AI in Marketing: 10 Practical Ways to Use AI
Let's be honest. Most of the "AI in marketing" talk is hot air.
Your CMO read an article on a plane. Now they want an "AI strategy." Consultants are charging five figures for slide decks that say "leverage synergistic AI paradigms." It’s a lot of noise.
The truth is, AI isn't some sentient being that's going to invent the next viral campaign for you. Not yet, anyway.
Right now, AI is a tool. A force multiplier. It's a wrench, a screwdriver, a power drill. It's here to help you do the tedious parts of your job faster, so you have more time to do the parts that actually require a human brain—strategy, creativity, and empathy.
Here are 10 practical things you can do with AI, right now, to get more done.
1. Annihilate Writer's Block
We all stare at that blinking cursor. Instead of panicking, use ChatGPT or Jasper to break the logjam. The prompt isn't "write a blog post about Q3 sales." It's "Act as a marketing strategist. Give me 5 different angles for a blog post about the importance of cybersecurity for small businesses. Make one funny, one serious, one based on a recent news event, one controversial, and one targeted at accountants." Instantly, you have five paths. Pick one and start writing.
2. Generate Ad Copy Variations
You need 10 headlines and 5 descriptions for a new Google Ads campaign. This is soul-crushing work. Feed a tool like Jasper or Copy.ai your product description and target audience. Ask for 20 headline variations. It will spit them out in 30 seconds. 90% of them might be garbage. But 10% will be usable, and you just saved yourself an hour of banging your head against a wall.
Create Images That Aren't Stock
I’m tired of seeing that same photo of "diverse team smiling in a modern office." You are, too. Tools like Midjourney or DALL-E 3 can create completely unique images. Need a photorealistic image of a golden retriever wearing a hard hat and looking at a blueprint? Done. It takes some practice to write good prompts, but you can create visuals for ads, blog posts, and social media that no one else has. It's the end of boring stock photography.
4. Write the First 80% of Anything
Notice I said first 80%. Don't ask AI to write a final-draft email to your most important client. But you can ask it to write the first draft. "Write a 500-word blog post on the benefits of our new software feature, 'Auto-Sync.' The audience is non-technical project managers. Use a friendly, helpful tone." What you get back will be a solid B-minus paper. Your job is to take that B-minus and, with your expertise, turn it into an A-plus. It’s editing, not creating from scratch. Much faster.
5. Create Simple Videos
This one feels a little like sci-fi, and maybe a bit creepy. But it’s undeniably useful. Tools like Synthesia or HeyGen let you create videos with AI-generated avatars. You type a script, choose an avatar and a voice, and it generates a video. Is it going to win a Cannes Lion? No. Is it perfect for a quick product tutorial, an internal training video, or a social media update that doesn't warrant a full production crew? Absolutely.
6. Repurpose Content
You spent a week writing a killer 2,000-word guide. Don't just let it sit there. Paste the whole thing into an AI tool and command it:
"Turn this into a 10-part Twitter thread."
"Summarize this into a 300-word LinkedIn post."
"Pull out the 5 most important takeaways for an email newsletter."
"Write a 60-second video script based on the core message."
One piece of pillar content becomes a week's worth of multi-channel assets. This is pure productivity.
7. Analyze Data
This is where AI gets really powerful. And it’s not about writing. ChatGPT's Advanced Data Analysis can look at your spreadsheets. Upload a CSV of your campaign performance data and ask it questions in plain English. "Which ad campaign had the best ROAS last month?" "Are there any correlations between click-through rate and the day of the week?" "Create a bar chart showing conversions by source." It finds insights you might have missed.
8. SEO Keywords
You've done your keyword research and have a list of 500 terms. Now you have to manually group them into topical clusters for your content plan. It's a nightmare. Feed that list to ChatGPT and ask it to "group these keywords into semantically related clusters." It will do in minutes what used to take hours of manual sorting in a spreadsheet.
9. Draft Social Media Calendars
The blank calendar is daunting. Give an AI a simple prompt: "I'm a marketing manager for a B2B SaaS company that sells accounting software. Give me a 4-week social media content calendar for LinkedIn. Include a mix of content types: industry news, product tips, customer success stories, and questions to engage the audience." You get a framework. Now you just have to execute.
10. Personalize Email Outreach at Scale
You have a list of 100 leads. You want to send a personalized email, not a generic blast. Use an AI tool connected to the web to help. Prompt: "Here's my standard outreach email. Here is the LinkedIn profile of [Lead's Name]. Rewrite the first paragraph of my email to reference their recent post about Q4 planning or their company's latest funding announcement." It adds a layer of personalization that dramatically increases response rates, without you having to manually stalk 100 profiles.
The Reality Check
This all sounds great. But there are rules.
AI lies. It hallucinates. It makes up facts, stats, and quotes with incredible confidence. You must be the human fact-checker.
The output is only as good as the input. "Write a blog post" gives you garbage. A detailed prompt with role, context, audience, and tone gives you gold.
You are still the expert. AI is an intern. A very fast, very productive intern who knows a lot of things but has zero real-world experience. You are the strategist. You have the final say.
The goal isn't to become an "AI prompt engineer." The goal is to use these tools to claw back hours of your week. Pick one thing on this list. Try it tomorrow. See what happens.
