AI for Marketing: 8 Powerful Ways Marketing Teams Can Use AI

Let’s be honest — marketing isn’t just creating creative campaigns and catchy taglines. It’s juggling endless data, managing a dozen tools, and trying to prove ROI while keeping up with ever-changing algorithms.

AI automation has turned the marketing landscape on its head simply by its ability to automate complex tasks that once required hours and entire teams — it is not about replacing people. Instead, it's about extending your team’s capabilities.

Let’s explore eight ways your marketing team can use the power of AI to optimise your marketing strategy, improve customer engagement, and gain valuable insights.

When your brand begins to take off, keeping a cohesive identity across all your marketing, paid, owned, and earned media can become increasingly challenging. This is particularly important for brands that built themselves on that 1:1 relationship with customers.

A lack of consistency across channels can lead to a weaker customer lifetime value (CLV).

Australian fashion retailer White Fox Boutique faced this exact dilemma. They were growing faster than they could keep up with their marketing materials and were at risk of losing their boutique charm.

That’s when they turned to Salesforce Artificial Intelligence to help them scale their marketing operations. Using AI-driven personalisation, they were able to manage their marketing campaigns and ensure that each customer interaction felt just as personal and curated as before.

What resulted was a unified customer experience that led to a 40% sales uplift in their SMS marketing.

Marketers are often drowning in data but don’t have the time to sift through it all.

Reece, a well-established plumbing supply company, started using AI to gain deeper insights into their customers’ preferences. By utilising Salesforce Sales Cloud, they moved beyond basic transaction customer data and began understanding their customers’ needs on a deeper level.

Reece used Salesforce Cloud to gain deeper insights into their customers’ preferences. Using Sales Cloud, they moved beyond basic transactional data and boosted their online sales by 53%.

AI helps companies like Reece uncover the softer details of customer insights and behaviour, leading to tailored interactions.

As a marketer, your ads are only as strong as your return on ad spend (ROAS). However, without the right data, it can be hard to make the most of real-time bid optimisation on your Google Ads.

Bidding strategies can often feel like guesswork and lead to budgets being burned quickly during the experimentation phase of your search ads.

AI can now help marketers in real time to adjust their bid strategies and predict trends, ensuring that every ad dollar is spent effectively. It can do this by analysing historical data, consumer behaviour patterns, and search intent.

AI can also help with creating ad copy to A/B test headlines, calls to action (CTAs), and even create images for your ads. In fact, Google Ads now allow digital marketers to generate AI images. There are plenty of other companies too that you can use to create text-to-image AI images, like OpenAI’s DALL·E 3, Canva, and Leonardo AI.

One of the most significant and exciting ways that AI can work in marketing is its ability to create hyper-personalised experiences for customers.

AI helps marketing teams learn more about their customers than just where they live and how old they are. It uses predictive analysis to automate your audience segmentation, trigger personalised email workflows and even serve dynamic ad creatives.

This level of personalisation helps your marketing team meet customers where they are at, with relevant comms that feel personal and authentic to your brand.

AI-powered content intelligence tracks engagement, visibility, and conversions, allowing teams to double down on high-performing content and cull the rest. Having this data also allows content marketing teams to get further investment, as they now have the data to show the return on investment (ROI) of their content.

An AI tool like Google’s Gemini can be used in the content creation process for a broad range of things, such as helping to create content briefs, analysing content, writing content, or even assisting with editing content.

For example, you could use a large language model (LLM) like Gemini to analyse a competitor’s piece of content and your own to determine which article covers a topic better.

In the case of content editing, Grammarly (which provides AI editing recommendations) can provide AI suggestions when you’re editing content.

There are also AI and machine learning tools like Jasper AI and Surfer SEO that can provide recommendations to optimise content for search engines like Google. These tools can also create detailed briefs and analyse your content.

High response times kill conversions. AI chatbots can be utilised to respond to inquiries instantly, allowing customer service teams to be freed up to get into the more gritty cases.

AI-powered chatbots also learn from past customer interactions, allowing them to anticipate needs and provide relevant responses, sometimes even before the customer types their request.

Today's consumers expect a seamless experience, whether they interact with a brand in person or online.

AI plays a vital role in helping businesses effectively and reliably integrate their customer data to provide consistent experiences across all channels.

Taking your data from different silos and bringing it together with AI can help you track, understand and quickly apply insights from across your business.

AI is here to stay and is changing the way we work, and marketing is no exception. Using AI in marketing, you can personalise your customer's experiences, streamline your brand across platforms, get better returns from your marketing budget and fast track customer queries.

Now is the time to become an early adopter of AI in your marketing team. Start using Salesforce Marketing AI today to get the best ROI from your marketing activities.