The trampolines are in different colors. You can pick one of those and keep like asking them to give you more variants, which is pretty cool.

What was interesting is the moment I knew orange was gonna be one of our brand colors, I just ask like, “Hey, can we get an orange trampoline where the elephant is gonna be jumping?” And yeah, like it gave me back that orange trampoline. So it’s super cool. Like you can do really crazy stuff with these tools and if you have the eye, you have the experience.

Definitely you can do really good marketing campaigns.

[00:28:10] Pete: Beautiful.

All right, Garrett and team. In 24 hours, you’ve done campaign strategy, you’ve done content development, you’ve built landing pages, you have pushed a paid social campaign live. Do you have any indication of results?

[00:28:41] Garrett: We set the daily budget for our Facebook ads at a hundred dollars. It hasn’t even been running for 24 hours now. What we’ve seen is close to 4,400 impressions. With 217 clicks, uh, that’s giving us a cost per click of 23 cents and a 4.9% click through rate, which is insanely high.

We’re running three ads. One variant is accounting for 90% of our total investment so far, and that’s the “Bounce your way to a happier herd with Elebounce” ad variant. So we’re seeing more clickthroughs to the landing page than probably any of us had expected. I guess people are legitimately interested in a trampoline for elephants.

The bad news is that we aren’t seeing a lot of actual conversions on the landing page right now. And I think this is clearly because people are arriving on the landing page looking for a trampoline for elephants, and when they click “Buy Now” or “Shop Now,” or one of the CTAs. What they get is a popup, letting them know that this is an experiment for a podcast and to sign up for notifications for when the podcast goes lives.

It violates our rules around message match and ensuring that, uh, when somebody clicks a CTA, the next thing that happens is what they expect would happen. Uh, in this case, they’re not getting the opportunity to buy the elephant trampoline, unfortunately.

[00:30:09] James: You’re saying we need to shift part of our business to selling elephant trampolines.

[00:30:13] Garrett: That is my pitch to you. Yes.

[00:30:23] James: So after all of this, I’m interested to hear Caoimhe, speaking on behalf of campaigns. Can you not?

[00:30:30] Caoimhe: Oh God. Can I give a half answer?

I think you can kind of. I think AI as a whole has a ton of benefits and it definitely is gonna help in the campaign process and campaign strategizing, but it’s lacking context and I think it’s lacking problem solving that as a marketer, I think isn’t inequality that we have. And it doesn’t have yet.

I don’t think it will always be like that, but for right now, I’m gonna say that I still have to, so I cannot not.

[00:31:00] James: Garrett, Content Manager at Unbounce, can you not?

[00:31:03] Garrett: It’s not the first time I’ve been asked that, James.

I think that I could not, I think that I could turn things over to AI and generate pretty decent content. On first pass, decent. But I think that if you want something of a higher quality, something that like really matches what you’re looking for, you are gonna spend a fair amount of time prompting and reprompting and like refining those prompts and working with AI to get it to where it needs to be.

I could not, I could not. I’ll submit. I could not, you don’t need me. You just need ChatGPT or Jasper or Smart Copy or some AI language model that can generate the content for you.

[00:31:51] James: Ceci, as an art director responsible for design, I have to ask, can you not?

[00:31:56] Ceci: I want to believe that I’m still needed. Designers are still needed.

Definitely from this exercise, I realize that anyone can create an image. It doesn’t matter what are your skillsets. I feel where the designers expertise comes in, it’s when you realize our image is just not the only important thing on a campaign like you have to consider brand strategy, brand experience, the usability, the work of a designer is still pretty big.

[00:32:30] Pete: Well, it’s good to know that as marketers, we still have a critical role that we do play as we go forward in the overall mix. I’m sure campaign execution will be on the, uh, robots’ minds going forward. 

[00:32:43] James: I love how some of these AI tools are keeping us as humans on track. They’re reminding us of our ethics, what we shouldn’t be doing. I think we’ve learned a lot as humans from this campaign, from AI based tools. It’s been quite educational around. 

[00:32:55] Pete: Well, and I would think as hungry, curious marketers, we’re all trying to discover what tools are out there, how they apply, and so I would encourage all marketers in our listening audience to embrace these tools and see what works for you.

All right, marketers out there in the marketing universe, I encourage you to explore the AI tools and let’s get smarter together as we go on this journey. It’s a wrap!

Hungry for more AI marketing content?

Don’t ya worry, there’s lots more where that came from. Tune into Unprompted on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts to hear human marketers and robots team up—or face off—in this new, wild age of AI marketing.

But it’ll definitely be one of those two things.

Fast forward to today, and we’re facing a similar paradigm shift in marketing—only this time, it’s artificial intelligence (AI) that’s causing the existential panic.

The transformative nature of AI in marketing is undeniable. It’s changing the way we create content, the way we target customers, the way we optimize campaigns. But with great power comes great responsibility uncertainty, and many marketers are left wondering if they’re about to become obsolete—replaced by algorithms with a penchant for cat memes and a knack for writing killer email subject lines.

It’s scary. But when we’re scared, we find it’s helpful to talk about it… then record our conversations and release them on the internet.

Enter Unprompted, the new podcast from Unbounce that dives headfirst into the (thrilling, sometimes spooky, and surprisingly… funny?) world of AI marketing. Hosted by our CMO Pete Housley and brought to you by the real, human people at Unbounce, Unprompted is here to help you make sense of this moment of incredible change.

“Another marketing revolution? I’m getting sick of these things.”

Hey, we hear ya.

As AI continues to evolve at breakneck speed, it’s revolutionizing marketing practices we once took for granted. AI copywriting. AI email campaigns. AI social media.

From data-driven insights and personalized customer experiences to AI-generated content and sophisticated ad targeting, it’s safe to say that the marketing landscape will never be the same.

But along with the immense potential AI marketing tools can offer, they also bring a ton of challenges and concerns. For instance, as AI becomes more adept at creating content, how can we ensure that it remains authentic and true to our brand’s voice? How do we strike the right balance between automation and human touch in our marketing efforts? And as AI-powered algorithms become increasingly sophisticated, how can we ensure that ethical considerations are not left by the wayside?

This stuff keeps us up at night.

So, what’s a marketer to do in the face of such change? Well, we could all huddle in a corner and quietly hum “Kumbaya” as the machines take over, or we could do what we do best—adapt, learn, and grow together.

Navigating the new, AI-powered marketing landscape 

The AI marketing revolution is happenin’ alright, and there ain’t no stopping it. The key to navigating these unprecedented times lies in embracing the opportunities AI presents while also acknowledging its potential pitfalls.

But why should you care about one more gosh darn marketing podcast? Seriously, as if we haven’t heard enough marketing acronyms we’re just supposed to know. (Lookin’ at you, ROAS.)

The thing is, this isn’t just another marketing podcast. Unprompted not only provides you with the latest insights, trends, and innovations in AI marketing, but it also tackles the big questions: How do we harness AI’s power ethically? What does the future hold for human marketers? And most importantly, can AI write better jokes than us? (We’re not rulin’ it out, but we’re also not goin’ down without a fight.)

Unprompted talks AI: The good, the bad, and the inevitable

Unprompted covers a lot of ground when it comes to AI marketing. From potential benefits to big, spikey pitfalls, here’s a quick overview of what you can expect when you tune in.

How AI is shaping the future (and now) of marketing

You’ll hear about the many benefits of embracing AI in marketing—from boosting creativity and streamlining processes to future-proofing your career. We talk about how AI can augment human creativity by providing us with fresh ideas and inspiration, helping us to think outside the box, and create more engaging, effective content. 

We’ll touch on how AI has been able to automate many of the time-consuming tasks that have long plagued marketers, freeing up valuable resources for more strategic initiatives. Or freeing up enough time to, ya know, make a podcast.

Challenges and question marks that are leaving room for doubt

But what about the ethics of it all? 

Unprompted delves into the ethical considerations surrounding AI in marketing, fostering thoughtful discussions and debates about the responsible use of it. As marketers, it’s our responsibility to ensure that AI is used in a manner that respects privacy, promotes inclusivity, and maintains trust with our customers. By staying informed and engaging in open conversations about the ethical implications of AI, Unprompted makes you better prepared to make informed decisions about its deployment in your marketing strategies.

How to embrace this new technology in your marketing

In addition to exploring the many benefits and challenges of AI in marketing, Unprompted will also offer a supportive community of fellow marketers who are facing the AI revolution head-on. By sharing our experiences, challenges, and triumphs, we can learn from one another and grow stronger together. So, whether you’re a seasoned pro or a marketing newbie, Unprompted welcomes you with open arms (and possibly a witty AI-generated quip).

Us marketers need to be agile and adaptable in the face of rapid technological advancements. That’s never changed. Embracing AI—and particularly specialized marketing AI—is crucial for staying ahead of the curve in an increasingly automated world. Unprompted gives you a front-row seat to the AI marketing revolution and arm(chair?)s you with the knowledge, insights, and camaraderie you need to thrive.

Unprompted, a podcast for the modern-day (and potentially confused) marketer

Well then, it’s official: The AI marketing revolution is upon us. 

We’re seeing AI change our lives daily, and it’s both exciting and nerve-wracking. But by arming ourselves with knowledge, engaging in open discussions about the ethical implications, and finding humor in the face of change, we can ensure that we’re not only surviving but thriving in this new landscape. 

With Unprompted, you’ll be well-equipped to navigate the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead, all while enjoying some much-needed comic relief. So, buckle up, and let’s embrace the AI revolution together.

You can listen to Unprompted now on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

There are countless channels: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, LinkedIn, just to name a few. Posts to write. Graphics to design. Reels to film. Cats to meme. The list goes on and on. 

To stay on top of it all… well, it’s a full-time job. But AI for social media can make it a whole lot more manageable. 

Artificial intelligence can help you handle many tasks quickly, easily, and in bulk. That means you can plan, produce, schedule, and monitor your content faster—so you can get back to doom-scrolling with the rest of us.

Wanna learn how to use AI in your social media marketing? Let’s get into it.

• What is AI for social media?
• How can AI be used in social media?
• What are the benefits of using AI?
• What are the best AI social media tools?

What is AI for social media?

In the simplest terms, social media AI refers to tools that can simulate human intelligence to automate and optimize aspects of social media marketing.

Basically, artificial intelligence means “machines doing things that usually require real, live people.” Things like analyzing data sets, amalgamating large quantities of information or data, calculating large sums and probabilities… that sorta stuff. So, when you hear terms like “AI marketing” or “AI in social media,” people are talking about AI (machines that can replicate human intelligence) specifically for marketing purposes. 

But AI isn’t a replacement for social media marketers. These AI tools augment your social media expertise to help you do your job more efficiently, increasing the speed of things like content creation and audience analysis.

Think of AI like a superpower. Only, instead of being bitten by a radioactive spider, imagine you’ve been bitten by a radioactive Instagram influencer—and now you can do your job five or ten times faster.

(But jokes aside: If an influencer bites you, definitely get that checked out by a professional.)

How is AI used in social media?

AI has all sorts of applications for marketing. It can write ads, landing pages, and even complex code. It can design images, create and edit videos, transcribe audio, and much more. And AI can do all of these things for social media, too.

Here are just some of the ways you can use AI in your social media marketing:

• Create social content. By now, we’ve all seen some kind of AI-generated content. These AI copywriting tools can write entire social posts, even customizing the messaging for your target audience and driving higher engagement. AI can also create images and videos, helping you pump out a steady stream of new content.
• Provide customer service. AI chatbots are totally changing the way folks interact with brands online. You can use AI to instantly address support requests and frequently asked questions, providing faster response times and reducing the workload on human customer service reps.
• Identify new trends. Wanna stay in the know? AI can identify emerging patterns and viral topics across social platforms, giving you the most up-to-date info on popular topics and ensuring your content is always super relevant. 
• Analyze brand sentiment. AI tools can sort through posts, comments, and reviews to provide insight into how your people feel about your products or services. This information can give you a deeper understanding of your audience and inform ways you might improve the perception of your brand.
• Target social ads. With its ability to analyze huge amounts of user data, AI can predict the type of content your audience will engage with and suggest which ads are most likely to convert—meaning a better return on ad spend. 

And it’s not just marketers using AI on social media. Today, many social platforms are using AI themselves. From LinkedIn’s job and connection suggestions to Facebook’s targeted ads and content recommendations, AI is the driving force that powers our increasingly personalized, user-focused social media experiences.

What are the benefits of AI for social media?

Maybe the benefits of AI for social are best summed up with an emoji:

There are an estimated 4.89 billion social media users today, and that number is projected to grow to 5.85 billion by 2027. And the market share of AI in social media was worth almost $992.7 million in 2021, expected to grow to $12 billion by 2031—which means we’re gonna see a lot more AI for platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn over the coming years.

As a social media marketer, you need to understand how to use these AI tools effectively. That’s the only way to ensure you’re harnessing the full power of AI to achieve your campaign goals and maximize your marketing ROI.

