It was just about a year ago that ChatGPT burst onto the scene. It wasn’t actually new when the company behind it, OpenAI, released it to the public. But it was new to millions of people who had never seen or heard of it before. You know the rest of the story. Everyone and their brother, including digital marketing agencies, raced to get on board with AI. So what does 2024 look like?
ChatGPT is a generative AI tool. Note that there are multiple forms of AI capable of doing different things based on programming. Generative AI can do things like create written text, conduct human-like conversations, generate art and music, and even write computer code.
Digital marketers embraced generative AI as enthusiastically as companies in any other industry. But the initial excitement started to fade. Marketers are discovering that AI isn’t everything they assumed it was. Expect digital marketing agencies to temper their AI goals in the coming year.
Keyword Research
In asking how digital marketing agencies will use AI in 2024, one would hope the answer would be ‘wisely’. That aside, AI’s most useful feature to digital marketers lies in automation. When mundane tasks can be automated, marketers have more time to put into the creative aspects of what they do. Enter keyword research for SEO purposes.
Webtek Digital Marketing, a Salt Lake City digital marketing agency with a secondary office in Austin, TX, says that SEO and digital marketing go hand-in-hand these days. They also say that AI can be an important keyword research tool in that it can automate some of the more time-consuming aspects like comparing keywords and grouping them for different marketing campaigns.
Keyword research is about more than hitting on the most popular keywords for a given topic, product, or service. Keywords need to be compared against each other and how internet users utilize them. Marketers then need to analyze groups of keywords to figure out which ones are best for a given campaign. It is a lot of number crunching that AI can do more quickly and efficiently.
Content Creation
At this time last year, much of the hype surrounding generative AI was its potential to eliminate the need for human content creators. The bloom is off that rose. Over the last 12 months, it has become glaringly apparent that none of the modern generative AI tools can create content of the same quality and level as a human creator. Does that mean AI has no place in content creation? No.
AI tools are still useful for creating drafts. They are useful for research purposes. An AI tool can quickly come up with dozens of topic suggestions and post titles for a creator who has hit a mental block. There are uses for AI in content creation, but human creators will not be replaced.
Campaign Analytics
AI as a tool for enhancing campaign analytics will be the big one in 2024. If there is one thing AI does extremely well, it is analyzed and extrapolate data. With the right AI tools in place, digital marketing agencies will get a better handle on their own performance. That can only serve to make them better at what they do.
AI will play a role in digital marketing over the next 12 months. But that role will be one of assistance rather than replacement. Digital marketers are not going to be replaced by machines. That’s a good thing, because the very nature of computers and AI tools makes them inferior to the human brain. You can take that to the bank.