AI is everywhere right now. The headlines are filled with stories about new applications revolutionising our personal and professional lives, and investors are seeing significant returns from the fast-growing sector.
Everybody is telling you that you need to implement AI in your business or you’ll fall behind your competitors.
This might be true to some extent, but subscribing to every AI tool under the sun won’t automatically increase your productivity. In fact, if you invest in AI without careful consideration, you could spend money on applications that don’t deliver real value.
Marketing is one area where AI certainly has its uses, but the human touch is equally important.
That’s why it’s important to be selective about how and when you use AI in your marketing. Here are five simple questions to ask yourself before implementing a new tool.
1. Does this solve a real problem?
Before using any AI application, think about whether it solves a real problem in your business. There are so many companies incorporating AI into existing products or creating new tools that they claim are essential for businesses.
For instance, companies like Adobe and Microsoft offer a whole suite of AI-driven applications. Their marketing often shows business owners jumping between tasks in a whirlwind of productivity, giving the impression that a monthly subscription will make life easy.
The reality is that you’ll likely be paying for a lot of features you never use.
That’s why it’s useful to ask whether an AI tool solves a specific problem or helps with time-consuming tasks in your business.
For instance, you might invest in applications to:
- Build content calendars
- Automate compliance admin tasks
- Make complex information more accessible for clients.
Unless you can point to a specific sticking point in the business that is made easier by using a certain AI application, you may want to rethink your decision.
2. Can AI do this better than me?
AI can do a lot, but it’s not a magic wand. There are certain things that it can’t do particularly well. It’s important to be aware of this when choosing how and when you use it, so you don’t sacrifice quality.
This is something we understand well in the Yardstick content team.
We could ask ChatGPT to write content for our client newsletters, and it would produce a passable article. But the content would be generic and not necessarily tailored to each client. It would likely look very similar to the thousands of other AI-written articles on the internet.
So, even though it might be faster to get AI to write content for us, we don’t because the results simply aren’t as good.
On the other hand, we would use an AI notetaker during a client meeting because it can take more detailed notes than we can and produce a recap, helping us remain clear about the client’s content needs. Having AI handle the admin for us also means we can be more present and listen carefully to clients.
By asking yourself whether AI can do something better than you, you can identify areas where the technology improves your marketing and avoid situations in which it produces worse results.
3. Can AI do this faster than me?
In some cases, AI’s results might not be any better or worse, but they could be produced much faster.
Gathering research when writing content is a prime example of this. While we could search manually on Google and pick through sources, it’s often faster to enter a well-written prompt into ChatGPT and pull together the research in seconds.
We would likely end up with very similar sources, but the amount of time spent on research could be lower.
Equally, tools like NotebookLM can be incredibly useful for quickly searching through lengthy reports and pulling out statistics to use in articles.
Certain admin tasks, such as creating content schedules, can also be completed much faster with AI tools.
Finding areas where AI can do things faster without affecting the results means you can dedicate more time to important human-led tasks that AI cannot perform.
4. Are the results reliable?
This is a crucial question because although AI can be great, it’s not always reliable.
People often talk about AI “hallucinating” – making up false information. This means you need to review any information it gives you to ensure that it’s correct.
If this is a relatively infrequent occurrence and it only takes you a few seconds to verify the results, AI could still save you time and increase productivity. On the other hand, if the results are consistently wrong, AI might be a hindrance.
For instance, using AI to write a complex market update might not be efficient if it’s riddled with errors and out-of-date information, and you spend a long time correcting the mistakes.
Remember, your priority should always be quality and consistency, and if AI can’t deliver reliable results in a given situation, don’t use it.
5. Is it cost-effective?
When you combine all the other considerations on this list, you can answer the final and perhaps most important question: Is this cost-effective?
An AI tool may be worth paying for, provided it:
- Delivers a solution to a real problem in your business
- Allows you to do something faster or better than you could do otherwise
- Produces reliable results that don’t require extensive corrections.
However, if it doesn’t meet these criteria, you may want to think twice about relying on AI.
Get in touch
If you need support with your marketing from humans who know how to use AI to drive results (and when not to use it), email hi@theyardstickagency.co.uk or call 0115 896 5300 now to learn more about our services.