Some of the key benefits of using AI include:

• Save time: With AI, you can create content in batches and schedule it days, weeks, or even months ahead of time. This gives you the freedom to concentrate on fine-tuning your strategy, analyzing what’s working (and what’s not), adjusting campaigns for peak performance, and so much more.
• Reduce costs: AI doesn’t need food, doesn’t sleep, and doesn’t call in “sick” when it’s sunny outside. It can post content during off-hours, write the content of posts for you, and analyze your data in the background—all tasks that might otherwise require additional headcount.
• Improve results: AI’s analytical capabilities can identify the aspects of your campaigns that might not be performing as expected. It can support with testing (or let you optimize for conversions automatically), ensuring that your social media marketing is getting maximum engagement and conversions.

AI isn’t just another trend—it’s a social media game-changer. And with the right AI marketing tools, it can totally transform the way you work.

Best AI tools for social media

Nowadays, marketers use AI tools for so many different parts of their job: email marketing, SEO, data analytics, optimization, customer support—and, of course—social media. 

Here are just a few examples of AI-powered tools for social media marketers:

1. AI social media writing tool: Smart Copy (Unbounce)

Smart Copy is Unbounce’s gift to the blinking cursor of doom. Social media managers know the existential crisis that occurs when they’ve gotta write dozens of engaging posts for each social channel (and brand, if you manage more than one). And you’ve gotta do it each and every week. 

With Smart Copy, it’s a whole lot easier. Choose from one of 45+ AI copy templates, add some basic info, wave your magic wand (or, ahem, click the button), and get all the content you need in seconds. Choose your favorite versions, copy ‘em into your social scheduling tool, and presto—you’ve got your weekly content sorted. 

Smart Copy isn’t just for social media, either. You can use this AI writing tool to write your copy for your entire campaign, from landing pages to emails and everything in between. (Talk about time-savings, huh?) And best of all, you can use Smart Copy for free—right now.

2. AI design tool: Magic Design (Canva)

If you need a lil’ help designing social graphics, Canva has the AI tool for you. Magic Design promises to help make you spin up attention-grabbing images faster and easier than ever before.

Using Magic Design is as simple as uploading your own media, then prompting it to create any number of unique and custom designs. And just like Canva’s other products, you don’t have to be a graphic designer to be able to create beautiful, on-brand collateral that can be resized with the click of a button for all the social media channels you use. 

3. AI posting and scheduling tool: ViralPost (Sprout Social)

AI isn’t just about writing content or designing images. Data analysis is a crucial aspect of social media management—and AI can help with that, too.

When you’re scheduling content weeks or months out, it can be hard to decide the best times to post on each social channel. ViralPost from Sprout Social uses AI to analyze your audience engagement data and determine the optimal posting times for your brand, simplifying your scheduling process and maximizing your reach.

4. AI social media analytics tool: ContentStudio

Speaking of analyzing data: ContentStudio reports everything you need to know about the performance of your social media accounts across every channel. Get daily AI-powered insights, create and share customizable reports—all as part of a platform that includes post-scheduling and AI content generation.

5. AI social listening tool

If your social media strategy includes frequent engagement across a bunch of platforms, then social listening is imperative—but it can also be kinda tedious. 

Tools like Sprinklr use AI and machine learning to do the social listening for you, helping you identify topics, trends, and even influencers that are most important to your customers and prospects.

6. AI sentiment analysis tool

Are people generally happy with your brand? Do they associate your brand with positive or negative emotions?

Figuring that out over several channels can be daunting. Brand24 does it for you across social networks, forums, news channels, podcasts, and even blogs and newsletters, so you can analyze all the different emotions associated with your brand.

AI is transforming social media—and marketers need to get ready

None of these tools are gonna transform marketing—let alone social media—on their own. But together, they demonstrate the beginning of an enormous change in how we create content, analyze information, and engage with our audiences online. As AI continues to improve (and as we get better at using it), it’s clear that the way we do social media marketing is going to be totally transformed.

AI is poised to redefine our strategies, making them more personalized, more streamlined, and more data-driven. It’ll help us understand our audiences on a deeper level, create more engaging content, and optimize our campaigns based on real-time insights.

Marketing is changing—and marketers need to change with it. Those who learn to work with AI will be the best equipped for the next era of social media marketing.

Oh, how naive we were.

AI has arrived, and now it’s friggin’ everywhere. Ryan Reynolds is writing ads with ChatGPT for Mint Mobile. John Oliver is talkin’ about AI-generated images in Midjourney. And marketers are quickly discovering how these AI-powered tools can help ‘em spin up entertaining blog content, optimize their social ad campaigns, and analyze their email performance.

But not all AI is created equal. (Or, maybe, some AI is created too equal.) Many of the AI tools available to marketers right now are built using the same generic models—models that weren’t built specifically for marketing use cases. That means their outputs tend to be kinda… same-y. And these tools aren’t optimized to get marketers the best performance from their campaigns.

Mike Kaput (Chief Content Officer at the Marketing AI Institute) and Jess Petrella (Director of Product Marketing at Unbounce) recently talked about the explosion of AI marketing tools and how to evaluate different AI solutions.

Because—as they discuss—not every AI tool is a good fit for marketers.

Hold up—where did all this AI stuff come from?

Real quick, let’s bring everybody up to speed on AI marketing.

A few years ago, true artificial intelligence felt like a sci-fi fantasy—but behind closed doors, some of the biggest tech companies have been pouring resources into AI development. Search giants like Microsoft and Google have been particularly interested in generative AI, which is AI capable of creating text or images. For example, in 2019, Microsoft dumped a $1 billion investment into OpenAI, an AI research and development lab. Not long after, OpenAI launched GPT-3, a language model capable of generating human-like text responses to prompts.

GPT-3 was also made available to other developers via API, meaning other software could (and did) incorporate the tech. Quietly, this was the beginning of a generative AI boom.

We have big businesses like Google and Microsoft putting a lot of money into AI and [adding it to] the regular workflow of their products—products that organizations, individuals, and end users are (by the millions) leveraging every day.

It’s still very early days, but these are signals that [AI] is something that is here to truly and long-term augment […] how we work.

GPT-3 made some waves—but marketers mostly kept on keepin’ on. Then came a pandemic, which brought economic uncertainty: the Great Resignation, the crypto and NFT booms (and busts), and endless talk of recession. The last few years have been weird, to say the least—and amidst it all, marketers have continuously been asked to do more with less.

In 2022, we surveyed 400 businesses to find out if (and how) they’re adopting marketing AI. Nearly half said they didn’t have the budget to do effective marketing, while a third reported they didn’t have the time. And companies were taking steps to address those problems: 31% had already adopted AI marketing tools and another 63% were interested in AI.

We were hitting a tipping point. Maybe some folks noticed it earlier than others—but by the time ChatGPT launched in late 2022, it became clear to everyone that marketing was about to change dramatically.

ChatGPT (built on top of the improved GPT-3.5, then GPT-4) gave us a new, simpler way to work with AI. Ask it a question, it’ll answer. Give it a task, it’ll do its darnedest. ChatGPT was the “aha!” moment in our collective consciousness—followed quickly by a collective “oh, $%!#.”

Suddenly, AI is all marketers can talk about. Google and Microsoft are locked in an (increasingly public) arms race to deploy this new technology, which could totally transform how people find and engage with content online. Many of the tools marketers have been using for years—like Grammarly, Adobe, or, hello, Unbounce—are now augmented with AI, streamlining workflows and optimizing results. Whether you know it or not, you’ve probably used AI sometime in the past week.

And that’s a good thing—at least, for the marketers who are starting to integrate AI into their process.

A marketer not using AI just can’t compete. We like to say at the [Marketing AI Institute]: AI isn’t going to replace you, but a marketer using AI will probably replace marketers who don’t.

AI marketing is here. It’s happening. But this explosion of AI tools has left lots of us feelin’ dizzy. What’s legit? What’s hype? How do you choose between one AI marketing tool and the next?

AI is kinda like a car engine—if most cars had the same one

Imagine a car. Maybe you’re thinking of a Honda Civic. Maybe you’re thinking of a Ford Mustang. Heck, maybe you’re thinking of a Hummer. (Which probably says something about you, from a psychological perspective.)

What makes ’em different? They all have four doors (or close enough). They all run on gasoline and take you from one place to another. What makes people drool over one and laugh at another?

It’s all about what’s under the hood: the engine. (It’s why we’re getting a tenth Fast and Furious movie.) A sports car that can go from zero to sixty in ten seconds is waaaaay cooler than some low-horsepower sedan. But throw in a powerful engine (and a kick-butt spoiler), and suddenly you’re Vin Deisel.

But unlike cars, most AI marketing tools have the exact same engine. Jess explains:

The underlying technology is quite similar in a lot of the tools that [marketers are] leveraging, but what makes certain tools for marketers different—and, at times […] more valuable—is the data sets that are on top of it, [which are] training that base machine learning model.

AI tools are often just user experiences built on top of machine learning models, like car frames built over engines. Those “engines” are, effectively, the AI doing the work of processing inputs and generating outputs. But while most engines are stock, some are souped up—trained on additional data to refine their outputs for certain use cases.

The stock engine works fine. But it’s not specialized to excel at a specific task. And the same concept applies to AI tools.

Like human marketers, AI can be a generalist or a specialist

Let’s take AI writing as an example. 

When you use a platform like ChatGPT, you’re utilizing OpenAI’s GPT model. GPT was trained on the whole internet (with billions and billions of data points), but it’s not trained specifically to produce highly persuasive content for marketing use cases. Think of it as a marketing generalist—somebody who’s really good at lots of stuff but not necessarily specialized for a particular task or outcome.

Many of the most popular AI writing tools (say Jasper or Copy.ai) are also built on top of OpenAI’s generic GPT model—which means they’re also not producing content optimized for marketers.

Artificial intelligence is a bunch of models that need data. So, at the end of the day, the data you train it on determines your outputs. How you train it also matters dramatically.

A bunch of other companies are essentially just providing an interesting user experience that uses the same model that ChatGPT uses.

Compare that with an AI copywriting tool like Anyword, which is built specifically for marketers to create marketing copy using millions of marketing data points to score and predict your marketing performance. Or (shameless plug) Unbounce, which provides AI-powered insights based on our own conversion data to make recommendations as you write.

The benefits of using an AI writing tool trained specifically for marketing should be obvious. You get more refined outputs on your first pass, so spend less time wrestling with prompts. You get content that data shows is proven to be impactful for your audience. You save time and get more conversions.

Proprietary, unique, and extensive data is going to be the only competitive advantage moving forward, because if you’re doing anything related to language, the dataset already exists. OpenAI is using it.

Of course, this “generic AI” versus “specialized AI” divide doesn’t only exist in AI copywriting tools. Because OpenAI has made GPT and DALL-E (its image generation model) available to other companies, generative AI is the space where it’s most common to see companies utilizing the same generic models. But as new models become available for different use cases, marketers need to consider whether an AI tool is specialized for marketing—or if its outputs are more generic.

How to find and evaluate specialized AI marketing tools

Choosing the right AI tools for your marketing stack can seem daunting, given the huge (and ever-increasing) number of options available. We’ve seen how much the AI landscape can change, even in just a few months. How do you know which tools are best for your marketing use case? How do you make the best choice for your team and your business? 

It’s all about asking the right questions. As Jess and Mike point out, there are a few important considerations:

1. Where’s the data coming from?

Figure out if the data used to train the AI tool is homegrown or gathered from elsewhere. Knowing where the data came from (and whether it’s of good quality) will help you decide whether the tool is a good fit for your needs. Plus, it’ll help you evaluate whether you can trust the information you’re getting back. 

If you’re a marketer, where the data came from to train the tools that you’re using is truly important. Because unless [they] have millions or billions of proprietary data points, you’re probably looking at [a tool] that is using data that one of the bigger players already has.

For instance, Unbounce’s Smart Traffic uses AI to optimize landing pages based on years (and years, and years) of collecting data from landing pages that convert—or don’t. It’s data that no other company could ever possibly replicate (we dare you to try), giving users a distinct advantage over AI conversion optimization tools that are just getting started.

2. How accurate is the model?

Dig into whether the platform produces accurate, impactful results. Like people, machines are molded by the information they’ve processed and internalized—which is not always correct. It’s essential to be aware of any inherent biases or flaws in the AI tool as they could negatively impact your marketing efforts.

We’ve seen a hundred different stories already of outputs from ChatGPT that sound really confident, but are totally wrong, or reinforce problematic approaches or biases to certain pieces of information.

The goal here is to reduce your work, not make more of it—so be sure you’re not gonna have to double-check everything the machine is doing.

3. Is this realistic? (Or even a good thing?)

Lots of the hype around AI is the idea that it might soon replace human marketers. And while AI certainly is developing at breakneck speed, it’s important to maintain a realistic perspective on its current capabilities. Yeah, it can streamline many aspects of your marketing workflow—but it’s no replacement for things like human creativity and empathy.

AI is a supporting tool to the marketing that you’re already doing, right? It can write a blog post for you from beginning to end, it can write your ad copy. But without the human assessment of those outputs […] it’s not as valuable.

Be wary of companies who promise to singlehandedly revolutionize your marketing strategy and put your marketing team outta work. It’s crucial to work with tools that acknowledge the balance between human expertise and AI-driven optimization.

