If you’re like most marketers, you’ve tried out a generative AI tool. You’ve played around with ChatGPT to generate headlines. Yet, these fragmented use cases don’t capture the full power of deploying AI strategically. In five years, many companies will be creating AI marketing campaigns.
According to McKinsey & Co., 90% of commercial leaders believe their organizations should use generative AI often, yet only 20% do. While individual teams are testing AI in small ways, most teams aren’t comfortable enough with the technology yet to use it for higher thinking or strategy.
Let’s take a look at how to create an AI marketing campaign: what the possibilities and limitations are, as well as what tools will give you the best results.
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Benefits of Creating an AI Marketing Campaign
First, why would you want to create an AI marketing campaign in the first place? Most of us associate higher-level strategy and thinking as a solely human function, but AI is becoming more competent in this area.
Think about how AI tools are trained: They use machine learning to analyze the top-performing campaigns across email, social media, and search results.
They use big data to find and replicate the top marketing campaigns, borrowing from their format and syntax while giving you an original campaign idea.
While they can’t ever replace human originality, they can help humans do their best work. Here’s why you should give AI marketing campaigns a try.
1. Launch Campaigns Fast
The best marketing campaigns take weeks, if not months, to develop. Or do they?
AI marketing campaigns help teams move from concept to execution in a matter of hours — saving valuable time and making it possible to react quickly to changes in your market.
Today, marketers work on an average of five campaigns at a time. This speed could be a game-changer.
2. Spark Fresh Ideas
AI tools may not give you an ADDY-winning campaign idea the first time or even the fifth time. Together with its prompter (that’s you), it can serve as a creative springboard to move through mediocre ideas to find an epic one.
Marketer Joe Lazer Lazauskas recently wrote about this phenomenon in The Storytelling Edge newsletter.
“Tools like ChatGPT allow us to have brainstorming sessions on-demand. It’s like having a thousand co-workers trapped inside your computer, eagerly waiting to yell ideas at you—except their ideas will probably be better,” Lazauskas writes.
3. Drive Revenue
Research by McKinsey & Co. found that companies who invest in AI are seeing a revenue boost of 3-15% and a sales ROI boost of 10-20%.
Though many factors determine how effective an AI marketing campaign will be, there’s evidence that strategic, consistent deployment can boost the bottom line.
7 Ways to Use Generative AI in Your Marketing Campaigns
Rather than feeding ChatGPT prompts like “Give me 10 headline ideas about…” put on your strategist hat for a minute. What do you need to know to produce a great marketing campaign?
- Who the audience is
- What your key messages or differentiators are
- What you want the audience to do
- Your tone or writing style
Once you feed this high-level information to the tool, it’s ready to start producing ideas and won’t waste your time on campaign pitches that miss the mark. At this point, you can ask artificial intelligence to brainstorm:
- AI campaign ideation. Ask AI to pitch an overall concept and hook for your campaign before building out individual content assets
- AI social media campaigns. Use AI to write a social media marketing campaign for you. In addition to suggesting a post, AI tools can describe an image, targeting parameters, and even a budget for your marketing campaign.
- AI advertising on Google Search. Envision a Google search campaign by researching keywords and asking AI to pitch you a PPC campaign complete with copy and targeting demographics.
- AI email campaigns. Build out an email series or email campaign by feeding your AI tool your call-to-action, demographics, and key messages.
- AI blog campaigns. Attract potential leads and save time with starter blog content for your website.
- AI commercials and video marketing. While AI video production is still in its early stages, you can absolutely request marketing campaign concepts and video scripts for just about anything.
- AI landing pages. Finally, make sure your campaign can convert by building out a landing page with messaging that matches your ad content. Keep your concept consistent from end to end to engage readers.
Starting to see the possibilities? Now, let’s get down to looking at the best tools where you can build your AI marketing campaign.
5 AI Tools [Reviewed] To Add To Your Marketers’ Arsenal
The flood of AI tools entering the market is more than a little mind-boggling.
To help you focus your time, I compared several of the top tools in a head-to-head test to see which creates the best marketing campaign. It’s like having your own bevy of ad agencies pitching you campaigns.
Let’s see how each one performed in our fictional campaigns.
Campaign Assistant by HubSpot
One barrier to implementing AI effectively is that the tools are so vast that they can be difficult to understand and use. This campaign assistant by HubSpot is designed exclusively for creating marketing campaigns and is virtually foolproof.
The campaign assistant asks you specific questions about your audience, your messages, your writing style, and your CTA, so you don’t miss anything important.
Tell the campaign assistant which campaign asset you want it to create. Then, you’re ready to go.
To put Campaign Assistant to the test, we fed it a fictional use case for an ecommerce brand that sells sustainable bags and luggage.
AI Email Campaign with Campaign Assistant
First, I selected a marketing email and put in my prompts for the campaign. I described my business and three key messages that I want my audience to know.
Then, I gave a desired action and up to three descriptors to create a writing style. I asked for a witty and confident tone.
Here’s the email that campaign assistant sent back. It shares a catchy subject line and pre-header, three paragraphs that hit my three main points, and an “Order Now” button at the bottom.
The email needs a little tweaking to make the writing tighter and more personalized, but it’s a good start.
AI Google Search Ad Campaign with Campaign Assistant
To continue the test, I asked the campaign assistant to convert this campaign into a Google Search ad campaign. I didn’t have to input the information again — HubSpot’s campaign assistant simply converted it over for me.
The result? Short and sweet Google ad content in preview mode as it would appear on Google. If I want to use it, I can simply copy/paste it over to Google Ads.
