Quick Wins for Incorporating AI into Your Marketing & Communications

You know AI is super powerful and it seems like it’s all folks can talk about. It also seems like it can do just about everything, leaving you wondering where to start. Sometimes the best thing is to start small and start now.

For most people, the easiest place to start is not by asking AI to do your most important thinking. It’s by using it for the boring, repetitive, low-stakes work that consumes waaaay too much of your time.

Here are a few ways to garner quick wins with AI in your marcom (marketing & communications!) efforts.

But first, remember what AI is and what it does.

AI isn’t nearly as smart as people think it is, and it definitely is not as smart as the people who created it hope you think it is. What AI really does is a whole lot of simple things incredibly quickly.

In a previous post on this blog I discussed how AI isn’t actually creative, it just plays a creative person on TV. I also covered how AI has been a bit of a sneaky liar lately.

So what do I trust AI to do?

I love having AI do boring, time consuming things.

A lot of people get stuck with AI because they start too big. They try to use it for strategy, creative thinking, or high-stakes decisions. Then they get bad results decide the whole thing is a scam, and decide they are done with AI. But if you start with work that is repetitive, practical, and easy to review, AI can save you time almost immediately.

Quick Wins for AI in Writing

I am a writer at heart. Every post on this blog comes straight from my brain. Even when I let AI proofread for me I yell at ChatGPT if it tries to do anything that would change my voice in my writing.

But there are some types of writing where your voice isn’t as important and you just need to get the point across.

Let AI write the things where your voice doesn’t matter

If you ever receive a proposal from me for marketing services, there’s a good chance that a large portion of the proposal has been written, or at least compiled, by AI.

When I started expanding my consulting business I developed my list of services; things I felt I did quite well and enjoyed helping other people do. I came up with very basic descriptions of these services, then had ChatGPT help me build out the service descriptions a bit more.

Now whenever I need to put together a proposal I go back into the project where I worked on those descriptions and tell ChatGPT, “Write a marketing services proposal for _________. My primary contact is __________. They have an existing website but need to get it ready for future SEO efforts and paid search ads. The proposal should include the following services from my offering list _____, _____, _______, and ______. Use my standard pricing. Include typical service agreement terms.”

I’ll then take what ChatGPT (or whatever LLM you prefer) gives me and paste it into a new document where I can review and make edits.

In a previous life I did proposal writing for a software company. After you write a few proposals all future proposals are an exercise in copy/paste and recycling your previous writing. AI is perfect for this kind of work.

Let AI write things you wouldn’t think of

It was 5 words in my last example. So quick you could have missed it. In my prompt for writing a marketing services proposal I told the LLM, “Include typical service agreement terms.”

These models have likely seen millions of marketing services proposals, far more than I’ve ever written or read. They can very quickly tell you the kinds of terms other marketing professionals are including in their proposals. And some of the terms it suggested for me are things that totally make sense, but I might never have thought of.

This isn’t meant to substitute for legal advice, and again I wouldn’t trust AI with legal advice no matter how good the model. But this gave me an idea of what others in the industry thought were important to include. As with everything that AI outputs it remains imperative to review what it gives you and ensure it aligns with your business, your values, and reality.

Let AI write the things where you can’t use “your” voice

I am not a bubbly, cheerful person. It would follow then that my writing voice doesn’t tend to be bubbly and cheerful.

So when it came to writing product descriptions for t-shirts and coffee mugs for an online shop I was helping to set up? Perfect time to use AI. Some print-on-demand services like Printify have AI built into the product description fields of their product designer. The AI can take a brief description you provide and write a cheery, informative product description.

Or here’s another example. Have you ever run into a tough situation at work and wanted to give someone a piece of your mind? Or maybe had to express a complaint to a coworker or HR representative?

Here’s the part where I warn everyone that it is obviously very important to take a moment to breathe and reflect on what you’re about to say. Sometimes communicating while we’re upset can lead to disaster.

But assuming we’re going to ignore that warning and write that fiery email, you can throw it into your favorite LLM and ask the AI to make it more “professional” and “safe for work.”

Let AI be an external set of eyes

In a previous post I explained how I’ve set up agentic AI to be a proofreading editor for me based on how I edit other writers.

The value in something like this is getting an external point of view to look at your writing.

Use AI to be a check on you falling into bad habits.

“I want to explain to new users how to get the most from my product. Review these instructions from the perspective of someone who has never used my product before. Highlight any instructions, words, or phrases that a new user wouldn’t understand or may find confusing.”