Specialized AI marketing tools amplify you—the marketer

Yes, AI has made rapid advances in the past few years (ahem, months), and its impact on the way we work as marketers is undeniable. But not all AI tools are the same. The key to making the most of this new technology is recognizing the difference between generic and specialized AI—and knowing when you oughta use which. By asking the right questions and being realistic about its capabilities, you can confidently integrate AI into your marketing stack and use it to its full potential.

There’s no competitive advantage to [creating] generic content—at least in the example of content marketing—with these AI tools. It’s augmenting rockstar writers and content creators with these tools to help them be 10x more productive, 10x more impactful.

But even specialized AI is no replacement for people. (Not until it can hug us, anyway.) The most Marketing of marketing tools are still most impactful when they’re in the hands of talented, imaginative humans. By working hand-in-algorithm with AI, you can streamline your campaign workflow, get more leads and sales, and push the boundaries of what you thought was possible.

AI marketing doesn’t mean the end of real, flesh-and-blood marketers. In fact, these tools are making marketers more effective. With loads of different applications (from research and analytics to copywriting and design), AI is quickly becoming a part of the everyday marketing toolstack. If you’re not using AI tools already, it’s high time you start exploring before you’re left in the digital dust.

But before you jump on the AI bandwagon, you’ll wanna ask yourself a few questions. What do you hope to get from AI? How could it support you in reaching your marketing goals? What inefficiencies or bottlenecks could it solve for your team? When choosing AI marketing tools, it’s important to be super clear about the problem you’re trying to solve—then use an AI tool that’ll get the job done. 

There’s no denying the benefits of AI in digital marketing. AI tools save you time and money, help you increase your productivity, and get you more conversions. It’s kinda like teamin’ up with the Transformers. But does your marketing campaign need Optimus Prime, or would Bumblebee do the job? Perhaps Jazz or Sideswipe are a better fit for the task?

Choosing the right AI marketing tool is key. And today, we’re gonna make it a little easier.

Check out some of the best AI marketing tools available today:

• AI tools for copywriting
• AI tools for email marketing
• AI marketing tools for SEO
• AI tools for social media
• AI tools for design
• AI data analytics
• AI marketing tools for CRO
• AI for customer support

AI tools for copywriting and content marketing

Using an AI copywriting tool is like having your own personal writing assistant—but without the constant need to eat and sleep. (Humans. So delicate.) You’re the boss, and AI is your trusty sidekick who’s always ready to crank out some killa’ content for you. (Or, at the very least, do some of the more time-consuming work for you.)

All you have to do is set the parameters for the content you want—like an editor giving instructions—and the tool will take it from there. Most AI copywriting tools can generate social media posts, Google ads, product descriptions, and everything in between. 

1. Smart Copy

We’d be fools—fools!—not to tell you about Smart Copy. Smart Copy uses some of the most advanced machine learning models to create on-brand, human-grade content for any marketing channel.

Paired with Unbounce landing pages and AI optimization tech, you can use Smart Copy to spin up page variants super fast and provide the highest-converting experiences for your visitors.

Key Features:

• Writes engaging and high-quality content in over 45 templates—social media, ad copy, websites, blogs, taglines, you name it
• Allows you to tailor copy for specific audiences or industries, as well as in particular tones or styles, ensuring your content matches your brand
• Generates whole-page copy for landing pages and provides different variants (perfect for use with Unbounce landing pages)
• Provides both a Google Chrome extension and downloadable desktop app, making it easy to generate content just about anywhere

Pricing: Freemium, then starting at $9/month

2. Jasper

Jasper is one of the more popular AI copywriting tools on the market. Since 2021, content creators from every walk of life (stroke of key?) have been using it to work through writer’s block and generate original content like, ten times faster. Plus, the platform recently added the ability to generate royalty-free images—perfect for pairing with your AI-generated ad and email copy.

Key Features:

• Generates well-structured, SEO-optimized copy in 50+ templates that can help you rank higher
• Provides content generation in more than 30 languages—oui, c’est vrai!—making it perfect for marketing teams targeting a global audience
• Comes with a built-in AI art generator as part of its higher-tiered pricing plans, letting you write copy and create images from a single platform

Pricing: Starting at $29/month

3. Copy.ai

Copy.ai positions itself as a more affordable option than Jasper. (Fight! Fight!) The AI writing tool generates copy for blog posts, ads, social media, websites, ecommerce, and more—much like Jasper. However, Copy.ai claims its competitor gates many features behind more expensive plans—which means they’re the budget-savvy alternative, without any usage limits.

Key Features:

• Provides more than 90 copy generation templates to streamline the creation process for just about type of content
• Generates content in 25 different languages, helping marketers spin up copy for campaigns targeting a global audience
• Offers a Google Chrome extension (so you don’t have to waste time flipping between platforms)

Pricing: Freemium, then starting at $49/month

4. Grammarly

Grammarly has come a long way. Marketers have been using the tool for years to review spelling, check grammar, and make suggestions on clarity and brevity. In March 2023, Grammarly announced GrammarlyGo—its “faster and smarter writing assistant”—which considers the user’s preferences and context and produce more tailored content. 

Key Features:

• Offers some of the most thorough grammar, spelling, and punctuation tools available on the market
• Helps you ensure your content is totally original by detecting duplicate content and potential plagiarism across the web
• Provides suggestions for ways you can improve the overall tone and clarity of your writing, leveling up the quality of your content

Pricing: Freemium, then starting at $12/month

AI marketing tools for email

Email marketing is a tough nut to crack. You might spend hours crafting the perfect email, tweakin’ your subject line, only to get an open rate lower than the chance of being struck by lightning. (That’s roughly 1 in 15,000, by the way.)

But fear not! AI-powered email marketing tools are here to save the day. 

With AI, you can personalize your emails, increase open and click rates, and even convert those pesky unread-ers into loyal customers. These tools can also analyze huge amounts of data, giving you insights into your campaigns that you never even knew existed. 

5. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is probably the world’s most well-known email marketing platform. (“Mail… Kimp?”) Though you could consider them email marketing vets at this point, they’re anything but old school. Mailchimp boasts an integrated analytics suite that helps you track your email open rates, click rates, unsubscribes, and more. They also offer robust AI-powered features that can help you track customer purchase behavior and split test subject lines.

Key Features:

• Provides AI-powered customer insights, including demographic, engagement, behavioral, and sentiment
• Helps you personalize your content with data collected and analyzed by AI, delivering a better experience for recipients
• Offers a customer journey builder that helps you map out personalized experiences based on how people interact with your business

Pricing: Freemium, then starting at $12/month

6. Optimove

Optimove offers a cloud-based email marketing software that delivers hyper-personalized and targeted emails. Its AI technology automatically adapts email content to customers’ preferences and behavior and gives marketers a more sophisticated analysis of customer engagement and what drives conversions. Optibot, their built-in marketing optimization bot, identifies performance-boosting opportunities and helps marketers get the most out of their campaigns.

Key Features:

• Helps you tailor your marketing strategy through comprehensive historical, real-time, and predictive data insights—powered by AI
• Provides valuable insights into customer behavior and trends, empowering you to make data-driven decisions and improve campaign performance
• Lets you create personalized campaigns at scale, ensuring customers only see relevant messages and product recommendations

Pricing: Custom

7. Constant Contact

Open rates not lookin’ so hot? Let’s add a little sparkle to your email marketing game. Constant Contact is an email marketing platform that boasts customizable email templates to help you build campaigns quickly and intuitively. Its AI tools are super-duper helpful in executing campaigns across various platforms like mobile, social media, and desktop email.

Key Features:

• Provides an all-in-one platform for managing email marketing campaigns, including hundreds of drag-and-drop email templates for different use cases
• Provides comprehensive reporting and tracking features, integrating with popular ecommerce and CRM platforms to streamline your workflows and centralize data
• Uses marketing automation and smart technologies to help you engage your audience, expand your reach, and nurture leads

Pricing: Starting at $12/month

AI tools for search engine optimization

If you’re not investing in search engine optimization (SEO), your website might as well be stranded on a desert island. SEO is the key to getting your content noticed and attracting those juicy organic clicks. But keepin’ up with all that keyword research can be a real challenge. 

That’s where AI comes in. AI-powered SEO tools can often do all the boring stuff for you, leaving you more time to brainstorm your next big idea. Plus, you’ll be able to optimize your content like a pro and adapt to changes on-the-fly. 

Below are some AI marketing tools for SEO that’re worth looking into.

8. Surfer

Ready to ride those waves of SEO success? Surfer is an AI-powered optimization tool that boosts your website’s visibility and rankings to catch that sweet organic traffic wave. With its content audit and keyword generator, Surfer will help you hang 10 with the best of ‘em, identifying prime opportunities for backlinking and giving you real-time feedback on your optimization as you write.

Key Features:

• Provides AI-powered content outlining, editing, and optimization to help marketers rank higher in search results
• Offers advanced keyword research tools to help you identify the most relevant and valuable keywords in your content planning
• Gives marketers real-time feedback on content structure, keyword usage, and other on-page SEO factors

Pricing: Starting at $59/month

9. Semrush

Semrush is an all-in-one SEO marketing tool that can help optimize your content, ads, and social media. It’s got a huge keyword and competitor research database, an in-depth content auditing process, and is excellent at identifying backlinking and ranking opportunities. Now, it’s also got an AI writing assistant that helps you optimize your content to target keywords and rank higher in search. Need we say more?

Key Features:

• Gives you the tools to create and execute a robust content marketing strategy, from creation to distribution
• Offers an extensive suite of tools for keyword research, competitor analysis, site audits, and more, helping you improve performance across various channels
• Offers competitor tracking and monitoring, such as their top-performing keywords, backlink profiles, and advertising campaigns

Pricing: Starting at $120/month

AI marketing tools for social media

Tired of keeping track of your social media posts manually? Feel like you’re stuck in a time warp, constantly checking and re-checking your data? 

AI marketing tools are a great way to break outta that social media doldrum. These tools not only help you stay organized, but they also take your marketing efforts to a whole new level by analyzing engagement data and providing real-time insights into your campaign performance.

Consider adding some of these AI social media tools to your toolkit:

10. Later

Hey, wanna post that LinkedIn article… later? Later is an AI-powered scheduling tool for social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Using smart features, it analyzes your content to find the right time to share for maximum engagement. The result? A steady stream of top-performing content for social media managers who would love having their weekends back.

Key Features:

• Offers AI-generated content to help you create and launch posts across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more way faster
• Providers a visualized, drag-and-drop social media calendar, letting you plan, organize, and preview your social posts in a super intuitive way
• Provides comprehensive analytics that help marketers track the performance of their social campaigns by engagement, reach, and follower growth

Pricing: Starting at $18/month

11. Buffer

Buffer will have you feeling like a social media pro in no time. With the ability to generate AI content and schedule across multiple platforms from one central dashboard, you’ll be able to sit back and let this management tool do the heavy lifting. Plus, with analytics reports from Facebook and LinkedIn, you’ll have all the data you need to understand your customers’ digital profiles and track your progress over time. Let’s get schedulin’.

Key Features:

• Writes engaging social media content for you with their AI assistant, accelerating your workflow across all social platforms
• Provides comprehensive social analytics to help you identify new insights, plus lets you publish with campaign optimization
• Streamlines the campaign and content planning process with efficient workflows and customizable permissions

Pricing: Freemium, then starting at $6/month

12. Hootsuite

Ah, Hootsuite— the ol’ reliable. This is no run-of-the-mill social media platform. Hootsuite is the savvy marketer’s secret weapon, and has been around long enough to prove it. The platform offers a social media management tool that provides users with a unified dashboard to craft, schedule, and deploy content across multiple platforms.

Key Features:

• Provides a comprehensive dashboard for managing multiple social accounts across different platforms, streamlining the creation, scheduling, and monitoring of social content
• Offers built-in collaboration tools and robust analytics and reporting features that give you granular insight into your social performance
• Allows marketers to generate social content with AI writing tools for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more

Pricing: Starting at $99/month

13. Emplifi

Emplifi is a super robust platform that acts like your personal data analyst for social media. Not only can it track your ROI, but it also gives you a whole suite of tracking features to gather juicy insights about your audience. We’re talkin’ traffic, metrics, demographics—you name it. Plus, it’s got some AI-powered features that help you streamline your workflows.

Key Features:

• Provides real-time social community management so you can engage and respond to your audience quickly
• Offers multi-channel management with AI-backed recommendations for scheduling and posting
• Gives you AI content creation tools to help you craft social posts faster

Pricing: Starting at $240/month

AI marketing tools for design

You know what they say: A picture is worth a thousand words. In marketing, graphic design is the key to delivering a compelling (and high-converting) digital experience. But times are a-changin’, which means you gotta embrace AI design tools to stay ahead.

Think of AI design tools as a creative kickstart—a way to supercharge your skills and take your marketing efforts to new heights. They’re not here to replace your creative process—they’re here to enhance it. With AI-backed design, you can create killer content that will make your competitors green (#00FF00) with envy.

Here are some AI design tools worth checkin’ out:

14. DALL-E 2

Who hasn’t played around with DALL-E? (Seriously, you haven’t developed even one creepy image of a dog-headed pickle? You’re missing out.) 

