How Generative AI for Marketing Revolutionizes Agency Revenue and Operations

Generative AI marketing refers to using artificial intelligence solutions to create content, including images, videos, music, and text.

In the current landscape, where businesses must consistently create and publish high-quality content to remain competitive with digital marketing, the use of AI can be crucial to success.

Generative AI can be used for a wide variety of content creation at multiple levels. Some agencies and businesses use it to help with brainstorming and outlining, for instance, while others use it to draft basic marketing content for ads or social media.

Discover 11 ways to use generative AI for marketing below.

1. Personalization of Marketing Campaigns

Generative AI tools can analyze vast amounts of data related to your previous marketing campaigns, customer interactions, competitor marketing, and other factors. It can leverage all of that information, along with individual preferences and customer behaviors, to suggest or create customized content for email campaigns or highly targeted content for ad and social media campaigns.

Some benefits of personalized marketing campaigns include:

• Customized product recommendations or offers that make it more likely for a customer or prospect to convert and make a purchase.
• Enhanced engagement rates on social media and email platforms, creating a better performance for your content overall on those platforms.
• The creation of strong customer or client relationships, as this attention to detail and support for audience preferences helps foster trust and customer loyalty.

For example, Vendasta’s Marketing Automation platform allows you to send campaigns to hundreds (even thousands) of prospects simultaneously. The campaigns you create with Vendasta include personalized information and deep research that turns heads and gets clicks. 

2. Unstructured Customer Data Analysis

Around 80 percent of data is unstructured, but this type of information is often overlooked in favor of resource investment into structured data (Edge Delta). That’s partly because structured data is easier to deal with and fits nicely into charts, graphs, and tables, such as the graph below.

Image source: Excel

Unstructured data is harder to quantify. It can come in the form of reviews and other sentence-based customer feedback, social media posts, emails, and even audio content. If you’re faced with customer emails housed in your CRM system, for instance, it’s difficult to slog through all the minutia and come away with conclusions that can inform your marketing content.

However, generative AI has the data chops to process all this information and the natural language processing capability to interpret it fairly accurately. This enables it to provide insights into customer pain points and needs and apply that information to tailored marketing and content approaches. 

3. Process Automation

Generative AI can help you streamline various marketing processes with automation tools. Some opportunities for process automation within your marketing funnel include:

• Marketing personalization. Generative AI can analyze customer data and use it to automate the inclusion of dynamic content in email and other marketing campaigns.
• A/B testing. These technology tools can automate tedious A/B testing by creating many variants of ads or other marketing components, analyzing performance in real time, and pushing the best performers without the need for human intervention.
• Customer service responses. You can automate chatbot and email responses to certain customer queries, removing simple questions from human-powered processes.

Whether you use white-label software to offer automated integrations or come up with your own solutions, generative AI can help you reduce overall costs, speed up processes, enhance scale, and take tedious manual processes off the shoulders of your marketing teams. 

4. Opportunity Identification and Idea Generation

Coming up with new digital marketing campaigns and all the content needed to fuel them can be a huge creative drain on teams. Eventually, the creative well runs a bit dry, making it difficult to come up with new ideas. With the right prompts and resources, you can use generative AI to help with opportunity identification and idea generation.

Because AI can ingest and analyze so much data instantly, it can help you understand the competitive market and uncover gaps in competitor marketing. You can also ask it to help you brainstorm ideas for email, blog, or social media content.

For example, Vendasta’s white-label Social Marketing Manager allows agencies to scale their clients’ social reach by implementing AI to generate engaging, customer-ready social posts. 

5. Real-Time Recommendations and Churn Modeling

By integrating generative AI tools into your marketing, sales, and customer services processes, you can get a better understanding of customer behavior. AI can delve deep into your existing data as well as competitor and other public data and come back with insights about customer attrition and churn. 

