How Businesses Use AI Marketing Tools to Increase Productivity
By: Michael Le
One of the biggest challenges that businesses and organizations face is reducing inefficiencies caused by task monotony, poor communication, and ideation hiccups. Why waste time on tedious (but essential!) activities, when you can leverage artificial intelligence (AI) tools to streamline your workflow?
Generative AI tools can be a useful addition to supercharge your team’s processes and communication due to their exceptional ability to interpret language. It’s no wonder that more U.S. businesses are starting to integrate AI technology to support their customer service, marketing, and digital assistance efforts.
In this article, we’ll cover:
What AI Tools Are Businesses Using?
How to Streamline My Workflow With AI
Rethink Your Workflow With AI Productivity Tools
This article is part of a larger Brandmint series on AI, geared toward keeping business and organization leaders informed on AI best practices. Subscribe to our newsletter MintMail to keep up with our blogs, marketing insights, and more!
What AI Tools Are Businesses Using?
Many AI tools for business draw on the same open-source technology, adjusted to meet specific needs. With derivative AI-powered chatbots and expansive AI plug-ins popping up each day, it can be hard to identify the best one for you.
Our list of promising AI marketing tools is geared toward tech-agnostic business teams and tech-enabled companies alike.
Treat this as a starting point for those beginning to incorporate AI productivity tools into their workflow. For more specific tasks, it’s best to find an AI model built with your output in mind. Tailored AI tools may require a subscription, so it’s best to test out their capabilities through a trial before committing to a purchase.
Whatever you decide on, make sure you follow AI best practices to ensure you’re using AI solutions securely.
ChatGPT
If you’re looking for a general digital assistant, ChatGPT from OpenAI can do it all! ChatGPT took the world by storm due to its exceptional natural language processing capabilities and friendly chat interface.
Feed the tool relevant context and then type your request. Based on your prompt, ChatGPT will deliver outlines, blogs, lines of code, and more. It’s also helpful in identifying the main points from dense text, though you should double-check the source material to confirm if ChatGPT correctly summarized the content.
ChatGPT offers a free-to-use model as well as a more powerful paid version. Having said that, recent updates to the model have tech experts debating whether or not the model has become less powerful. For the average tech-agnostic user, ChatGPT still remains a useful communication starting point.
Google Bard
Google Bard, powered by LaMDA and the PaLM Model, functions similarly to ChatGPT. Though its generative text capabilities aren’t always as detailed as ChatGPT, Google Bard is connected to the internet. As a result, it can draw information in real time from websites and give resources through the right prompts.
You can also browse through similar questions that people have asked, allowing you to quickly fact-check content through the main search engine. This is an effective step toward addressing potential AI hallucinations in your content.
Google Bard is currently free to use for its experimental phase.
TextFX by Google
Speaking of Google, they recently launched an AI experimental tool with rapper Lupe Fiasco called TextFx. Unlike other generative tools, TextFX doesn’t give you paragraphs to work with. Rather, it facilitates creative exercises and techniques that writers often rely on to polish their work.
TextFX includes tools that help you find relevant alliterative words, browse unexpected prompts, discover new perspectives, and find semantically related words to spark unexpected connections.
Marketers and copywriters should leverage TextFX to create content for new engaging campaigns.
Jasper AI
There’s a reason why Jasper AI stands out among the popular AI marketing tools. Jasper AI draws on OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT-4 models to specialize in content creation. You can write commercial scripts, ad copy, social posts, and even articles with suggestions on future topics.
Like Google Bard, Jasper AI is connected to the internet, making fact-checking a breeze. Train Jasper AI to recognize and emulate your writing style by feeding it your content.
Zupyak
Zupyak is for business owners who want to get started with simple content marketing and marketing professionals who want to automate tedious marketing tasks to focus on strategy. Compared to similar AI marketing tools, Zupyak offers an easy-to-use interface that guides you through selecting a topic, finding attainable keywords, and creating a blog.
This is a powerful tool to get you started with content marketing—just make sure you check the output and bring your own flair to the party! It’s also best practice to double-check the keywords generated for local searches.
Midjourney
Need visual inspiration? Midjourney is a text-to-image AI tool that generates realistic high-quality images based on your prompts. This is great for figuring out different design approaches without investing too much effort upfront. Create unique product mock-ups, website designs, visual placeholders, and even mood boards.
Please note that detailed images may require a graphic designer to correct. We recommend using Midjourney as a starting point or as an image generator for internal mock-ups.
Midjourney’s free version allows a limited number of generated images per month. Upgrading to the paid version will unlock additional features and greater imaging capabilities.
Adobe Photoshop Generative Fill
Adobe Photoshop recently released a powerful new generative AI fill tool that allows users to convert a text prompt into an image. Removing reflections, replacing backgrounds, and adding visual texture become child’s play with generative fill!
The main benefit of generative fill is to augment a graphic designer’s creative process. Rather than spending time sorting through and blocking out visual assets to test a concept, you can use generative fill to make a quick change and see if you like the direction.