Developed by OpenAI, DALL-E 2 (the second iteration of DALL-E) is an AI design tool that generates realistic images and artwork from a text prompt. Type what you wanna see, and DALL-E will spin up a few different versions in just a few seconds. 

Key Features:

• Creates unique and creative visual content for just about anything—all from a text prompt
• Simplifies the design process by providing content creators and designers with a quick way to generate images
• Allows users to design visuals for specific requirements (through more complex prompts), giving a high level of customization and control

Pricing: Freemium, then pay per use

15. Adobe Sensei

First of all, cool name. Adobe Sensei is an AI and machine learning tool that enhances graphics with Adobe Creative Cloud. The tool helps marketing teams streamline their workflows, so they can focus more on the actual creating. Sensei also provides insights on what visuals will perform best, giving a lil boost to those conversion rates. It is a sensei, after all…

Key Features:

• Uses AI to streamline creative workflows, enabling you to create better-looking content faster
• Automates repetitive tasks and optimizes aspects of content creation, from image selection to typography adjustments
• Helps you deliver personalized and targeted content, improving your visitor experience and increasing engagement

Pricing: Custom

16. Jasper

Who said you can’t do it all? Not only does Jasper have a copywriting tool, but they’ve also got an image-generating tool. Users can create high-resolution and copyright-free images in seconds using a text prompt. Talk about the best of both worlds.

Key Features:

• Provides stunning, high-resolution images for a whole range of applications
• Offers a great alternative for marketers lookin’ to break free from the limitations of stock images
• Features an intuitive, user-friendly interface that makes the process of designing and generating images a breeze

Pricing: Starting at $20/month

17. Smart Builder

Smart Builder is Unbounce’s AI-powered landing page creation tool. Designed to simplify page creation and optimize for conversions, Smart Builder provides a guided creation experience that helps you build higher-performing landing pages right from the get-go.

Key Features:

• Leverages AI to recommend higher-converting designs and on-page optimizations, helping you maximize conversions
• Offers a drag-and-drop interface that lets you create fully responsive pages with ease—no design or coding experience required
• Integrates with popular marketing and CRM systems to facilitate collaboration between teams and streamline lead gen, tracking, and reporting

Pricing: Starting at $99/month

Data analytics tools using AI

Data can be a lot. Analyzing, optimizing, over and over again. It can be overwhelming to make sense of it all. AI tools for marketing analytics are designed to make it all easier.

These tools are like the wise old wizards of the marketing world, revealing insights and understanding that we mere mortals could only dream of. With their help, you can easily gather and analyze data to help make more informed decisions.

Check out these AI-powered analytics tools to take the pain outta data:

18. Tableau

Tableau turns your data into a masterpiece. This AI platform takes the headache outta data analysis with its intuitive data visualization tools. You don’t have to know a lick of code, and you can still create stunning visualizations that bring your data to life. And with their integrated AI and machine learning, Tableau makes speeds up data analysis and makes it easier to pull actionable insights. What could be better?

Key Features:

• Produces actionable, data-backed insights super fast, including forecasting, clustering, and trend analysis
• Lets users create stunning, interactive dashboards and visualizations that are sharable and easy to edit in real-time
• Integrates data from a wide range of data sources, including Google, Salesforce, Dropbox, and Cloudera (to name a few)

Pricing: Starting at $70/month

19. Polymer

Polymer is another AI analytics tool in the game. They peg themselves as a “no BS” business intelligence tool that help users create dashboards and visualizations in just a few minutes. Not only is their UI super visually appealing, they also have a bunch of great features to top it off.

Key Features:

• Uses AI to analyze your data and quickly turn your spreadsheets into easy-to-understand dashboards and visualizations
• Provides embeddable dashboards and visualizations and lets users easily add graphs, charts, and other graphics
• Integrates with the most popular platforms and makes it easy to import your data

Pricing: Starting at $9/month

20. Microsoft Power BI

About time to level up your data game, no? Enter Microsoft Power BI. This business intelligence and visualization tool helps you slice, dice, and analyze even the biggest data sets with ease. With the ability to import data from spreadsheets and generate AI-powered reports and dashboards, you’ll be able to see your data in a whole new light. So why settle for boring ol’ spreadsheets?

Key Features:

• Seamlessly integrates with Microsoft products (we’re looking at you, Microsoft Excel) and other data sources
• Enables users to create visually compelling and interactive dashboards and reports
• Provides a scalable solution that caters to businesses of all sizes, giving you a flexible approach to your analytics

Pricing: Starting at $10/month

AI conversion rate optimization tools

With AI-powered conversion rate optimization (CRO), you combine the genius of a data scientist with the persuasive charm of a top-notch salesperson, helping you turn more of your visitors into customers. These smart tools can analyze heaps of data to determine the likelihood of a visitor converting, then optimize the experience to make it even more probable. 

Check out the best AI marketing tools that’ll help you maximize your conversions:

21. Smart Traffic

Shameless plug alert. Smart Traffic is our conversion optimization tool. It uses AI to gather audience insights and automatically directs ‘em to the landing page  where they’re most likely convert. While it’s not quite the same as A/B testing, the result is often the same: more conversions. And because Smart Traffic learns in as few as 50 visits,  you don’t have to wait around for weeks until you get enough traffic for a traditional split test

Key Features:

• Lets you create and optimize unlimited variants simultaneously, so you can customize headlines, body text, and visuals for every type of customer
• Analyzes variant performance and generates recommendations based on audience data (like their location, device, and more)
• Learns in as few as 50 visits and gets you (on average) 30% more leads, sales, and signups

Pricing: Starting at $99/month

22. Pathmonk

Pathmonk is an AI-driven CRO platform that helps businesses increase their conversions by providing more personalized experiences for visitors. With their advanced algorithms, Pathmonk analyzes user behavior to provide predictive content and comprehensive reporting for real-time performance insights. Plus, it integrates seamlessly with many of the most popular marketing tools and CRM systems.

Key Features:

• Uses advanced machine learning to analyze user behavior and deliver personalized experiences that engage and convert
• Dynamically adapts content based on user interactions, maximizing conversions and reducing bounce rates
• Provides real-time performance insights through a robust analytics dashboard

Pricing: Starting at $450/month

AI marketing tools for customer support and chat

AI chat tools are helpin’ businesses and marketers automate customer support by simulating conversion prompted by either text or voice.  For us marketers, AI chat tools can be an excellent way to market our products and services by creating a more personalized experience for customers and keeping them engaged.

Here are some top AI chat tools for marketers:

23. Drift

Drift is a great cloud-based AI chat tool created for B2B companies. The AI-powered chatbot provides customers with a more personalized experience and engages with them at every step of their journey. The platform also collects comprehensive user data to provide businesses with actionable insights about customer behavior. 

Key Features:

• Lets you engage with visitors in real-time through live chat and AI-powered chatbots, improving the user experience
• Helps you capture and qualify leads more efficiently by automating initial interactions, gathering information, and connecting visitors with the right person
• Leverages AI-driven insights to deliver personalized content and messaging, increasing conversion rates

Pricing: Starting at $2,500/month

24. Zendesk

If you’re in the market for an AI chat tool that’s as user-friendly as it is versatile, look no further than Zendesk. This cloud-based software is the real deal, offering fully customizable options that are just easy as heck to use. Plus, it seamlessly integrates with all sorts of other apps and media, so you can chat from any channel you choose—whether you feel like typing away or gabbing the phone (Assuming you don’t have phone anxiety, which… Yeah, us, too.) 

Key Features:

• Offers a comprehensive customer service solution that consolidates all of your support channels, including email, chat, and social
• Lets you customize the platform to suit your needs, ensuring a seamless fit with your existing processes
• Provides powerful analytics and reporting tools, helping you track key performance metrics, identify trends, and optimize your support

Pricing: Starting at $295/month

25. Netomi

Lookin’ to impress customers? Netomi‘s AI chatbot software is for you. With its AI-powered messaging engine, this chatbot can resolve customer inquiries with a whoppin’ 70% accuracy rate—all without human intervention. (Just how we humans like it.) So whether your customers prefer chattin’ online, or talkin’ on the phone, or emailin’ away, Netomi’s got ya covered.

Key Features:

• Lets you deliver fast, accurate, and efficient customer service through intelligent chabots and virtual assistants
• Automates routine tasks and common issues, helping you reduce the workload on your customer support team
• Easily integrates with popular CRM systems, messaging apps, and customer support platforms to provide a cohesive experience across multiple channels

Pricing: Custom

The most impactful marketers are doing it with AI marketing tools

Digital marketing is changing, and change can feel overwhelming. With so many tools and techniques available, it’s tough to know where to start.

Rather than replace marketers, AI-powered tools can help you keep up. These tools are literally designed to streamline processes, provide actionable data insights, and save you time and money. Plus, they can take care of the mundane tasks, allowing you to focus on more creative and strategic aspects of marketing.

So leave those marketing dinosaurs behind, and embrace this brave new world.

There have been smaller versions of that, too, ever since that big Big Bang. Events that changed the course of life as we know it. The invention of the internet was a pretty big one. The invention of wheels. The invention of yogurt-covered pretzels. 

And of course, the invention of artificial intelligence. AI is totally reshaping how we work, how we create, how we communicate—and it’s getting more and more accessible each day. ChatGPT, anyone? 

That’s true for marketers, too. Businesses are adopting AI marketing tools to help them get better results from their campaigns—often with less effort and lower costs. We even did a little research of our own and it turns out, more than 80% of businesses believe AI tools will positively impact their business in three years or less. Businesses—and not just the ones running tech startups out of Silicon Valley—are hungry for a piece of that AI pie.

Some marketers are already using AI to create more customized campaigns. Some are still skeptical that AI can deliver results as good (or better than) a real, live person. But one thing’s certain: AI marketing is happening, and even if you’re not gonna adopt AI tools, you need to know what it’s all about.

So, what does AI marketing really even mean? Let’s take a deep dive.

Here’s what you need to know about AI marketing:

• What is AI marketing, anyhow?
• What are some types of AI marketing?
• What concerns are there about AI?
• Will marketers be replaced by AI?
• How do I add AI to my marketing strategy?
• What are some AI marketing trends?

What is AI marketing?

Before we can talk about AI marketing, we need to start by goin’ back to basics. What is artificial intelligence?

Artificial intelligence is just a way of talking about computers that can think—or appear to think—like humans. A brilliant ol’ fella named Alan Turing first proposed the question, “Can machines think?” The answer depends on who you ask (and what we agree “thinking” even means), but it’s generally accepted that machines today can successfully replicate human intelligence in some circumstances.

AI is all about programming computers to perform tasks that normally require a person, like recognizing speech, making decisions, and even learning from experience. If that thought freaks you out, instead imagine having a cute lil robot brain inside your computer, ready to help you out with whatever task you throw its way. Adorable.

AI marketing is just the application of AI for marketing purposes. Marketers in this day and age are using the power of AI to speed up (or even automate) content creation, analyze customer data for insights, respond to support requests—all sorts of things that would normally take time and expertise. Frickin’ cool, right?

Examples of AI in marketing

Maybe this all sounds a little abstract—but marketers are using AI and getting real, concrete results. Here are some examples of what that looks like:

• Peter Letts is the founder of Abyss Scuba Diving. Peter is churning out PPC campaigns and landing pages that see an average conversion rate of 35% . He did it all using an AI landing page builder that takes makes data-backed recommendations gets folks converting like mad.
• Jeff Taylor is the founder of his own digital marketing agency, Taylor Made Marketing. Jeff regularly gets his clients conversion rates 10 times the industry standard. He’s using an AI tool to analyze visitor attributes and automatically route ‘em to the page where they’re (statistically) most likely to convert. Since he started using AI, business has been boomin’.

AI offers tons of benefits to marketers. It doesn’t just get you better results—it also speeds up mundane tasks, reduces the need for additional headcount, and lets you focus on the big picture. Many marketers are adopting AI tools—like copy generators, design assistants, and marketing automation and optimization software—because they help ‘em save money, fill expertise gaps, and free up more time. Show us a marketer who doesn’t want literally all of those things?

Popular types of AI marketing

AI is everywhere. It’s like the sand you find all over your house after that one day playing volleyball at the beach. (Top Gun just made it look so darn fun.) 

Many industries have adopted AI or are in the process, and it’s no different for marketing. So, what types of AI are available for marketers, and how are they used?

AI data analysis

To succeed in marketing, you gotta know what makes your customers tick. AI can crunch the numbers for you and analyze all your juicy data to understand consumer habits. From there, it can predict what products and services they’re likely to buy based on their online history and past purchases. With this intel, marketers can forecast sales, manage inventory, and push the right products to the right people. 

It’s like having an octopus that can predict the future, but without that… fishy smell.

AI content generation

AI can help marketers create all sorts of content for social media, email marketing (hello, subject lines), and other communication channels. Marketers can set parameters around the generated content and ultimately have the final say in what gets sent or published.

For example, we’ve got an AI copywriting tool to help users write engaging content for landing pages, emails, and ads. Spin up some content, keep what you like, and bin the rest. (Also, check out our guide to AI writing and how it can improve your content.)

Though AI can’t replicate human creativity, it can save your team time—and maybe even fuel a bit of inspiration.

