Where AI Fits in Marketing & SEM

Artificial Intelligence. AI. ChatGPT. Claude. Gemini. How are these services changing the marketing landscape? And how can your business’s marketing benefit from them?

AI has come on the scene in a big way. But can it do all your marketing for you? Or at least handle your Search Engine Marketing? The short answer is no, but it can help marketers deliver their work faster and better than ever before.

What is SEM?

Search Engine Marketing is the process of increasing your website’s visibility on search engines like Google. This is typically done through marketing tactics like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertisements. Read last month’s blog here if you want to learn more about SEO & PPC.

In search engine marketing (SEM), whether you are doing SEO or PPC, you must be able to convey your business’ value as the right solution to your client’s problems. Therefore, copy writing is an essential skill to have. Whether writing for your website or for your ads, a bad message will turn away customers. With the advent of AI like ChatGPT and Claude, many people have turned to AI to write all their copy for them. This has resulted in a lot of websites, advertisements, emails, and resumes to sound unnatural, clearly written in the overly cheery voice of AI. Some businesses have gone as far as using AI to generate videos for their business. This is not the best way to use AI in support of your marketing efforts.

There are some great ways that AI can help your marketing. Let’s look at how AI can help and hurt your business’s marketing.

Bad ways to use AI in marketing.

Here are a few ways you should not ask your AI to do.
Write all your ads and web copy.
Generate your photos and videos.
Pick your keywords for your PPC and SEO.
AI Writing Your Copy

Allowing ChatGPT to write the copy for your website may sound appealing. Why hire a copywriter when Claude can do it for free? The answer is that everyone is thinking the same thing. Your website will sound like hundreds of other websites all using the same shortcut instead of standing out with well-considered, human written copy.

Generating Photos & Videos

Having a skilled photographer and designer take pictures and create content for your website can be expensive. So allowing AI to do the work for you seems like a good idea. However, without knowing best practices for design and creative work, getting photos and videos from AI often results in work with distortions that customers WILL notice. Even Coca-Cola faced backlash for their AI generated holiday commercials this last holiday season.

Pick your keywords for your PPC and SEO.

Asking AI which keywords you should use to drive traffic to your site is asking for trouble. AI cannot access the proper resources like Google’s Keyword Planner, Ahref, or SEMrush to tell you how keywords are trending, what intent these keywords are aligned with in your industry, or where your competitors are competing.

Good ways to use AI in marketing.

There are many ways that a person can interact with AI. Here are a few good ways you or your marketing team can use it to get a leg up on the competition.

Summary Reports
Research
First Draft Content

Summary Reports

If your business relies on substantial qualitative data, like customer feedback or survey responses, using AI to summarize the data and highlight interesting interactions can save you a lot of time. Asking the right questions and writing the correct prompts will be important. Maybe ask the AI what is a common theme among positive reviews within your data? Then ask the same for negative reviews. After receiving your summary, look over the data yourself to make sure the AI is going in the right direction. Take the summary and raw data to your team and brainstorm corrective measures for your product or service. This can be replicated with other data like email open rates and subject lines as well.

Research

Instead of asking AI what keywords you should use, ask AI to review your competitors’ websites for what keywords they are using. Do the initial leg work of finding your competitors and their websites titles, descriptions, and site content. Then feed that information into the AI and ask it to pull keywords and keyword density. Give the AI your requirements for excellent titles and descriptions and then review your competitors’ site to see where they have a leg up on you.

First Draft of Content

Having AI write all your content from scratch is a bad idea. Having AI write a first draft of an email or social media post after giving it data on previously successful campaigns and information on your customer persona is a great idea. Make sure you give it gaurdrails, like how long the email should be, what voice it should be in, and what the call to action is. It can easily write an entire email campaign for you, but make sure human eyes still read every word, and make edits for a final draft.

If you’re wondering whether AI is the missing piece in your marketing strategy or worried you might be using it the wrong, give us a call. At TOTAL Advertising, our Search Marketing team knows exactly where AI fits into a winning SEO and PPC strategy, and where human touch still matters most. If you’re ready to work smarter and grow faster, connect with the TOTAL Advertising team today!

Written by

Amari Williams, Senior Search Marketing Specialist