5 Ways to Use AI in Your Marketing (And Still Stay Authentic)

I know – no one wants to hear about AI anymore.

It’s either saving the world, destroying it, or somewhere in between.

We’ve talked plenty about the impact AI is having on mission-driven marketing teams, from adding FAQs to your website content to the need to grow your social media community to when to use AI-generated images.

Most importantly, we’ve talked about the need to keep your brand authentic and how that might mean breaking some rules.

There are many ways you can use AI to improve your marketing without losing your authenticity (and that obvious AI poster template is not one of them).

Here are five ways to use AI in your marketing and still stay authentic.

1. Generate ALT Text for Social Media and Website Images

AI tools are great for doing grunt work that doesn’t require a lot of creativity but requires detail.

Adding alternative (ALT) text to your images is one of those accessibility best practices that you should absolutely be doing with everything you post online. By simply uploading the image you plan to use, AI tools can generate accurate, thoughtful ALT text.

While including ALT text on your website images has been a must-do for some time now, it’s becoming increasingly important for your social media content. As social media becomes search for many people, the text you include in both your captions and as ALT text gets indexed and can help your content float to the top of results and feeds.

When you generate the ALT text, remind your AI tool to:

• Transcribe any text in the image faithfully, so it can be read by screen-readers
• Include details of the image itself, especially naming any brand references like your logo

Before you post, make sure you review what’s been generated; it should be accurate, thoughtful, and helpful. If it’s not, write the ALT text yourself.

2. Index Content for Community and Customer Use

If your website is filled with useful information – which it definitely should be! – then your community’s biggest challenge could simply be finding your answers to their questions.

AI tools like CustomGPT.ai can actually help with this. They’ll crawl your entire site, index all of your content, and then provide a conversational interface for your community to interact with your content. It sounds like a chatbot, which it kind of is, but not in the “we’re finding an agent for your query right now” sense.

Most of us are annoyed at when we have to use a chatbot for customer service, but feel differently when we’re looking to learn, discover, or get straight answers to relatively easy questions. These types of tools can live on their own page, rather than stick to the bottom right of every page on your site, and act more like a Q&A terminal and discovery engine.

There are multiple options out there for something like this; CustomGPT.ai calls it “AI Enterprise Search”. That name’s a little too buttoned-up for me, but the utility of a tool like this can be great.

3. Suggest Alternate Titles and Subjects for A/B Testing

AI shouldn’t be writing your emails, but it can definitely be used to make them better.

While you should avoid asking ChatGPT to do major rewrites of your content, it’s a great tool for when you’re looking to test out alternate versions of your email subject lines or titles. A/B testing your subject lines is one of the best ways to increase your email open rate, and it’s easy to do.

If you’re like many digital marketers, you know a good headline when you see one – and coming up with other options that could possibly work isn’t as easy as it seems.

Give your AI tool the subject line you plan to use, and ask it to come up with 3-5 variations. Test 1 or 2 of them against your subject line, and see what works best.

4. Review Your Metrics and Provide Context

We’re inundated by statistics, and tracking the metrics that matter can be more complicated than it sounds.

As I’ve talked about before, the “Ask Advisor” AI tool in Google Analytics is the best thing that’s ever happened to that platform. It’s taken all of the confusing aspects of Google Analytics 4 and made it easy to ask questions and find answers about your website’s performance.

Have a question about your email open rates? Take a screenshot and drop it into Gemini and ask for its opinion on how the numbers are trending or how they stack up to other organizations in your industry.

Want to know why certain URLs on your site seem to always perform well? Ask AI to review the URLs and weigh in.

Not sure if your ad campaign is worth it? Feed AI some numbers and get context.

You should obviously carefully read everything that your favorite AI tool tells you, and click through to original sources for more context whenever possible. For a general sense of how well your marketing is performing, AI can give you a reaction and help guide your understanding of your results.

5. Research, Learn, and Grow Your Knowledge

This isn’t a customer-facing benefit, but using AI tools and LLMs as a gateway to improve your own digital marketing knowledge is a slam dunk.

What do you want to learn more about? What do you have a cursory understanding of but want to know in more detail?

Like when traditional search engines burst into the scene, these tools are the starting point of improving your skills and learning more about the industry you work in. They understand the question you’re asking, and usually provide good answers and resources to help you on your journey.

Becoming smarter at what you do allows you to better understand how to improve your work, grow your brand, and, yes, be more authentic. Using AI tools for education and learning just makes sense, and it’s a thousand times better than having it create the same slop that everyone else does.

Remember – “You know that’s AI, right?” – is going to be the phrase people say when they see something clearly not generated by a real person. Use AI as a tool to make what you do better – and not replace what you do.

Want to have a conversation about AI and your mission-driven marketing team? Reach out and let’s chat.