Dynamic pricing AI

The retail world’s version of “now you see it, now you don’t!” Dynamic pricing is when prices change based on things like traffic volume or product availability. You know the drill: You search for something, leave it for a bit, and when you come back, the price has gone through the roof. (Not nice, ecommerce website.) Of course, the theory is that prices then drop once demand ebbs. 

For marketers, AI-powered dynamic pricing is gold. They can create campaigns that have a sense of urgency and maximize their ROI, without needing to adjust prices themselves manually. It’s a win-win situation. (Except when you have to pay through the nose for that flight to your cousin’s wedding.)

AI chatbots

Chatbots have become a common feature of the customer service experience. Think about the little chat bubble embedded on many websites, or the responses you get from brands on social media, by email, or by text. AI chatbots can be used to assist customers with various tasks, like placing orders or even working through technical hiccups. (Thanks again, “Brad,” for wishing me a happy birthday while fixing my phone service issue.) 

Chatbots also have the potential to generate new sales opportunities. AI chatbots can make more personalized recommendations by collecting data about a customer’s interests and preferences. For marketers, that means more conversions. Good stuff.

AI conversion rate optimization

Forget about manual A/B testing. Marketers can use AI to automatically select the best version of your content—or better yet, eliminate the need to choose a “champion” entirely. Imagine using AI to quickly spin up dozens of ad or email variants, then letting the machine analyze demographic data to figure out which is likely to perform best for each individual. 

For example, Unbounce has an AI conversion optimization tool for landing pages. Rather than split-testing a couple of variants at a time, marketers can create as many landing pages as they want, then let AI automatically send visitors to the top-converting page for people like them. On average, it gets marketers get 30% more conversions. Just sayin’.

Problems with AI in marketing

Of course, it’s not all sunshine and algorithmically-generated daisies. AI is changing the marketing landscape stupidly fast, and it’s important to also recognize some of the risks that come with this dramatic shift in the way we work.

For example, AI isn’t so great at replicating the emotional intelligence of marketers. Customers still value a human touch, and if their entire experience with your brand is jumpin’ from one artificial experience to the next, it could be a turn off. It’s crucial that marketers don’t let AI replace genuine interaction and connection with their customers.

Likewise, AI lacks human creativity. Generative AI models are incredible for their ability to churn out an absolutely bonkers amount of… well, pretty decent written and visual content. (After all, they were trained on the whole gosh-dang Internet.) But AI doesn’t yet come up with truly original ideas. It just combines other ideas it’s seen before into something that looks kinda new. Marketers can use these tools to accelerate their creative processes, but it you wanna make something great, you’re better off putting in the time to do in the ol’ fashioned way: Thinking of it yourself.

There are other problems with AI, like privacy and data collection. When you share data with an AI tool, you need to be aware of how that data is gonna be used. Imagine you turn over your customer list (with names, emails, phone numbers) for AI analysis. Can you say confidently that the data isn’t gonna be used to train the model, or even show up as generated content for other users? 

And we can take that concern a step further. What says an AI tool is even correct?

AI is only as good as the human-created content it’s trained on, and as a species, we’re, uh… we’re not super reliable. If AI is using inaccurate data and biased information to determine its own outputs, then those outputs are inevitably gonna be inaccurate and biased, too. 

It’s impossible for a marketer to fact-check the oceans of data informing the AI tools they use. The solution, then, is to always filter what you’re getting from AI through your own skepticism and expertise.

Will marketers be replaced by AI?

It’s true that AI marketing comes with a bunch of great perks. But we’re sure most marketers have woken in a cold sweat with an intrusive thought: Are robots gonna replace me? If AI is just so good at this whole marketing thing, what are we gonna need marketers for?

There’s no denying that digital marketing as we know it is in for some big changes. But marketers—being their usual, nimble selves— are already adapting. Our research shows that marketers are fully aware of how AI can help them juggle everyday challenges, supporting and enhancing their marketing efforts. And as of 2022,  31% of marketers were already using AI to improve their bottom line.

With so many everyday marketing tools integrating AI into the mix (think Notion or Canva), the days of marketers using AI without even knowing it are pretty close. So don’t worry so much about AI replacing you. Instead, worry about the other marketers using AI to level up their skills and increasing their impact. (Now that’s nightmare fuel.)

How to adopt AI in your marketing strategy

At this point, you’re probably thinking about adding some AI to your marketing strategy. Go, you! 

While it’s not a magical solution that can solve all your problems, AI can give your marketing efforts that boost you’re lookin’ for. It won’t replace your entire marketing team, but it can automate tasks, improve conversion rates, and help you identify new opportunities to engage with your audience.

But before jumping in headfirst, here are some things to consider:

Evaluate your existing processes

If you’re considering adopting an AI tool, first think about how it’ll fit into your current workflows. That means deep divin’ into your audience, understanding their journey and potential pain points, and identifying areas where AI can help you create a better experience.

Let’s say you run an online clothing store. You could start by (manually) analyzing some of your existing customer data to identify patterns and trends. What are the most popular clothing items that are flyin’ off your shelves? What are the most common reasons you get for returns? What are the most asked questions by your customers?

This will help you identify how AI can best be used to improve customer experience, such as personalized clothing recommendations (you can match this top with this skirt), automated returns processing, and chatbots to answer customer inquiries.

Think about your gaps or inefficiencies

What are some of the frustrations you have with the processes of your team? Think about this in terms of actual manual labor. Think about what things could be slowing you and your team down, and decide where and when to get AI to do some heavy liftin’. It’s all about streamlining your marketing processes.

Let’s say you work for a marketing agency that specializes in social media management for small businesses. You and your team spend a heck of a lot of time manually scheduling social media posts, creating content calendars, and analyzing engagement metrics. Blegh.

You can use AI to tackle some of that manual work. Scheduling posts in advance, optimizing times for maximum engagement, and even creating content based on audience preferences. With all this work outta the way, your team could focus on other tasks that require human creativity. You’d be increasing efficiency and productivity, benefiting your clients and their social media presence—and gettin’ more business as a result.

Plan how you’ll implement new tech

Implementing any new technology into a team’s marketing processes can take lotsa time and effort. To get the most out of AI-powered tools, you’ve gotta know how to use ‘em efficiently so your team (and your customers) can get the best experience. 

Imagine you’re the marketing director for an ecommerce company that sells consumer electronics. You’ve decided to implement an AI-powered chatbot on your website to handle customer inquiries and provide personalized product recommendations. Smart. 

But implementing this technology into your team’s workflow means real time and effort. To get the most out of the chatbot, you’ll need to train it with accurate data, program it with relevant scripts, and integrate it seamlessly into your website. Not to mention training your team on how to use the chatbot—how to monitor conversations, escalate issues to human support, and analyze chat logs for insights.

Be sure you’ve got a plan for how you’ll implement AI tools before you pay for ’em.

Trends and the future of AI marketing

Artificial intelligence ain’t sci-fi anymore. The past few years have seen huge advances in AI tech. Crystal ball in hand, here are some trends we’re expectin’ to see in the future. 

• Concerns about privacy and security will increase. Despite all these great things happenin’ with AI, the trust issues are still there. Consumers are legit scared of their data being collected and used against them. That means marketers gotta start addressing privacy concerns by providing more transparency around the data they’re collecting, and using it only to the benefit of the customer. It’s also time for organizations to beef up their cybersecurity game—because hackers are starting to use AI, too. Businesses will need to take additional steps to protect their customers’ data from algorithmically-augmented outlaws.
• Voice-enabled AI is (still) gonna change marketing. Voice-enabled AI has been the talk ‘o the town for years now. At this point, some of us talk to assistants like Siri and Google Home more than actual people. Still, this conversational AI remains under-utilized in marketing. That’s gonna change. In the not-so-distant future, marketers will need to consider speech recognition technologies in their marketing strategies. In fact, voice-recognition tech was already projected to become a key business channel in 2022. Who needs fingers when you’ve got a voice assistant?
• AI will keep getting better at generating creative work. AI in marketing is getting smarter by the minute. With more marketers jumping on the AI marketing bandwagon, AI itself is learning all sorts of algorithms and refining its content like a pro. The best part? The more data it collects, the more impressive its outputs become. That means we can expect to see some seriously impressive content generated by AI—we’re talkin’ copy, images, videos, and basically any other medium you can think of.

Marketers: It’s time to join forces with AI

AI is the new hotness, and it’s shakin’ things up in the world of marketing. But don’t worry—it’s not here to steal your job. In fact, by combining your marketing expertise with the power of artificial intelligence, you can become more impactful than ever before. Marketers who adopt AI are more effective than those who don’t—because it saves ’em time, helps them with complex tasks, and boosts the results they get from their campaigns.

Likewise, AI works best when it’s paired with a real person. It needs you—to check that the information it provides is accurate, to improve the written and visual content it creates, to keep it from rising up against its human overlords in a Terminator-type machine revolution. Rather than feeling threatened by AI, marketers need to recognize the value that both sides bring to the partnership—and start kickin’ butt and crushin’ conversions together.

Enter: The Internet and the wide, webby world of digital marketing.

And it is wide. With the ability to communicate with just about anybody on the planet—all without getting outta your pajamas—digital marketing makes it a snap to raise awareness about your brand. Choose your marketing channels, create some content, and voilà. You’re in the business of bein’ in business.

But it’s not quite that simple. Here’s what you need to know about digital marketing and how to do it right.

• What is digital marketing?
• What are the benefits of digital marketing?
• What are some types of digital marketing?
• How do you create a digital marketing strategy?

Um, what exactly is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is what it sounds like: marketing that takes place online. It’s a pretty broad term without a universal definition. Still, you can think of it as encouraging people who interact with your digital content—ads, emails, social posts, ebooks, whatever—to become customers. (Or, at the very least, to engage meaningfully with your business.)

There are all kinds of digital marketing. (We can’t even count ’em all on two hands.) You might choose to advertise your business on Google and pay to show up at the top of search results for relevant keywords. You could send an email to your customer list persuading them to try a new product or redeem an exclusive discount. Or maybe you wanna do some good ol’ fashioned content marketing and attract potential customers with educational resources. Ahem.

When you know what to look for, you can see digital marketing happening everywhere. It’s one of the most foolproof ways—maybe even the only way, for some—to get new customers today. Although strategies and tactics will vary, almost every brand does some form of digital marketing.

Why should you be doing digital marketing?

Business has moved online. We don’t really think that statement is controversial, but if you don’t believe us, here are some wild facts:

• In 2022, people around the world spent just over 400 minutes on the web every day. (That’s more than 6 hours daily. Get a hobby, us.)
• Ecommerce sales recently eclipsed $1 trillion globally—for the first time in history.
• It’s expected that 24% of all retail purchases will take place online by 2026. That’s a whole lot of digital cheddar to be made.

So, yeah, Digital Revolution and all that. If you want your business to be successful today, it’s almost a given that you need to be doing some kind of digital marketing. But that’s not a bad thing—it’s incredible. There are all kinds of benefits to digital marketing over traditional marketing methods:

• It’s highly targeted. Most traditional kinds of advertising (like radio or television ads) are one-to-many, which means you’re broadcasting the same ad to everybody. That makes it hard to tailor your messaging to address particular customer segments. Digital marketing is much more targeted, allowing you to customize your ads for people that meet certain criteria: age, gender, interests, and more.
• It’s very measurable. Mass communication is weird. When you run a newspaper ad, it’s tough to figure out whether anybody’s even seen it. Did your sales go up? Was that because of the ad or something else? In digital marketing, you can measure how many people have seen your ad in real-time. Not only that, but you can track what they do after they see your ad, all the way up to when they make a purchase.
• It’s super agile. Traditional marketing moves slowly. Once you’ve committed to running a TV ad, dangnabbit, it’s gonna run. There’s too much effort involved in planning, production, and distribution—not to mention the exorbitant cost—which also means it’s hard to pivot. Digital marketing allows you to move fast. Kicking off a new promotion? The ad can be up in minutes.
• It’s pretty affordable. That depends on the type of digital marketing, of course—but compared to traditional media, it’s a steal. According to a quick web search, wide-reach television ads cost hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars, and it’s tough to determine whether they’ve even worked. Advertising on Facebook, you can get people straight to your website for a couple bucks. That’s tough to beat.

What types of digital marketing are there?

Ooh boy. There’s no shortage of ways you can market your business online. Here are some of the most common types of digital marketing:

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) means optimizing your website to rank better on search engine results pages (SERPs) for sites like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The goal is to make it easier for search engines to understand the content on a page and rank it higher in the results for relevant keywords or phrases. And it pays to be first: the top-ranked page in search results gets clicked 49% of the time. 

SEO combines technical, on-page, and off-page optimizations to improve a website’s overall search engine visibility:

• Technical optimizations: You can improve a website’s backend infrastructure to make indexing its content easier for search engines. Common technical fixes include optimizing load speed, implementing structured data markup, fixing broken links, and ensuring the website is mobile-friendly. 
• On-page optimizations: This type of SEO is all about tweaking individual web pages to improve their relevance and authority for specific keywords or topics. That means optimizing page titles and meta descriptions, using header tags to structure content, and ensuring the website has high-quality content that reflects what folks are looking for.
• Off-page optimizations: Building external links to a website improves its credibility with search engines. To get more backlinks, you can create high-quality content that gets cited by other websites, post engaging social media content to build brand awareness and authority or participate in online communities to build relationships with other businesses and influencers.