For example, AI analysis of data might uncover that customers who use an agency’s social media marketing services are 70 percent more likely to leave if the agency is managing three or more platforms. This insight could indicate that the agency is not performing well with certain platforms or that it only has the resources to manage two effectively. By addressing these issues, you can head off customer attrition and establish more stable growth. 

6. Continuous Support Throughout the Sales Process

Generative AI can provide support throughout sales funnels to streamline your processes and help keep prospects engaged and informed. Chatbots are a prime example of this type of technology. A generative AI chatbot can:

• Provide immediate answers to simple queries about products, locations, appointments, pricing, and orders. This is true even when your offices are closed or your human teams are taking a break, ensuring 24/7 responses to potential clients.
• Connect prospects with sales reps when necessary, facilitating a seamless handshake that connects each client with the team or rep most likely to be able to help them.
• Conduct some simple sales efforts by offering upsell or cross-sell items or suggesting landing pages or blog content designed to help encourage the prospect further down the funnel.

To achieve such results, you do have to work on humanizing AI content and training your AI chatbot. That includes providing it with adequate data so it can offer human-like, accurate responses to queries. 

Vendasta' AI chatbot greets website visitors, answers product questions, and immediately sends their contact information for timely follow-ups. (Hint: you can not only use this chatbot yourself but also deliver it to your clients.)

7. Customer Journey Mapping

Whether you’re using generative marketing to support your startup idea or integrating it into existing marketing and sales approaches, consider how it can help with customer journey mapping.

AI can analyze existing customer data to answer questions about the customer journey and provide feedback on when customers fall out of the funnel or seem to disengage with services. You can use that information to enhance customer experiences with personalized interactions at appropriate touchpoints. 

8. Dynamic Audience Targeting and Segmentation

By using generative AI in your marketing research, you can find patterns and trends that human analysts might overlook. This is because AI can help you understand the bigger picture thanks to the vast amount of data it can analyze while also applying those big-picture thoughts to detailed applications, such as targeting and audience segmentation. 

This can help you with insights and marketing activities such as:

• Understanding what social media platforms your audience might be on and how to best engage with them there
• Timing of messages through emails, social platforms, and other channels to ensure optimal engagement
• Finding and reaching new audiences for your services or products

Vendasta’s AI helps you match solutions to pain points for marketing agencies. Our Snapshot Report provides intelligent insight into your prospect’s digital marketing performance so you can tailor your conversation around how your solution can solve their pain points.

9. Automation of Sales Team Functions

You can also integrate marketing and sales tools to automate other functions of sales processes. AI can capture important contact information from emails and chats, ensuring your CRM systems are comprehensive and up-to-date.

It can also ensure queries and sales emails are routed to the right workflow or remind sales teams to follow-up with prospects at times that data shows are optimal. Each small task you automate reduces manual workflow requirements for sales teams, freeing them up to nurture leads and close more deals. 

10. Transforming Marketing and Sales Operations

You may be starting an agency without experience or looking to grow a traditional agency in this new digital environment. Either way, including AI in your plans can help transform your marketing and sales operations. Consider tried-and-true leaders who have leveraged AI to optimize success in the modern age:

• Coca-Cola’s AI-powered content. The beverage company has been a clear marketing king for decades, always embracing the next thing that can help keep its brand on top. It uses AI-generated content for social media and other campaigns to ensure accurate, targeted content for a global audience.
• Sephora’s AI-chatbot. Sephora has long capitalized on its cosmetic and aesthetic expertise, including in-store makeover and recommendation tools. The brand went digital with the Sephora Virtual Artist chatbot, which provides beauty advice and recommendations.
• Amazon’s recommendation engine. If you spend any time on Amazon, you might notice how accurate its product recommendations are. How did Amazon know you needed a set of wooden salad tongs? The answer is all in its AI.

11. Elevating Industry Leadership

Whether you want to make money with AI art or generate leads with the help of effective technology tools, generative AI marketing solutions can help. When properly employed, these tools can help you gain a competitive edge and stand out from the competition in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.