What to Know About Marketing & AI
How to avoid major mistakes when it comes to using AI tools to market your business
There’s no denying that AI is incredibly powerful. It seems like there’s no limit to what it accomplish with new roles and capabilities for AI surfacing daily in the media. We hear about AI making strides in data analysis and forecasting, cybersecurity, accessibility, and even medical diagnostics. Our trust in AI is increasing and it has rapidly found a place in almost everyone’s daily lives. Even if you haven’t deliberately sought out AI powered tools, it may have already appeared in systems you already use (think Copilot, Gemini, Firefly, Magic Studio, Einstein; the list goes on).
Although it can be an effective tool, the idea of using AI causes mixed, often polarized, feelings. Some view it as a silver bullet, putting a lot of trust (and hope) into AI as a wonderful bit of magic that will eradicate pain points while saving time and money to boot. Others take a closer look and spot the flaws. One undeniable way that AI really is too good to be true is from a values-based perspective. AI has a major impact on the environment, using massive amounts of water, creating tonnes of hazardous electronic waste, and uses far more electricity than a Google search. AI also presents numerous ethical dilemmas, and some applications can pose significant risks to mental health. Regardless of the impact, the lure of AI’s potential for cost-savings has still become difficult for many business owners to resist.
A very common way that many businesses are using AI is to power their marketing efforts, using affordable AI-generated text and images along with AI tools to manage campaigns. It seems like an obvious choice to cut costs while gaining exposure for your business. Although AI may have a role in marketing, the misuse and overuse of AI can end up costing you.
If you’re planning to use AI to market your business, here’s what you need to consider:
You may compromise connection
We’re all used to seeing the hallmark signs of AI-generated images; think six-and-a-half fingers, disconcertingly blank eyes, and disembodied arms. While AI has improved when it comes to generating realistic images and videos, AI-generated images can actually elicit an undesirable reaction. This is known as the “uncanny valley” phenomenon, a term originally coined by Masahiro Mori to explain the discomfort people feel in response to robots with realistic humanoid faces. As AI images and videos are becoming more convincing, they evoke that same sense of discomfort due to their subtle mismatches with reality. Depending on the prompts and tools being used, AI-generated images will contain a range of errors, from jarring flaws that are immediately noticeable to small inconsistencies (which can be even worse). When we are faced with something that is almost, but not quite, realistic, we experience the phenomenon noted above, causing us to feel repulsed, uneasy, and unsettled. While this term was originally devised to explain the reaction we have to faces, AI-generated images and videos of many things, including overly-perfect and realistic food, landscapes, homes, and even products, can cause the same sense of repulsion due to those very small mismatches with reality.
While AI has come a long way from the laughable images generated in its early days, the closer AI-generated images come to reality the more they can literally push viewers away. For business owners, this may have consequences. The success of advertising lies in connecting with your audience by creating a positive emotional reaction. In turn, that positive reaction strengthens your relationship with your customer, helping you build trust. The feeling that customers associate with your brand through interacting with your ads, website, and social media lingers. It is very difficult to shake the uneasy feeling that AI-generated images elicit, which isn’t fantastic when it comes to how customers feel when they think about your brand.
Blending in is a big risk
Like AI-generated images and videos, AI-generated text is easy to spot. The rhythm, tone, and structure of sentences generated by AI are a telltale sign. AI even favours certain words, leading to the same buzzwords being used over and over until they ultimately lose impact. When it comes to marketing, your brand’s unique voice is completely vital to success. Highly successful brands have a voice that is immediately recognizable, which helps form genuine connections with your audience and fosters customer loyalty. Heavy use of AI-generated content can even harm initial acquisition, as consumers experience fatigue when confronted with a wash of content that looks and sounds the same. Blending in with your competitor’s ads, or even ads from completely different industries, means you essentially become invisible to your audience.
You may also be tempted to use AI to generate content for your website or to help you churn out blog posts more quickly. While Google does not penalize AI-generated content in organic search placements, it does penalize content that feels like spam. The risk of creating content with AI that feels like spam is fairly high; if your AI-generated content feels boring, repetitive, or useless, visitors likely won’t choose to engage with it. If they do click through, they may bounce from the page quickly. This can cause Google to flag your website as containing spam, ultimately harming your placement in organic search results.
Look out for hidden costs
The main draw to using AI is the illusion of saving time and money. However, AI may not actually do either of those things if it is not used correctly. Using the examples above, paying to run ads that repel your customers or are ignored by them isn’t a great use of your ad budget. Paying hosting fees to keep a website online that struggles to attract visitors and keep users engaged is also a big expense with little return on investment.
AI-managed ad campaigns have the potential to burn through marketing budgets. We have seen big brands make mistakes like running holiday ads during the spring or promotions for sales that have long expired. When creating recommendations about which ads to run, AI-powered marketing platforms can fail to take context into account, leading to “high performing” ads being re-activated at inappropriate times. AI can also make other mistakes if not carefully supervised, like adding hallucinated content into your ads (false claims or product features, incorrect statistics, distorted images, incorrect prices), and can create fabricated performance insights that can seriously mislead business owners.
These days, professional designers and developers spend a lot of time re-working and fixing AI creations that would have been much more affordable and scalable if they were architected by a professional. For example, AI-generated logos and brand collateral are things we are frequently asked to fix, either because they look too similar to other brands or because they simply doesn’t work in practical use (such as in print, particularly in large-scale signage or in small areas like business cards, or in digital use on websites that require responsiveness, etc.). Developers spend a lot of time fixing websites and applications that were built with AI-generated code without professional oversight. Unless someone with deep technical knowledge is guiding AI to create high-quality code and implementing it correctly, you may find yourself facing major technical debt and the need to rework your website so it is secure, usable, and indexable.
You still need skills to use it
If you typically outsource marketing, design, or web development, it is not likely you’ll get the results you need by totally replacing human skills and experience with AI. Where technical and creative skills are required, it can be very challenging for someone without this knowledge to create a prompt that will give you professional results. Learning how to prompt AI correctly is a skill in itself, but if you don’t fully understand the technical parameters of what you need to begin with, you also won’t be able to verify whether the output is what you were looking for. When it comes to generating clean code that will run without conflict, creating a unique logo and branding materials that will work across digital and physical media, or writing content that is tailored to your audience and stands out from your competitors, it’s a good idea to involve a professional to provide oversight or guidance.
Does this mean there is no way to use AI for marketing?
If you are set on using AI to help you with marketing, it’s definitely something you can do with some caveats. As long as you carefully check what has been generated, use it sparingly, and feel confident in verifying the results, it can certainly help you out. It’s a very powerful tool that can support you with analyzing data and trends, or speed up composing content or code. It can help you express ideas visually, and can make image and video editing easier. It can also help you tackle time-consuming tasks, like adding alt text and metadata to your website. At the end of the day, our recommendation is to use AI the way you feel aligns with your ethics and values, helps you truly connect with your audience, and benefits your business. Knowing the potential pitfalls before you risk your brand’s image and your marketing budget is important, and we strongly caution against blind trust and excessive use when it comes to AI.
Not sure where to start?
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