The obvious benefit of SEO is driving more organic traffic to your website–but it can also help businesses demonstrate authority online by ensuring they show up first in the search results for relevant queries. (If we didn’t show up in one of the top spots for “landing page builder,” you’d be a little worried, right?)

SEO is tricky, though. The big search engines are pretty secretive about what exactly factors into their rankings. They regularly make secret updates to their algorithms to ensure their search results are relevant and high-quality. That means what works in SEO (and what doesn’t) is changing all the time.

Search engines will always try to highlight the best result for any given search query—so first and foremost, create digital content that provides value to your target audience. Make sure you’re addressing the needs of your visitors, then focus on optimizing your headlines and meta information to make Google especially happy.

Content marketing

With content marketing, the goal is to attract and retain your target audience by creating valuable, relevant content that educates or entertains. Executed well, content marketing can help you establish trust and credibility with potential customers—and make them more likely to engage with your brand in the future.

Content marketing is everywhere. (Hey, you’re experiencing it right now!) Popular types of content include:

• Blogs: Blogs allow brands to demonstrate their expertise by sharing valuable information and insights with their audience. Additionally, blogs are easy to share and can be optimized for search engines, making them a great way to drive traffic to your website and improve its search rankings.
• Videos: Videos are an engaging and versatile format that can convey complex information in easy-to-digest snippets. They’re particularly effective at capturing viewers’ attention—plus, they can be shared on social media and embedded on websites, helping you reach a wider audience.
• Podcasts: Podcasts are particularly effective for businesses that want to establish themselves as thought leaders, as they allow hosts to share their expertise and engage in conversations with industry experts. Podcasts can also be listened to on-the-go and offer a unique and intimate way to connect with your audience.
• Infographics: Infographics have fallen outta fashion lately, but they’re still a visually appealing and effective way to present complex information in an easy-to-understand format. They’re perfect for highlighting statistics and insights to your audience and can be easily shared on social channels.
• Social Posts: Social posts are ideal for creating engagement and fostering relationships with an audience. They’re great for sharing news, promotions, and updates with your followers, and can be used to drive traffic to a website or landing page. And with the wide-reaching nature of social media, they give you a way to expose your brand to new audiences.

So yeah—content is basically everything you read, watch, and listen to online. Content becomes content marketing when its aim is to drive some sort of customer action, like getting ‘em to fill out a form, buy a product, or improve their perception of your brand.

Content marketing works very well in tandem with SEO. Brands can improve search engine rankings by creating high-quality, optimized content that attracts links and social shares. This (in turn) can lead to increased website traffic and visibility. You get the dual benefit of introducing yourself to a broader audience and making a great first impression by providing folks with the information they want. 

Creating valuable content is also particularly useful for lead generation. Say you produce an ebook or whitepaper—some piece of educational content that solves a problem for your audience. You can “gate” this resource and require visitors to provide their contact information in exchange for access. Gated content helps you capture valuable leads that you can nurture through email campaigns and gradually move toward a purchase.

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing

With pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, your ads are presented to visitors on a particular platform—and whenever somebody “clicks” on one of your ads, you “pay.” (Are these “quotation marks” annoying?) The cost depends on your targeting parameters, but it’s usually pretty cheap. When everything goes right, the value of the click (in terms of new sales or leads generated through the ad’s landing page) should more than offset the cost of advertising.

When people talk about PPC, they usually mean paying to have their ads show up at the top of the SERP on Google or Bing. Although PPC is definitely a thing on social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, too.

When you set up a PPC ad campaign, you can target customers based on things like:

• Keywords: Search engine PPC ads require you to choose the keywords that will show your ads to your audience. Pick keywords related to your product and your customer’s intentions when they’re looking for your product. (And don’t forget to do keyword research.)
• Location: If you have a local business or seasonal product, you can advertise to specific countries, states, cities, or even ZIP/postal codes.
• Demographics: Since everybody’s online behavior is being tracked extensively, PPC platforms usually have a good sense of who they’re showing ads to. (This is doubly true on social media.) You can set your PPC campaign to target folks of a particular gender, age, income, and more.
• Retargeting: In a retargeting campaign, you show PPC ads to customers who’ve already interacted with your website. You can set campaigns to advertise to people who abandoned their shopping cart on your site or visited a specific page.

Social media marketing (SMM)

Social media marketing (SMM) is all about promoting your brand on social platforms like Twitter, Pinterest, or Instagram. It often means organically sharing content to build and engage with a digital audience. It might also mean running a PPC campaign to target ads at a particular demographic on one of these platforms.

Some of the most common channels for social media marketing include:

• Facebook: With literally billions of active users every month, Facebook provides an enormous audience of potential customers. It’s great for creating brand awareness and engaging with customers through comments, messages, and groups. Facebook also offers PPC options, allowing businesses to target specific demographics based on interests, location, and behaviors.
• Instagram: Instagram is a visually-driven platform perfect for brands relying on stunning visuals to showcase their products or services. It’s great for influencer marketing and user-generated content, too. Instagram offers paid advertising, including sponsored posts and stories, as well as shoppable posts that allow businesses to tag products in their photos.
• Twitter: Twitter is great for engaging with customers in real-time—things like providing customer support, answering questions, and addressing concerns. Twitter is also great for sharing news and updates about your business. Hashtags are widely used on Twitter, allowing brands to participate in conversations and increase their visibility.
• YouTube: YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world (after Google), with more than 2 billion active users each month. It’s the ideal channel for brands to share video content, including product demos, tutorials, and behind-the-scenes footage. YouTube also has paid ads, including promo segments that appear before or during videos.
• LinkedIn: When it’s not being flooded with #hustleculture nonsense, LinkedIn is perfect for B2B businesses. It’s a great spot to generate brand awareness, establish thought leadership, and connect with potential customers and business partners. You can also run ads on LinkedIn, including sponsored content and sponsored InMail.
• TikTok: TikTok is a rapidly growing social media platform perfect for businesses that want to utilize fun, engaging, short-form video content. TikTok provides paid advertising options, including in-feed ads and brand takeovers.
• Snapchat: Snapchat is a popular platform among young audiences, making it ideal for brands chasing a more youthful demographic. Snapchat lets you create temporary content, such as stories and snaps, only available for 24 hours.
• Pinterest: Pinterest is a visual discovery platform that is perfect for businesses that want to showcase their offering alongside smaller creators. You can “pin” content to visual “boards” and create blog posts that drive traffic back to your website. Pinterest also offers paid advertising, including promoted pins and promoted video pins.
• Reddit: Reddit is a discussion-based platform that’s ideal for engaging with niche communities. It’s great for sharing content and participating in discussions related to your industry. You can advertise on Reddit through promoted posts and subreddits.

You probably already use these sites pretty regularly, huh? Social media marketing is about connecting with people where they’re already spending time in order to create brand awareness and drive value for your business. (Jeez, that sounds kinda cynical, actually.)

But truthfully, the best social media marketing provides value for your audience, too. You could publish a series of posts that are just flat-out entertaining content. Your audience gets a laugh, and now they think a bit more fondly of your brand. Or you could run an exclusive promotion for your social followers giving them a discount on their next purchase.

It’s that connection that makes social media marketing so powerful. You can build a following of people who actually want to hear from you because they like what you have to say. And you can grow your audience by demonstrating value to folks who might’ve never heard of you before.

Example of a social media marketing campaign:

When creating a social media campaign, try mixing up your post formats. Take a page out of the convenience store Sheetz’s book and use a combo of text, picture, and video posts to maximize audience engagement. For their holiday campaign, Sheetz used a variety of post types throughout December, like this Christmas sweater discussion and this video of a yeti invading its local Sheetz.

And these posts are all from Twitter alone. Sheetz used some of the same videos and photos for its other social accounts, but they made sure to avoid a common social media mistake and customized their posts for each platform. Make sure your content and tone of voice match the platform where you post.

Native advertising

Native advertising refers to the practice of creating and placing ads that match the form and function of the platform on which they appear. (Kinda like a ketchup bottle shaped like a tomato… And we use “kinda” very loosely.) Unlike other types of digital advertising, native ads blend in seamlessly with the user’s browsing experience, making them less disruptive and more engaging. 

These ads can take lots of forms, including sponsored content, product placements, and certain social media ads. The goal of native advertising is to promote a brand or product without overtly interrupting the user’s experience or feeling like an advertisement. 

Native advertising can be a more effective way to reach your target audience. Blending in seamlessly with the platform’s content, these ads are more likely to be received positively by users. This is especially true for younger audiences who are more likely to use ad-blocking software and have become skeptical of traditional advertising methods. (Darn savvy kids—why won’t you buy our stuff?!) 

That said, avoid making native ads that are deceptive. It’s great to run ads that fit the vibe of the platform, but it’s equally important that users can distinguish between advertising and organic content. Misleading practices can erode your audience’s trust, doing your brand more harm than good. Make sure your ads are clearly labeled (as “sponsored content,” for example) and don’t misrepresent the product or service you’re promoting.

Influencer marketing (or affiliate marketing)

Influencer marketing (sometimes called affiliate marketing) is the act of partnering with an influential person in your space (an influencer, if you will) to spread the word about your brand. You get the benefit of introducing your product or service to their existing audience, which might be a lot bigger than your own. They get the benefit of… well, whatever money you pay ’em for the privilege—usually a commission or percentage of the sales they help generate.

That might sound kinda goofy, but influencer marketing clearly works. The influencer industry had a global value of $16.4 billion in 2022, and it’s growing bigger all the time. Short-form video platforms like TikTok and Instagram have helped influencers build audiences into the tens of millions. (People really like being told what to think, apparently.)

But you don’t need to land an influencer with millions of followers. In many cases, a micro-influencer can actually help you build more authority. Micro-influencers have a smaller following than the big names, but they often specialize in niche topics and have more distinct audiences. These influencers make it easier to target your marketing to people who will be most receptive to it.

Example of an influencer marketing campaign:

You might associate influencer and affiliate marketing with products on Instagram, but businesses outside of ecommerce can get in on the trend. PRWeek’s top influencer campaign of 2021 involved a community football club in the United Kingdom.

The Grenfell Athletic club was founded to help residents stand strong after 72 people died in a fire at London’s Grenfell Tower. Two agencies helped the club raise money to support its community through a shirt distributed to 72 influencers in honor of the tragedy. They helped Grenfell Athletic raise £30,000—enough to support the club for three more years.

Email marketing

Email marketing is all about communicating with folks who have already interacted with your business in some capacity. (How else would you have their email?) You can use email marketing to let your audience know about new products, special promotions, upcoming events, or even provide educational content that “nurtures” prospects through the buyer journey.

Email is a particularly valuable channel for businesses that are concerned about return on investment. (Uh, who isn’t?) Depending on who you ask, email marketing has an ROI in the neighborhood of $36 for every $1 spent. Whoa.

That’s partly because email is so affordable. Unlike with PPC, you don’t need to pay an advertising platform every time someone engages with one of your emails. But it’s also because email can be super targeted since you already know a ton about the people you’re communicating with.

By segmenting your audience into different groups—say, depending on how they’ve previously engaged with your business—you can send targeted messages that are more likely to lead to conversions. And once somebody has converted, email can help you maintain relationships, build loyalty, and increase retention.

Example of an email marketing campaign:

A common email marketing strategy is to introduce new subscribers to your brand through a series of introductory emails. Check out how gender-inclusive underwear brand TomboyX begins its welcome email with its mission statement to draw in customers with similar values.

When it comes to building loyalty, emphasizing your brand’s purpose is a slam dunk. (Unless your purpose is, like, drowning kittens or something.) If you plan on creating a welcome campaign for your email marketing, think of how you wanna introduce your business to customers and start with that message.

So, how do you create a digital marketing strategy?

The key to digital marketing success is understanding how customers interact with your business online. When you understand both sides of the marketing relationship—you and your customer—you’ll be able to identify the best digital marketing channels and content types to engage with your audience.

Here are some digital marketing tips to keep in mind before you get started.

Digital marketing tip #1: Know your product/service

You need to know your offering inside and out before trying to market it. After all, if you don’t know your product or service, how can you explain it to your customers?

Before you try your hand at digital marketing, make sure you’ve got a thorough understanding of these aspects of your product or service:

• Value proposition: What’s your brand’s value proposition, and how does your product or service contribute to it? Your value proposition communicates your brand’s core value and helps customers (or potential customers) understand what makes you different. Think of the ways that your products or services deliver that value.
• Features and benefits: Features describe what your product or service does. Benefits show how those features will help your customers solve their problems. When you talk about your business, you should always emphasize the benefits. Think of features as the means by which you provide that value.

This might sound a little basic, but it’s essential to producing digital content that really communicates the value of your offer. Think of all the ads you see that make you go, “huh?” Those marketers haven’t done their homework.

Digital marketing tip #2: Know your audience

Now that we’ve got the product or service you’re trying to sell, spend some time thinking about your customers (or potential customers). It’s easier to make engaging, persuasive digital content when you know how your audience thinks and behaves.