AI Social Media Campaign with Campaign Assistant
Finally, I asked the campaign assistant to create a social media campaign for Facebook.
The tool can also create campaigns for LinkedIn and Instagram (launching soon).
The platform suggested three ads with a headline and body copy for me to review and placed them in a preview pane.
While the images are just placeholders, it’s useful to envision how it might look.
Once you have a campaign draft you’re happy with or ready to edit outside the platform, you can copy/paste it in one click or publish it if you’re a HubSpot user.
Honorable mention: Content Assistant by HubSpot
While we always recommend strategy first, there’s also a benefit to ideating in the same space where you produce your content. This helps you see your campaign in layout and tweak the designs in real time.
That’s where HubSpot’s other AI tool can come in handy. Content assistant is generative AI built into HubSpot’s layout and publishing tool.
If you use HubSpot for email marketing or landing page creation, you can strategize, create, and publish all in the same window.
ChatGPT by OpenAI
ChatGPT is likely the most well-known AI tool, with more than 100 million users.
We tested it to see how it handles marketing campaign requests, giving it the same ecommerce campaign prompt.
Since ChatGPT doesn’t have a plug-and-play prompt feature like campaign assistant, I fed it the information in natural language prompts (see the example below). This test used ChatGPT version 3.5. Here’s the marketing campaign it created.
AI Email Campaign with ChatGPT
The first iteration of the email campaign that ChatGPT had some good lines (“Hey there, Eco-Explorer!”) and endearing emojis but was far too long for an ecommerce email. So, I asked ChatGPT to cut the length in half.
The final result was more scannable and still conversational. It even created a discount code for my campaign, EARTH25.
AI Google Search Ad Campaign with ChatGPT
To make my campaign cross-channel, I prompted ChatGPT to repurpose my campaign for Google search.
The tool brainstormed three ad groups for me and three ads within each group. The headlines aren’t bad. The output also includes the main keywords and discounts needed to draw a click.
Beyond the ad copy, ChatGPT can also recommend parameters to make your PPC campaign a success. It recommends ad extensions, a bidding strategy, and best practices.
AI Social Media Campaign with ChatGPT
Finally, I asked ChatGPT to convert this campaign into a companion ad campaign on Facebook.
ChatGPT produced social media copy that was similar to its email campaign draft. However, it also recommended an image, a CTA better suited for Facebook, and four hashtags for my post.
ChatGPT gave me three ad alternatives and some basic campaign details about my audience and campaign objective. It’s somewhat vague, but you could follow up with some additional prompts to get extra targeting recommendations.
LLaMA 2 by Meta
If you haven’t heard of this one, you aren’t alone. Released quietly in mid-2023, LLaMA 2 is Meta’s large language model (LLM), which is free and open to the public.
Unlike ChatGPT or Google Bard, LLaMA 2 is open-source, allowing users to flag and fix potential issues. To chat with LLaMA 2 on a browser, I used Chat Arena.
AI Email Campaign with LLaMA 2
First, I fed LLaMA 2 the exact same prompt as Campaign Assistant and ChatGPT asking for an email campaign. The email could use a shave for length but definitely delivered a witty tone.
The email came complete with emojis and a discount code suggestion but appeared to be missing a call to action — a big oversight in the email marketing realm.
AI Google Search Ad Campaign with LLaMA 2
Next, I served LLaMA 2 the challenge of converting this into a PPC campaign with the simple follow-up prompt, “Can you convert this into a Google Search ad campaign?”
First, LLaMA 2 organized my campaign into three different ad groups based on product type. Each ad within the ad groups focused on a different angle or audience, setting it up well for A/B testing.
Here’s the headline, ad copy, and CTA that LLaMA 2 wrote for the search campaign. While I can’t preview how it would look in campaign assistant, it did save me time by pulling the top keywords I can use for the campaign.
AI Social Media Ad Campaign with LLaMA 2
Finally, I asked LLaMA 2 to create a Facebook Ad campaign for me based on the campaign parameters already entered. Since LLaMA 2 was created by Facebook’s owner Meta, it’s no surprise that the results were very thorough.
LLaMA 2 gave me a target audience with suggested demographics and interests to target. The ad creative included an idea image, headline, text, four hashtags, and a CTA. It also suggests a budget of $1,000 and a 30-day duration.
The model also gave me some tips to increase sales through Facebook ads, such as running retargeting ads and creating a lookalike audience.
Want to learn more? Read the State of AI in Marketing report or visit our resources and best practices for AI marketing campaigns.
Which AI tool pitches the best marketing campaign?
Looking at these AI tools side by side, you can see that each one has its own strengths in marketing campaign creation.
Campaign Assistant by HubSpot is best for ease of use and plug-and-play capabilities that make it easy for marketers. It also gives design previews to help users visualize their campaigns and integration that saves existing HubSpot users time.
ChatGPT is likely the most flexible tool, with natural language processing enabling you to make customization requests to tweak your campaigns. Its emoji-filled copy hits the right notes, and it delivers strategy and campaign advice for paid ads.
With Meta’s influence, LLaMA 2 gives the most detailed strategy recommendations for paid ad campaigns. It also managed to pull off some wordplay that’s impressive for a machine: “Buckle up (or should we say buckle in?)”.
Just remember, AI marketing campaigns are a complement to human creativity. All three of these tools suggested very similar campaigns: images of bags and their wearers with scenic backdrops behind them.
While this is a solid idea, if every company followed it, no one would stand out. Always give the ideas a gut check against what you know about your audience and industry, and edit and tweak AI content to make it brand-perfect.