This can be incredibly helpful if you work in a field with a lot of internal industry jargon that newcomers may not have exposure to. If you want to reach new people, make sure your communications aren’t going to be filled with language they don’t understand.

Quick Wins for AI in Research

One area where AI truly excels is in research. A Google search is quick, sure. But AI can do far more digging than you can before you even finish typing your question.

AI is especially useful when you need to gather a lot of information quickly, compare options, or get a rough sense of what other people are doing.

Let AI find consensus

This follows my above point about service terms in a marketing proposal. LLMs have been trained on as much content as they can possibly get their hands on. Any time you’re looking to see what “everyone else” is doing, AI is really well suited to do that for you.

Another example of this concept could be figuring out quantity distribution for sized products. “I want to sell t-shirts at my local farmers market. I can afford to have 150 shirts inventory on hand. How many of each size should I bring? I live in a small suburban city in Massachusetts and my target audience is millennial parents.” The added context will allow the model to conduct some research for you, maybe surface some best practices, and then apply its learnings to your specific situation and prompt.

Let AI shop around

AI can also be useful when you’re trying to compare prices, retailers, or buying options without opening fifteen tabs and doing the legwork yourself.

Here are some examples of prompts I’ve actually used in real life.

“I need to get a personal computer. I’d love to find a Macbook Pro at a reasonable price. I’m open to purchasing a refurbished computer. What’s the best option for finding a deal on a good computer?”

Or when I was shopping for a new mattress and found a particular model that had great reviews:

“Find the best price on a queen sized _________ mattress, delivered to [my zipcode].”

(Full disclosure, I bought the Macbook that the AI found for me. I didn’t buy the mattress because who buys a mattress online without ever feeling it in real life? I was clearly not thinking when I started that research project.)

Let AI break down complex concepts (or even not so complex ones...)

When I was launching Sensemaking Media I had a lot of decisions to make, and some of them were based on things I had no understanding of.

“Explain the difference between a sole proprietorship and an LLC.”

AI was able to pull together a succinct explanation of the difference between these two things. Unfortunately I still didn’t quite understand. Fortunately with an LLM you can always follow up with further instructions or questions.

“OK, explain that to me again, but explain it as if I’m a 6 year-old child with a short attention span.”

Bingo. That did it. The AI broke down the information into simple language, focused on key concepts, and provided prompts for other considerations I may need to take into account.

AI is great at pulling together information, providing comparisons, explaining similarities and differences, and yes, explaining it to you like you’re a child.

Quick Wins for AI in technology

A system that has read every instruction manual on the internet and has instant recall of all that information knows far more about technology than we humans could ever hope to know.

AI can’t/shouldn’t replace strategy when it comes to implementing tech, but when you know what you want to do it can be an incredibly valuable tool to help you get from point A to point B.

Let AI remember how to do things for you

There are certain tasks that you do every single day. You’ve done these things so many times you could do them in your sleep. 

But on the other hand, there are things you may only do once in a blue moon.

That obscure functionality or formula in Microsoft Excel that you used 6 months ago to make a really fantastic pivot table? AI can remind you how to use it or explain how it works.

Or maybe you’re like me and took web programming back in college only to work extensively in WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) website editors. But now you need to do some very specific thing and you can’t remember the HTML tag you need. Describe what you’re trying to do and AI will tell you the tag you need, the syntax for using it, and best practices for using it on your website.

Let AI help you troubleshoot

This builds on the example above. In addition to reminding you of a long forgotten formula or coding tag, AI can tell you what you screwed up, or what in your system is screwing it up for you.

A few months back I was trying to implement a particular functionality on a website using Javascript. I’m not a Javascript developer or expert. I knew what I wanted to achieve, so I had AI write the code for me.

Then I pasted it into the website and... it didn’t work. It was supposed to work. But it didn’t work.

I banged on it for a while trying to get it to work before I realized that AI could probably solve the problem faster than I could. AI could access the page I had published but it could also read the website platform’s entire support documentation in an instant. I told the AI what platform I was building the page on and it helped me troubleshoot the code until we got it working.

I don’t know how long it would have taken me to figure out how to fix the issue, but by using AI to review my code and know how the platform I was using worked, it figured out how the site builder was messing with what I had originally written.

Quick Wins With AI Make You Go Fast

What are the quickest ways to incorporate AI into your work? Look for things that you could do yourself online but that would take you a lot of time. Things you could find, or learn, or write.

Focus on things that don’t benefit from that “human element” that relies on your voice, intuition, judgment, or values.

Let AI do the boring repetitive stuff so you can focus on the things that you love.