Audience research is a whole discipline of work in its own right—but there are some quick and scrappy ways to do it as a marketer. The most obvious (and, weirdly, the least common) is talking to your customers. These are the folks who’ve already bought what you’re sellin’ (either literally or figuratively). Ask them how they heard about you, what they like about your business, or where they hang out online. Lots of people are more than willing to share.

If you wanna dig a little deeper, you can perform more in-depth audience research using some of these methods:

• Surveys (try a free platform like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms)
• Social media audience analysis
• Analysis of your competitor’s audience
• Google Analytics demographic info
• Audience research tools like BuzzSumo or SparkToro

Once you’ve got some audience data, look it over for patterns in demographics, interests, and online behavior. Put those trends together to create marketing personas—profiles of your typical customers that’ll help you visualize who you’re talking to in your campaigns.

Digital marketing tip #3: Know your channels

Digital marketing happens across a wide range of channels—places where you market your products or services. (We talked about some of the most common types of marketing above.) Marketers use an average of 7.2 channels, so you should use at least a couple to keep up with the industry.

Some examples of your digital marketing channels could include:

• Your website
• Your list of email subscribers
• Your social media channels (e.g., Facebook)
• Your video platforms (e.g., YouTube)
• Your search engine rankings and ads

What channels will work best for your brand? The answer will depend on your audience. As you research your customers, look at where they spend time online. Investigate the sorts of content they like to engage with. And—importantly—figure out how much time and money you can invest in a particular channel before you use it. (There’s nothing sketchier than a Twitter profile with no activity for three years.)

Send your digital marketing traffic to landing pages

Of course, getting folks to engage with you online is only half (or maybe five-ninths) of effective digital marketing. Once somebody has clicked on your ad or email, you still need them to complete your campaign goal—whether that’s buying a product, signing up for a service, or downloading an ebook. You still need them to convert.

And when you need to drive more conversions, you need landing pages.

Landing pages are standalone web pages that keep people focused on your call to action. Unlike your website, they don’t present visitors with any distractions—just a consistent, seamless journey from their first click all the way to your campaign goal.

Your audience gets a better experience. You get more conversions.

I wrote my first piece of copy. The client read it, looked at me, and said, “You’ll work in an ad agency one day.” I was 12.

Call it fate or natural skill, Jeff has been marketing and growing businesses since 1992—long before “digital” was a part of any agency’s vocabulary. Now, he’s got his own agency. Taylor Made Marketing helps home improvement businesses with lead generation through branding, web design, digital marketing, video production, and more. 

But this ain’t your everyday marketing agency. Jeff regularly gets his clients conversion rates above 35%—10 times the home improvement industry standard. That’s led to monster campaign results for the companies that use his services—and Jeff’s well-earned reputation as the handyman who can fix anybody’s marketing.

From analog to digital marketing in a decade

Jeff started out in television and radio advertising. As the internet was going mainstream, he remembers a door-to-door salesman in the early 1990s trying to “con” him into purchasing domain names. Today, some of us buy domains like candy (ahem)—but 30+ years ago, not so much. At the time, Jeff had never heard of domain names and sent the seller on his way. 

Although Jeff didn’t buy up any domains, he still got an early start in digital marketing, dipping his toes in the worldwide web towards the turn of the century. Jeff decided to fully move into digital marketing during the financial collapse of 2008, when businesses were struggling to afford more traditional channels like radio and television. 

Without skipping a beat, Taylor Made Marketing jumped on the digital marketing bandwagon—and they’ve been driving quality leads for home improvement businesses ever since.

Why traditional A/B testing is great—until it isn’t

Like most marketing agencies, Taylor Made Marketing adopted a traditional approach to building and testing landing pages. They would create multiple pages for clients and A/B test them over several weeks or months to find the winning page. When they discovered the best-performing page, they’d tweak one element and start all over again—and again, and again, until they saw a significant improvement in conversion rates. 

Sure, it got them results for their clients—but it was slow, tedious, and the increases were minimal.

Things changed when Taylor Made Marketing discovered Unbounce, and specifically Smart Traffic. Jeff said “buh-bye” to cumbersome and drawn-out A/B testing and “hey, how you doin’?” to AI-optimized landing pages with sky-high conversion rates. 

Smart Traffic uses machine learning to detect traffic patterns and automatically route visitors to the page where they’re most likely to convert. Now, Taylor Made Marketing can test a truckload of pages with multiple variants simultaneously and get faster results for their clients—in as few as 50 visits. That’s lightning fast. 

Before Smart Traffic, we used to build landing pages the old fashioned way and do our own A/B testing one page at a time. We gained some increases that way, but once Smart Traffic came out, we could test a whole bunch of landing pages at once.

It gives us real-time results back about what’s working. Seeing that real-time data across many landing pages made it very easy for us to make the switch to Smart Traffic.

In fact, he regularly gets 35% conversion rates—when the average conversion rate in the home improvement sector is between 3-5%. Jeff says with results like this, it was a no-brainer to switch all his agency’s landing pages over to Unbounce, which they did several years ago.

Putting AI-powered traffic optimization to work

Thanks to Taylor Made Marketing’s decades of experience in digital marketing and their knowledge of Unbounce’s Smart Traffic, Jeff’s clients experience incredible ROI on ad spend. “On a $10,000 ad spend, we have hit 30:1 ROI with Smart Traffic.” If he’s working with a window installation company, for example, he typically sees a 35% conversion rate (inquiry) with Smart Traffic—with an average close rate (final sale) of 50%. Whoa.

Jeff knows you can have the most amazing, splendiferous, high-converting landing pages—but if you can’t close a lead, it means nothing. You’ve wasted your money.

Here—join us over at the whiteboard, won’t you?

Some leads don’t require much work to sell—but typically, you need more than headlines and CTAs to book an appointment.

It’s a universal lesson for every industry. If you use landing pages to drive someone to your online shop, and it’s a terrible experience, there’s nothing you can do to convert the customer.

Jeff stresses that every touchpoint of the sales and marketing funnel needs to be effective. He also notes that if a landing page is converting (like the ones he builds for his clients), but the sales don’t match, then you know where your problem is.

Robots never call in sick, robots never lie

Selling the idea of AI marketing tools to his clients comes easy to Jeff. He uses Smart Traffic to generate leads for his own company—and knows first-hand how effective AI can be. But using AI is sometimes intimidating to his clients because they don’t understand it.

Jeff says giving the robot human attributes helps make it feel more approachable. 

[Customers] don’t know what Smart Traffic is, so we just call it AI and assure our clients that our robots are superior to any human marketer on Earth—and it’s true.

We’ve used personification where we give the AI human characteristics, like ‘it never calls in sick, it never lies, it’s always 100% accurate, it doesn’t make mistakes, it’s smarter than Einstein, Gates, and Musk combined.

(Time’ll tell on that last one, huh?)

Once clients understand how Smart Traffic fits into Taylor Made Marketing’s team, they’re more open to the idea of using a robot to gain more leads. And with conversion rates like the ones Jeff is pumping out for his clients, any home improvement business owner who doesn’t wanna use AI is missing out.

How AI optimization can accelerate your testing

Taylor Made Marketing has seen a tenfold improvement in results for their clients. So, how are they able to help their clients gain such impressive conversions? 

Three tactics have helped Taylor Made Marketing’s home improvement clients turn more leads into customers with Unbounce landing pages and Smart Traffic.

1. Test a ton of pages simultaneously

According to Jeff, one of the best things about Smart Traffic is the ability to test multiple pages at the same time. “We do a lot of testing. We’ll put up 12 pages and find the ones that convert the highest. And then we take those pages and start tweaking them.” The key is testing a whole bunch of pages first, getting those early signals, and then going into testing the finer details. 

Once the winning pages are found, Jeff’s team will adjust one thing—the call to action or the image—so they’re only testing a single variable at a time. (That’s what the kids call the OG A/B testing method.)

2. Build pages for specific audiences

You might assume when you find a winning landing page, it’ll with all of your customers. But the reality is, folks in Texas are different from folks in Sydney or Vancouver (holla)—and expecting the same landing pages to work for these different demographics is misleading. 

I can take a headline and a hero image that’s working beautifully in Atlanta, Georgia, and move it to Houston, Texas, and it won’t work at all. Or find one that works in Houston and move it to San Diego. And it works twice as good in San Diego as it did in Houston, where it was already working. So geography [of your audience] can definitely affect your results.

The same goes for other aspects of a landing page. Take humor, for example. Jeff’s noticed that using humor in their landing pages has helped improve conversion rates. Humor can offer a little escape from reality and reduce stress, even if for a moment. Used in the wrong context, humor can offend people. Right now Jeff says, “humor is working pretty well, but if there’s a national tragedy, [the advertiser] needs to change gears.”

Knowing your audience is essential. And building landing pages that appeal to different people in different locations has increased conversions for Taylor Made Marketing’s clients.

3. Don’t hesitate to test something new

Video can have a huge impact on conversions—especially if a product or service is being endorsed by a celebrity or influencer. Jeff tells his clients, “if you don’t have an established brand, rent one from someone else.” By that he means, find someone well-known (like a celebrity, athlete, or even someone who’s semi-famous in your hometown) and pay them to endorse you. 

We most recently did a test with three very popular landing pages in Nashville, Tennessee. We duplicated them and added video of NFL players endorsing the product. We got almost double the conversion rate on the landing pages with the video. So we were able to prove that video from an NFL player did have a dramatic positive impact on conversions.

One thing Jeff reiterates is that because of Smart Traffic, they are able to test landing pages quickly without having to isolate one thing at a time. The AI learns quickly what type of page resonates with different people, then sends similar people to that page, too. 

Get the best possible results from your campaigns

Jeff points out that things have come a long way since the days of marketing in traditional media—particularly when it comes to tracking.

In the old days, people would say, “How do I know if my television ads are working?” I would say, “Did your sales go up?” And that’s about the only answer we could give. If your sales go up, it’s working. If they didn’t, it’s not working. But today we can track everything, and Unbounce makes that so easy for us.

A/B testing is cumbersome and results slow because you can only test one thing at a time. But with AI, you can experiment with lots of different combinations at once—and know exactly what’s working best for a particular audience. 

If you’re a digital marketer trying to use a one-size-fits-all approach to help your clients or your company, it might be time to explore how Smart Traffic can help you maximize results. And with results like 35% conversion rates and 300% increase in ROI, Jeff’s proven that the next big step in marketing is AI.

Jessica Meher, CEO and Co-Founder of Wonderment, put it really well on Twitter:

So many #SaaS companies today produce the same content mktg formulas as they did 10 years ago.

E.g. ebooks on “the complete guide to X” or blog posts on “5 reasons why.” etc.

This shit works, until it doesn’t. Now’s a good time to invent the new ebook. Get creative.

— Jessica Meher (@jessicameher) February 6, 2018

To generate leads, you need more than quality lead magnets and optimized lead gen landing pages. You need to think outside the box. Try something a little bit different. Maybe even a little bit… experimental.

So: How do you come up with truly great ideas for lead generation campaigns?

We talked to some of the legendary marketers working today and asked them to share their most creative lead gen examples. And believe me—these folks needed quite a bit of convincing to spill their most useful and interesting ideas.

But we got ‘em here for you: 10 unique examples lifted straight from the secret marketing playbooks of the pros. Use these ideas as inspiration for your next lead gen campaign. Or, just keep them handy for the next time you want to try something more interesting than creating another ebook or webinar.

Ready? Let’s get cookin’.

Jump to a creative lead gen idea:

1. Create an interactive tool that generates qualified leads
2. Embed lead capture forms directly in video content
3. Interview a third-party expert (and embed gated resources)
4. Send attention-grabbing direct mail that delights
5. Share a customer experience that builds connection
6. Generate word-of-mouth leads in online communities
7. Promote a personalized template that solves a problem
8. Access new audiences with cross-promotion campaigns
9. Experiment with new types of content (and act on what works)
10. Entertain your audience with a surprising quiz

1. Create an interactive tool that generates qualified leads

There’s a good reason why so many brands—including HubSpot, Moz, and, yes, even Unbounce—have invested time and effort to create free tools. Tool-based marketing is popular because even simple interactive ideas can fuel campaigns that generate boatloads of qualified leads.

For example, Larry Kim, CEO of MobileMonkey, says they developed a Free Keyword Tool for the Wordstream website. Marketers could use it to research and prioritize new keywords in just a few minutes.

And while developing an interactive lead magnet might seem like a lot of work (you probably need someone who knows how to code), Larry says they were able to generate a huge number of leads as a result.

Here’s how the tool works. You start out by entering a keyword or website URL that you’re interested in analyzing. To hone the results, you can also choose the industry and country you want to focus on.

What makes this tool particularly clever is the way it displays the results. Hit the “Search” button, and you’ll instantly be able to see some of the related keywords. But all the other information? It’s hidden, blurred out, or obscured in some way.

This smartly creates a curiosity gap for visitors, who feel like they’ve already started the process of doing research on their keyword. All they need to do is take one teeny-tiny extra step to get their results.

