Nowadays, AI-powered tools in digital marketing are like sugar in tea.
If you don’t use it, things will be somewhat tasteless.
If you use it right, things will be sweet.
And if you use it too much, things will get…dangerous.
Considering the utility of AI-based tools, using them to a certain extent can be highly useful and even necessary. However, during the process of using them, there are a lot of things that you steer clear of.
In this post, we’ll be helping you understand what you should and shouldn’t do when using AI tools for marketing purposes.
However, before you do read ahead, you first must evaluate if you do have reliable internet service at your disposal. You would need to use these AI tools online, and a poor internet can ruin it all for you. Therefore, we advocate for services such as Cox Internet so that can use these tools to their full potential!
Let’s get started.
The Do’s of Using AI-Based Tools for Marketing
Here is the stuff that you should do when using AI tools for marketing purposes.
Use some high-quality ones
The main thing that you have to be careful of when using these tools is to pick some high-quality ones from the very start. AI tools can only give you the right results if you take care to select them properly.
Low-quality and substandard tools won’t actually help you out during the marketing process. They’ll just become a burden and mess things up for you.
Here are some things that you can look out for when picking AI tools for your marketing campaign.
- Availability. Ideally, the tool that you are looking to use should be free to use. There are a lot of them available on the internet, but some of them are either totally paid or partially. By picking a free tool (and a good one at that), you can save yourself from getting trapped in the rigmaroles of making payments and buying subscriptions, etc.
- Quality. Obviously, if you want to use tools – for whichever marketing purpose – you have to make sure that they are high-quality. And depending on the purpose for which you need them, the quality of the tool(s) would be decided by varying factors. The best way to ascertain the quality of your contemplated tools is to check what other users have to say about them and how they are rated on online platforms.
- Security and privacy policies. There is a reason that online tools are still transparent and very up-front about their privacy policies. Users have to make sure that the tools they use don’t utilize their data in any way or process other than what is necessary for the completion of the respective process. So, when you want to pick some AI tools, be sure that they’re in the clear as far as user security and privacy goes.
There are many other indicators that you can use as well. However, the three we mentioned above are some of the rudimentary ones that you have to get right.
Use them smartly
There are basically two ways in which you can use AI tools. You can either do hard work or smart work.
If we talk about hard work, for example, it will refer to utilizing AI tools in such a way that would involve repeatedly opening them and using them for their respective purpose.
If we talk about smart work, on the other hand, it will refer to utilizing AI tools to automate tasks in such a way that they would continue on their own without constantly needing your intervention.
Depending on the tool that you use and the purpose for which you use them, you may not be able to automate anything. But, where the possibility exists, you should make things easier for yourself.
Watch the Results and Improve
Your experience with using AI tools shouldn’t be limited to just using the tool themselves and then ending the deal. Rather, you should use the tools, monitor the results you get and then use those results to upscale your approach.
This will make the process of using these tools less of a monotonous routine and more of an engaging exercise.
Now, considering that there are a lot of AI tools out there, and they can be used for a host of different purposes, it’s a bit tough to come up with an example to illustrate this point. Let’s take an example of…paraphrasing tools.
Paraphrasing tools are mostly AI-based nowadays if we count the high-ranking ones. And since they have to be used frequently on different pieces of text, the exact method of using them has to be constantly tweaked.
When using these tools, you can check the results they give to learn about how they work and where they can be a bit lacking. Then, you can use this to improve the way you use them.
So, here is a picture of an online paraphrasing tool in action. You can see the output in the right box. The tool that we’re using for this particular example is Rephrase.
In the image above, we bunched together a couple of sentences with completely different contexts. And as you can see, some of the changes are a little off, despite the fact that we’re using a premium mode of the tool.
Now, if we happen to analyze the results, we’ll understand that the reason for this error is the simple fact that we’ve amalgamated a whole bunch of different contexts and settings into the same passage.
To fix this issue and avoid having it occur in the future, the solution would be to simply input the content into the tool bit by bit.
In this same way, you can analyze the outputs of other various AI tools like content generators, summarizers, idea generators, and the like.
The Don’ts of Using AI Tools for Digital Marketing
Now that we have looked at the stuff that you should do when using AI tools for digital marketing let’s take a look at the stuff that you should not.
Completely rely on AI tools
While AI tools are great for marketing purposes, you should not completely rely on them. These tools have to be used strictly in an assistive capacity. This applies particularly to generative tools, i.e., the ones that generate an output of some sort for the user.
In the last section above, we mentioned some types of tools, including content generators, summarizers, idea generators, and so on. These are the types of tools that are included in the “generative” category.
By the way, since we are talking about this in 2023, it would be like not addressing the elephant in the room if we skip talking about ChatGPT. ChatGPT, although launched with an apparently different intention, has become a content writer, researcher, SEO expert, programmer, and developer for a lot of people and companies.
Although there is technically nothing wrong in utilizing ChatGPT for these purposes, it is practically and logically not as ideal as it appears. Since ChatGPT is an AI model, the outputs it gives should not be elevated to a sacrosanct pedestal. They should always be held under scrutiny and used tentatively.
Use them unethically
There are plenty of ways in which AI tools can be used ethically. But unfortunately, as the deal goes, there are some unethical ways to do it as well.
When using AI tools in any capacity for any digital marketing purpose, you should make sure that you don’t overstep any boundaries.
For example, in the context of paraphrasing tools that we discussed above, overstepping boundaries would constitute steps like taking already published content from a source and then paraphrasing it to use it as your own.
And in the context of content generators like ChatGPT, overstepping boundaries would mean giving it an existing idea and having it make content based on that. This would fall into the category of unethical use since it would involve mooching off of someone else’s idea.
The same goes for other types of tools as well.
As far as the unethical use of different online AI tools goes, there isn’t a specific rule of thumb that you can abide by. You should just keep in consideration the rules of usage given by the tool itself as well as the regulations that other users follow in general.
Conclusion
Using AI tools for marketing, while necessary and helpful, has to be necessarily governed by strict rules and principles. There are different things that you have to do when using them, and there are different things that you have to avoid.
In the post above, we’ve taken a brief look at both of these.
