Integrating AI into Your Marketing the Smarter Way

Digital marketing is complex and inevitably will only become more so as new technologies and platforms emerge. Today, one of the key questions facing marketers is how they can best harness AI to support digital marketing. To answer this question and others so that businesses can prepare themselves for the future of marketing, over June-July 2024 we ran a survey with our members and produced a report on The Future of Digital Marketing in collaboration with our partners, Technology for Marketing and eCommerce Expo - to better understand the current state of digital marketing and future adoption plans for businesses into 2025.

In this article, I’ll take you through 5 of the key trends that we identified in the survey which need careful consideration for the future since many of the businesses surveyed weren’t following these approaches. You can read more recommendations and download the report from the Smart Insights blog in my article: 10 Actionable Digital Marketing Trends for 2025.

Attend Dr. Dave Chaffey’s Presentation This September

Dr. Dave Chaffey will also be presenting the results from this report and his recommendations at the event on 18-19 September 2024 at ExCeL London. Register now to Attend Dave’s session.

Let’s dig into the trends for a successful future of marketing.

1. Create a Dedicated Digital Strategy

This is a long-standing trend featuring in our previous surveys. In 2024, we still see that shockingly, nearly half (42%) of businesses don’t have a defined digital marketing strategy, but they are doing digital marketing...

It’s good to see that more than half of businesses do have a strategic approach. The ultimate aim should be to use an integrated strategy, but it can be useful initially to have a dedicated digital strategy in larger organisations, or to plan for and make the case for investment in digital marketing before it becomes integrated. Those businesses that don’t have a defined strategy can consider techniques to more rigorously define how they plan, manage, and optimise their digital marketing, for example through digital marketing playbooks or standard operating procedures (SOPs) for digital marketing.

2. Identify Priorities to Increase Your Digital Maturity

The previous chart is a symptom of a bigger malaise, which is a surprising lack of digital marketing maturity in many businesses. All this activity and investment is aimed at improving digital marketing capabilities, so in the research we asked where people were now with using digital marketing and where they would be in the future.

Results for businesses in our survey show that, across all key digital marketing activities, around half of businesses are rated at lower levels of 1 to 2 (average 2.4) out of a maximum of 5 showing clear room for improvement. For context, for small and medium businesses with limited resources, I recommend that level 3 is a suitable aspiration to compete. For businesses who have a higher digital contribution where online leads and sales are vital to their success, I recommend that levels 4 and 5 are necessary if the case for investment is made.

Next, to gauge how businesses are looking to improve their capabilities in the future, we asked respondents to repeat the analysis for 2025. The stark contrast between the two charts suggests that many of the businesses at levels 1 and 2 are conscious that they need to improve their capabilities and are planning to invest to achieve a higher-level in 2025.

3. Adopt Smarter Marketing Fueled by Gen AI

In the research we found that resourcing is the biggest limitation in increasing digital maturity, so this is a driver of a trend to using Generative AI which we can simplify to ‘doing more with less’. This is forced upon many by the competitive environment which means that less budget and people resources are available for marketing.

In the survey, we asked to see whether Generative AI was living up to the hype. I’m not sure whether it’s surprising or not, given that around half of the businesses we surveyed weren’t using GenAI at all. Are they to be congratulated for realising that the quality of their marcomms were fall or chastised for being behind the curve? I veer more towards the latter unless they have tried it, but decided that it’s not ready for them yet.

The research suggests to me that those who are using Gen AI should still be chastised for how they are using it, either without training or an AI governance policy. Don’t they remember the GIGO acronym from tech pre-history?! We certainly believe controls are essential to maintain quality as we show in our AI for marketing governance policy template and article.

In our report, we go beyond Gen AI to review the popularity of the wide range of applications of AI in marketing, since AI can support the ‘AI-assisted marketer’ in so many ways beyond Generative AI for copywriting.

4. Consider Your Response to Zero Click Marketing

If you have heard of this concept, it’s likely been via Rand Fishkin, ex of Moz and now of Sparktoro. Zero Clicks originally referred to the falling proportion of people clicking through from Google. The latest figures via SparkToro show us that for the keywords tracked, in 2024, fewer than 60% of searches lead to a click on Google.

More recently, the Zero click concept has been extended to other platforms such as social networks whose goal has always been to keep people on the platform. Rand has gone as far as to say:

"The Way We’ve Done Digital Marketing for 20 Years is Ending."

He is urging people to invest more in awareness-building, brand-building and PR, and using content marketing as the main goal of content marketing (rather than SEO). It suits him to say this since SparkToro is an insights tool that can support you in these activities. I disagree that digital marketing is changing fundamentally, since using exceptional branded content marketing to support PR and SEO has always been an effective tactic. But, certainly this is a useful trend to consider.

Amanda Natividad has taken this one step further by exploring the concept of Zero Click Marketing as an activity. I think this is taking it too far, but it’s useful to prompt people on where they should focus their activities to get success.

5. Review Your Always-on Digital Marketing Optimisation

To assess the extent to which insight is used to test, learn, and improve the effectiveness of digital media, experiences, content and messaging, we asked marketers to categorise their approach to testing for each. There is a similar level of testing across all four of these, but few have a continuous, structured program which is line with what we saw about maturity earlier.

Summary: So Which Digital Channels Will Matter in the Future?

You can see from my review that many of the newer trends are around AI. Finally, let’s go back to the top-level and think about marketing channels. Have the disruptive forces of AI and Zero Click Marketing really changed the channels we know and love?

Yes, it may be getting tougher to get traction in organic channels in the future world of Zero-click marketing, but sorting the top-rated channels by those with Highest ROI shows that the top 4 are all organic. So many of our tried and tested content-based marketing techniques are still being made to work by many, who completed our survey.