That final step? You gotta give up your email address. Boom, lead generated. And as Larry reports, it’s become a near-bottomless source of new leads:

This simple tool took just 3 months to build, yet has generated over a million email signups.

But remember: Even a simple tool can be expensive to create. When considering your tool-based marketing idea, make sure it’s something your audience will find value in—before you start building.

2. Embed lead capture forms directly in video content

Should you be gating your best content?

I believe it was ol’ Billy Shakespeare who once wrote: “To gate or not to gate? That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous website traffic, or ask for an email address against a sea of troubles…”

At some point, every marketer faces this dilemma. You have an amazing piece of content—now are you going to give it away for free as a way to attract organic traffic? Or do you gate the content and use it as a lead gen magnet?

Cara Hogan, then Content Strategist for Zaius (acquired by Optimizely), considered these options and asked—why not both?

For their Marketing Unboxed video series, Cara says they took a hybrid approach to gating their content. Rather than lock everything behind a form, they embedded forms into each video—and it’s a great example of creative lead generation.

We created the Marketing Unboxed video series as a top-of-funnel piece of content designed to engage our target audience of B2C and commerce marketers. By including a lead gen form within the video itself, we encourage people to subscribe, but we don’t require it.

The forms draw just the right amount of your attention, without being too distracting. It slides off the video if you move your mouse off the screen, but then pops back on whenever you come back. All in all, it’s a very tasteful lead-generating campaign that Cara says has driven some serious results.

We’ve generated hundreds of net new leads from this video series so far. We’ve only published 10 total episodes, and older episodes continue to earn subscribers over time. Some of these subscribers have since been nurtured to become new Zaius customers.

3. Interview a third-party expert (and embed gated resources)

For many brands, consistent blogging is a key source of lead generation. Every time you put out an article, it’s an opportunity for someone new to visit your site, discover your product or services, and opt in for more communications.

But you don’t need to create all of that content on your own. Interviewing experts in your field (kinda like we did for this article) and sharing their advice or perspective can be a fantastic way to bring in new audiences.

Take, for example, this lead gen example brought to us by Aaron Orendorff, previously the Editor in Chief of Shopify Plus. To help Shopify rank for some valuable keywords—such as “ecommerce replatforming”— Aaron interviewed a high-profile expert in the industry.

Aaron says it’s the quality of the interview that makes this lead gen example work.

Rather than a heavy-handed sales pitch, the piece is an interview with Paul Rogers—one of the brightest and most respected leaders in ecommerce … That objectivity—and framing the article as an honest conversation about a ‘dirty word’—is highlighted throughout.

But wait—how do you actually generate leads with an interview or blog post? Aaron explained that they peppered the article with three separate lead gen CTAs (including an Unbounce popup) to present visitors with downloadable content related to the topic of the interview.

It goes to show: Any piece of content can become a lead magnet, so long as you’re offering real value to your audience.

4. Send attention-grabbing direct mail that delights

Direct mail might seem like an old-school marketing tactic—but that’s exactly what makes it so darned interesting for lead generation. Why not focus your efforts on a smaller customer segment, and put together packages that really get them to sit up and take notice?

For example, check out these direct mailers that Hero Conf sent out to promote their PPC marketing conference. The event organizers used a super creative approach to get the attention of marketers like Casie Gillette, SVP of Digital Marketing at KoMarketing:

Oh man. @heroconf this is one of the coolest pieces of direct mail I’ve ever received! Who knew video could be so amazing in such a small package? pic.twitter.com/aQnlV2y71G

— Casie Gillette (@Casieg) January 31, 2019

Each piece of mail embedded a small video screen to show clips of the presenters who would be speaking at Hero Conf. And while these must have cost a fair bit more than a typical event brochure, Casie says the unique packaging really helped to win her over.

What got me was if you played the video to the end, they had a free ticket offer—you just had to respond to the email they had sent earlier … By placing the offer at the end, only those who watched the video all the way through would learn about the offer. A really cool way to grab attention.

Sure, this isn’t exactly a lead generation example, but the same principles apply. When you connect with your audience in delightful and unexpected ways, they notice—and they’re more likely to engage with you, too. 

5. Share a customer experience that builds connection

Creating a connection with your audience is crucial to effective lead generation. Folks need to trust you before they’re gonna hand over their contact information. And one of the best ways to build trust is with social proof, like customer testimonials and positive reviews. 

Andrew Davis, best-selling author and keynote speaker, has pointed out that most video testimonials are pretty dry. They’re usually just a lot of talking heads, with nervous customers babbling on about all the reasons why they like some marketing brand. They don’t feel authentic.

But there’s also a different type of video testimonial—one that actually tells the complete customer story. And although these can be harder to produce, they can also serve up a different type of indirect lead generation for your business.

As an example, Andrew suggests watching this video on YouTube that recently went viral: Vance’s Incredible 365-day Transformation. The video now has over 100 million views and 120,000 comments on YouTube.

Unlike other video testimonials, this customer story is shot in real-time. It’s compelling, it’s emotional—and it doesn’t have a single call to action.

Instead, Vance mentions throughout the video the diet and exercise program he is using to lose weight. The references start out subtle, but eventually become a main focus of the video. Andrew calls this an “implied CTA” that generates leads by inspiring viewers to take the next step.

A great testimonial video needs no call to action. It actually should create a moment that inspires people to do the next search … It doesn’t need a button, it just invites people who are so inspired to actually check out the next step of the product.

If you want to try this for yourself, all you need to do is start thinking about how you can frame your customer stories more like, well, stories. Connect with viewers on a personal or emotional level, and tease out the results so they get curious to learn more. Then, when it comes time to ask them for something (like an email address), they’re far more likely to say yes.

6. Generate word-of-mouth leads in online communities

For freelancers, consultants, and smaller marketing agencies, you might have to take a slightly different approach to lead generation. While you can still build lists using lead magnets on your website and landing pages, a lot of your success will also come from word of mouth and social interactions.

For example, Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré, B2B SaaS Consultant, says their go-to lead generation strategy has been to build sincere connections with other people in both online and offline marketing communities.

Being an active member of my favorite communities has led me to receive leads from other members, because I’m demonstrating expertise in that domain.

Nichole says that being an active community member on websites like Growth Hackers has often led to them becoming a part of the team, responsible for either community management or growth.

This is a mindset shift from traditional lead generation campaigns. As you build relationships and demonstrate expertise, people will naturally start to think of you or your company for future opportunities. The key is to be genuinely helpful and selfless in your interactions, and to try to build actual friendships with other members of the community.

The thing is, ‘getting leads’ was never my end goal for any of these communities. I was just actively building relationships by bringing value to others.

7. Promote a personalized template that solves a problem

The right template on the right page can be a powerful tool for generating leads. That’s because visitors are willing to give up their personal information in exchange for something practical they can actually use.

But while traditional templates are usually just generic PDF downloads, Ross Simmonds, digital marketing strategist, says you can get better results by making a downloadable template that’s more personalized and interactive.

Almost every audience loves a template. If you can think about a simple template that arms your audience with the steps they need to take to solve a problem, it can be a great win. Even better: Make it an interactive template that gives the user the ability to download it at the end.

As an example, Ross points towards this Free Privacy Policy Generator created by Shopify.

Privacy policies are one of those things that ecommerce business owners know they need, but probably don’t have time to create. And while Shopify could have given their visitors a sample policy or instructions on how to create their own, instead they decided to go above and beyond by building a personalized template generator.

The form you fill out to generate your privacy policy serves two purposes. Not only does it help personalize the template with your company info, but it also lets Shopify follow up meaningfully with every lead that uses the tool. How cool is that?

The template approach is interesting because there’s a true value exchange. If you’re offering a template that is closely aligned with your product or service it can be both a rewarding user experience and a rewarding lead generation tactic.

When you’re coming up with your own lead generation ideas, think about value. “What problem can I solve for my audience?”

Sure, you don’t wanna give everything away to get somebody’s contact information—it’d put you outta business. But it’s important to remember that generating leads is an exchange of value with your audience. They get something, you get something. Give and take. 

Just make sure they feel like they got their email’s worth. 

8. Access new audiences with cross-promotion campaigns

Cross-promotion isn’t a new idea—but it’s something too few marketers think about when it comes to lead generation.

The hard part, of course, is finding the right brand to partner with. If the other company is too similar, then your audiences might already be overlapped. (See also: Competitor.) If the other company isn’t similar enough, then you run the risk of promoting to people who just don’t care about your brand or products.

This is where a bit of outside-the-box thinking can come in handy. Britney Muller (formerly Senior SEO Scientist at Moz) points to this particularly clever example of cross-promotion between Hydrate IV Bar and Live Love Lash:

Rather than partner with another health or fitness company for their cross-promotion, the marketers at Hydrate IV Bar decided to try a different strategy. They thought about different places where their target customers might be available to try an IV bar, and struck up a smart partnership based on that:

The Hydrate IV Bar team was brilliant in thinking outside the box for local lead gen! In what instances are people in a position of stillness/rest where they could also benefit from IV therapy? Lash extensions! This cross-marketing has done very well for both businesses and feels like an efficient use of time for their customers.

And the thing is, there are all sorts of unique cross-promotion opportunities available that marketers might miss. Let’s say you’re a running shoe company, for example. The obvious cross-promotion opportunity would be a sports store, right? But you could also partner with a gym or training facility, and target athletes in the places where they spend the most time. Or, heck—how about a dog training workshop for folks with energetic puppers?

The beauty of a lead generation campaign that leverages co-marketing is both companies get exposure to a whole new audience. Rather than targeting the same people over and over, you’re suddenly talking to lots who’ve never heard of you before—and that can make ’em more receptive to hearing you out.

9. Experiment with new types of content (and act on what works)

Sometimes, the best lead magnets can develop outta projects that have very little to do with your actual business. If you dig into related topics, you can discover whole segments of customers who otherwise might not have been exposed to your brand or marketing.

And when it comes to side projects, Ryan Robinson is a self-described aficionado. Once, he launched a public challenge on his blog to validate a random business idea in under 30 days with only $500.

The project took up a lot of Ryan’s time for that month, even though it was something he was doing on the side. He figured it would just be an interesting way to educate readers on how to validate their business ideas, and perhaps bring in some new audiences to his blog. But he was surprised by the number of leads he was able to generate as a result.

I saw a sizable surge in traffic during my first week of the challenge. Throughout the course of the full month as I updated the challenge post, I picked up almost 3,000 new subscribers on my blog.

To take advantage of all these new leads, Ryan even built a new course based around his learning.

A couple months after the challenge wrapped up, I launched a course about validating ideas to that new audience … This new group of subscribers that tuned in and kept a close eye on my challenge were very qualified leads, and that course ended up generating over $15,000 in revenue during just the first week of open enrollment.

What do they say? “No bad ideas in a brainstorm?” Try approaching lead gen campaigns with a similar philosophy. Experiment. Create new types of content, content on new topics, new content formats. You never know which one is gonna catch fire—and when it does, be sure you’re ready to collect the… smoke.

(That’s a bad analogy. Leads. Collect the leads, is what we mean.)

10. Entertain your audience with a surprising quiz

Online quizzes have been around for years, but many marketers still haven’t discovered their potential for lead generation. They’re powerful because they’re so compelling—visitors actually have fun filling them out, and then get super curious about the results. (“Why yes, I do want to know which piece of IKEA furniture best represents my personality… LACK? This is bullshit.”)

To find a creative quiz example, we went to the quizmaster herself, Chanti Zak. Chanti is a quiz funnel strategist and copywriter who specializes in creating quizzes for lead gen, and really brings a special flair to the quiz creation process.

As an example, she shared this saucy quiz she created to target entrepreneurs for Jenna Kutcher’s website.

The key to a great quiz? You’ve got to surprise and delight visitors with every click, so they stay engaged throughout the process. Throw them a couple curveballs along the way, and then hit ‘em with results that speak to their unique situation.

The results go deep into what uniquely positions you to create a successful business. The custom results meet people where they’re at and are intentionally designed to empower them to take action.

To attract the most leads, you’ll want to create a quiz that speaks directly to your brand and target market. For this example, Chanti created playful questions and answers that really get in the headspace of a budding entrepreneur.

When this interactive and personalized approach is the first impression someone has of your brand, your chances of converting them from onlooker to customer are exponentially higher than with a generic lead magnet.

And the strategy seems to have worked too, with this quiz alone generating over 100,000 leads.

In thinking through your own lead generation ideas, don’t forget that entertainment is valuable, too. People don’t wanna be lectured. (Oh jeez, are we lecturing?) Think about ways you can make your lead magnet delightful and engaging. Life’s too serious as it is—inject a little fun into your marketing campaigns, wouldya? 

Ready to launch more creative lead generation campaigns?

Of course, we’re only scratching the surface with these 10 ideas. There are all sorts of different ways to generate leads, including more tried and true methods. You could host a webinar, offer a free ebook download, run a contest, or buy ads on social media. The opportunities are almost endless.

Whatever you try, the most important thing to remember is this: In order to generate qualified leads, you need to offer up valuable content. Give those top-of-funnel leads something that’ll educate, entertain, inform, or inspire. And for the best results, be sure to pair your lead magnet with an optimized landing page that drives your visitors to take action.