Should I Use AI in Digital Marketing?
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AI in Digital Marketing
Every marketer today is being told to “use AI.” You should ask for campaign ideas, design insights, copies, calls to action, design workflows and automation, and even write your emails answering clients. But nobody seems to be asking the more important question: should you?
AI in digital marketing is a massive tool, but only when it’s applied to the right problems. Used in the wrong place, it creates more noise, more mediocre content, and more disconnection from your audience.
Repetitive tasks and heavy loads of data management
If a task involves processing large amounts of data, identifying patterns, or making real-time micro-decisions, AI marketing tools are built for exactly that. Paid media platforms like Google or Meta use machine learning to adjust bids, audiences, and placements. A reliable usage of AI is to put your trust in these features — but is it really as simple as that?
Truth is, you should be implementing A/B testing in the first place. This will give you a real comparison between human vs. AI. Don’t just rely on automation — get your hands dirty and compare your results. Automating campaigns is a long-term race, not a starting point.
Email marketing is another area where marketing automation with AI consistently outperforms manual approaches. Sending the right message to the right segment at the optimal send time, based on individual behavior, is a data problem. AI solves it well.
I’ve been using Brevo for a couple of months now and testing different dates and times for my email marketing strategy. AI has learned when my audience is more likely to interact, turning the feature into a more attractive resource.
That said, as good practice I keep experimenting manually to nurture my algorithm.
The same applies to:
Lead scoring: Juggling with variables can be time-consuming and human error can cost a lot of money — and lead to a poor customer journey strategy. Gathering all the key information upfront gives AI a solid foundation to start your lead scoring.
Workflows: Same as lead scoring — it’s a great starting point for creating more fluid and effective workflows. I’d approach this with existing workflows before trusting your newest ones to automation.
If you’re lazy enough to skip all my points, here’s a quick summary: A/B Testing. Do it!
Cre-AI-ting problems
AI is not here to replace your unique approach on the creative side of digital marketing — and it’s definitely not here to replace your personality when answering emails or writing WhatsApp messages.
1. Stop compromising your brand identity. AI-generated copy tends to sound generic, cold, and often gets a negative response from real users. A couple of years back everyone was doing “3 tips to,” “Reasons why,” “How-to guides” — and that’s exactly what the algorithm became.
Here’s where you can stand out in a saturated industry. But if everyone else is doing it, is my content irrelevant to the algorithm?
You need to understand how to fit into the algorithm:
Research: Identify niche trends — this is nothing new. Marketing is cyclic, and it always comes back to niche products, niche audiences etc.
Focus on long-tail keywords: You found a niche topic, now exploit it by using copy that resonates with real user intent. Start learning how to use SEMRush, asking Chat-GPT for keywords is like taking your car out when its raining and saying you washed it.
Engage in multichannel strategies: You have a blog — great. You also need email marketing, social media content, and a decent website to connect with your audience. Repetition is key, again, marketing is cyclic. In order for people to connect with you they need to interact with your content in more than one way.
SEO: Keywords aren’t your only resource. Use images, videos, and info graphics — anything shareable.
Refresh your content: Past content is always useful. Repurpose an Instagram post into a blog post and an email campaign, for example.
For the lazy ones: the algorithm isn’t only crawling through titles and meta descriptions. It’s evaluating all your content and deciding if it’s relevant. Take the time to actually answer user queries.
Bonus tip: research AEO and LLMs — spoiler alert, it’s SEO with extra steps.
2. ChatGPT is not your personal assistant. Well, it kind of is — but you shouldn’t be drafting all your emails and texts with it. Doing so cripples your ability to understand specific situations and think quickly through problem-solving. Plus, we can tell when you do!
Am I a hypocrite? Is this blog AI-generated?
Am… Partially. I did use AI to help with my blog writing. But here’s my approach:
Research: I didn’t ask Claude (yes, I switched to Claude) to write a blog for copy-pasting. First I decided what specific points I wanted to cover based on real conversations I’ve had with other colleagues. Then went to SEMrush to find keywords I could use and evaluate their density, position, and volume.
This helped me understand if this content was actually relevant or just something I thought was relevant.
I got my long-tail keywords, then wrote a draft — full of grammatical and spelling mistakes, I’ll be honest. That’s where I used Claude: to give my own words more structure and clean up the spelling.
Finally, Since I follow RankMath for my SEO checklist on blogs. Claude helps me cover all those fields for a better rating, without compromising my voice. This is not a paid mention.
Wrapping up...
AI is meant to help you with repetitive task and heavy data managing problems, every time you feel like turning to your favorite chat think, Is this a creative task? if the answer is yes. Don’t overuse them.
AI works best as infrastructure, not as a creative.