Generative fill is fueled by Adobe Firefly, a group of AI models trained on Adobe Stock images, open-licensed work, and content in the public domain. In theory, this makes Adobe’s generative images safe for commercial use, but you won’t be able to use generative images commercially until Adobe Firefly is out of its beta phase.
How to Streamline My Workflow With AI
According to a recent Microsoft study, users who most actively rely on Microsoft products to execute their digital work spend about 8.8 hours per week on average reading and writing emails. That doesn’t include the time spent resolving the issue at hand or fulfilling requests.
Poor communication can contribute significantly to productivity inefficiencies, which translate into money lost. Here are some of the common ways workers use AI productivity tools to revamp their workflows.
Write Email Templates
Rather than spending time writing custom emails, you can use AI tools to draft email templates for specific scenarios and share them with your team. That could range from sales outreach and requests for clients to troubleshooting customer support issues.
Templated responses help your messaging stay consistent, regardless of the sender. Save time by focusing on key actions rather than workshopping communications. Just remember to add personal touches where necessary!
Automate Low-Level Customer Support Tickets With Chatbots
Older chatbots can often feel like a website menu in disguise—responses to customer inquiries are based on keywords, and they’re limited to the responses you’ve predetermined. In contrast, AI-driven chatbots take things to the next level thanks to their improved natural language capabilities and continuous learning.
These modern chatbots can better guide customers to relevant resources or support a self-service model, freeing up valuable time for your team. The longer the AI chatbot operates, the better its responses will become. Don’t have a FAQ page or necessary resources ready? Use AI tools for businesses to analyze and/or outline key customer requests. Then, develop effective materials that solve those issues.
Chatbots connected to CRMs are the most effective for customer support and sales, allowing you to automate repetitive manual data input. Some tools can even predict customer behaviors and suggest relevant products and upsells.
Generate Training Documents
You’re the subject matter expert at your organization and have pioneered an exceptional sales process. However, you haven’t documented your process, making it difficult to replicate through new trainees, stay accountable to protocol, and further iterate for efficiencies.
AI tools like Scribe AI allow you to create documentation in minutes so that you don’t have to work from scratch. Start with a prompt like, “Write an SOP for an account executive to find prospects on LinkedIn” and customize the content based on your expertise. You can also edit existing documentation easily with quick checks.
Design Presentation Templates
Confident in your content but just don’t have a graphic design mindset? Use AI design tools to auto-generate chic, easy-to-digest business presentation templates in minutes. Some AI tools can even create photo-realistic images and graphs based on your data. Let AI take care of your presentation’s look and feel so that you can focus on your messaging.
Generate Excel Formulas & Interpret Data
Speaking of graphs, AI tools can help make Excel, Google Sheets, and similar spreadsheet programs more accessible to beginners. This is a great first step to unlocking Excel’s full potential. One of our favorite ways to use spreadsheet AI tools is through text-to-formula prompts like Ajelix. Simply request what you’d like, and the model will create a formula for you. Other tools can help you efficiently interpret your data and check for input inaccuracies.
Provide Content Prompts for Social Media, SEO, & Blogs
Kick-start your creative process by using AI marketing tools to suggest writing prompts, consider keywords, and outline blog topics. If you’re pressed for time, the right AI tool can help you write simple social media posts that convey your key points. This is most useful for short, straightforward social posts or as a base for additional customization.
Scale Your Content Effectively
Text-based generative AI excels at scaling content production by taking a larger content piece and dividing it into digestible chunks.
Let’s say you’ve spent a lot of manual time writing a long-form blog or white paper. If you follow integrated marketing principles, you’ll want to find ways to repurpose that content across multiple platforms.
Try feeding the blog into ChatGPT, and ask it to identify the main points. Then, have ChatGPT generate a series of social media posts based on those main points. You can adjust the parameters around tone, angle, and audience to get different variations per post.
Gain a New Perspective
More sophisticated chatbots can behave like different demographics to help you gain a new perspective on your messaging, product, and more. Try having your chatbot emulate a user persona. Then, ask it questions like:
“How would you use this product?”
“What are some challenges you face around my topic?”
“What are the top five benefits you’re looking for in a solution?”
Answers will vary depending on the chatbot used and the prompt’s level of detail. While this may not be as valuable as focus group data, a change in perspective may reveal angles you haven’t thought of before.
Rethink Your Workflow With AI Productivity Tools
Using AI productivity tools can revolutionize the way you work. Text-based generative AI tools have made traditionally complex communication, marketing, and design tasks easier to navigate, effectively lowering the barrier of entry. These solutions are also powerful ideation tools for experienced workers who understand when a boiler-plate output is sufficient and when a custom approach is more impactful.
To make the most of your AI productivity tools, it’s imperative that you follow best practices and understand the larger risks associated with widespread AI usage. AI is a way to support your team and processes—it’s not a magical replacement for expertise.
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