It’s finally happening: marketing spending is over the recession hump and is climbing across B2B and B2C brands! According to the Fall 2023 edition of The CMO Survey by Deloitte, Duke Fuqua and the American Marketing Association, both digital marketing and overall marketing spending is expected to increase over the next 12 months. With newly refreshed budgets, many brands will be turning to AI to optimize their marketing efforts. But they could use some help with AI-​enabled content. Here’s what you need to know.

Marketers to Focus on AI-​Enabled Content Creation and Personalization

AI is New to Most Brands

Many marketers know that AI can help them with their organization’s marketing efforts, but many don’t know how to make that happen yet. According to The CMO Survey, the majority of companies have been using AI in their marketing efforts for less than a year:

• B2B Product Companies: 60.4% have been using AI in marketing for less than a year
• B2B Services Companies: 64.2%
• B2C Product Companies: 57.1%
• B2C Services Companies: 40.6%

The lower the company’s sales revenue, the less likely it is that they’ve been engaging in AI-​related marketing efforts for very long.

What They’re Using AI for

Companies that have been using AI in marketing are using it for:

• Content Personalization: 55.28% of companies on average use AI for this purpose
• Content Creation: 47.13%
• Improving Marketing ROI by Optimizing Marketing Content and Timing: 38.45%
• Programmatic Advertising and Media Buying: 37.88%
• Predictive Analytics for Customer Insights: 34.18%
• Targeting Decisions: 33.75%
• Marketing Automation: 27.33%
• Conversational AI for Customer Service: 28.6%

AI-​enabled content creation and personalization can make brands’ ad dollars go a long way. Not only can AI help optimize content, it can help free up brands’ marketing teams’ time to let them focus on other important tasks.

Overall, CMOs are trusting AI to create content such as:

• Blogs: 59.83%
• Website Content: 63.6%
• Social Media: 51.63%
• Email Copy: 51.3%
• Ad Copy: 37.83%
• Product/​Service Descriptions: 34.5%
• Technical Copy: 13.2%

Getting help with long-​form AI-​enabled content like some of the ones above can save marketers a lot of time. Even writing short-​form content like emails and social media posts can be a huge time saver for marketers. That is, if they know how to use AI properly. Like you do.

Digital > Traditional

You may have noticed that not a lot of AI-​enabled content types listed above are of the traditional variety. That’s not because AI can’t help with content like that. It’s because brands are dedicating less and less of their budgets to traditional media.

The expenses included in the marketing budgets of the CMOs surveyed for the report are primarily digital media related. So, having a digital-​focused marketing strategy could work in your client’s favor.

The only way to know for sure if your client should primarily rely on digital, traditional or a healthy mix of the two is to know their target audience’s preferences. To learn what those are, all you have to do is look up their profile on AudienceSCAN on AdMall by SalesFuel. There, you can see which types of advertising media influenced what percentages of that audience to take action within the last year. Then you can make changes to your client’s marketing media mix accordingly.

Conclusion

AI is and will continue to be a major growth vehicle, especially in the marketing industry, within the next year and beyond. In order to stay on top of emerging trends and create the best AI-​enabled content possible, your clients need to learn how to harness the power of AI or trust you to provide it for them. It’s the only way to stay competitive.

Photo by KOBU Agency