2024 AI Automation for Marketing and PR Agencies
If you own a marketing or PR Agency, you are looking to help clients achieve their marketing objectives to grow their businesses. Practically, these services typically include:
- Strategy Development: creating comprehensive strategies to achieve them, including target audience analysis, competitive analysis, and positioning.
- Campaign Execution: Running the campaigns across channels: a. paid ads on google and meta b. organic presence on social media, c. organic outreach on search engines, d. lead gen activities like email marketing.
- Creative Services: Designing interesting content - with virality potential - for social media, websites etc.
- Public Relations (PR) / Reputation Management: Managing media relations, press releases, influencer partnerships, and crisis communication if needed.
The AI Automation Flavors
We hear queries from clients daily about how we can add AI automation to emulate their business processes. Our advice as a combination of techniques which falls in one of these "flavors". To understand our advice, kindly go through the following definitions first:
1. Automation: just making processes automatic (reducing manual effort, usually not fully). For example, a vacuum cleaner. It automatically sucks dust from your carpet, but needs to be "managed" intelligently - a human would need to move it across the room.
2. AI: Intelligence / decision making. Forget the part about the doing. AI is just about navigating and making decisions. For example, an AI can navigate disruptions intelligently - for example an AI robot can carry itself across a room without knocking over stuff.
3. AI Automation: Making an intelligent self-managing "automaton" - a thing that is capable of working by itself and making decisions about how to navigate disruptions intelligently. Imagine a vacuum cleaner driven by an AI robot! You just sit back and watch them go!
As an AI Agency, we run into a lot of other agency owners - and a lot of those are focused on digital marketing - SMM, SEO, or PR. These are the top questions they ask us:
- What repetitive tasks can AI automate in my marketing workflow?
This is usually the #1 question we get, when we tell them we are an AI Automation Agency. How can we make their lives a little easier and reduce the daily firefighting that takes place at every digital agency? The answer is to use Automation (Flavor 1) as much as possible. There are lots of ways you can automate an SMMA: you can use scheduling of social media posts (meta provides those intrinsically - no tools required!), email marketing - (tools like Mailchimp, Apollo, SmartLead.ai), reporting. Please understand that you can easily automate (Flavor 1) the process via tools, but AI (Flavor 2 and 3) is not required here. All you need are simple automations which Zapier, or lots of tools provide by themselves. Can you automate sales and marketing? Again, yes, and you don't need AI for that - tools like SmartLead can work for you. Or perhaps you can use a chatbot like AI Frontdesk to serve your inbound traffic and service their queries to convert them. What these simple automations can do it to make your life easier and allow you to actually devote time to creativity. But can you fully automate digital marketing? As of writing in 2024, the answer is no. To grab attention on behalf of your clients, you need to have creativity, something different, something unique. As of 2024, AI has not reached the stage where it can do that.
- Can AI help me create high-quality marketing content?
Today everybody uses ChatGPT for work, and has learnt to be on the lookout for the next tool. Using ChatGPT / openAI's API the market is filled with tools which can help you make automated videos / other content, but on a deeper look you will find that most AI-generated content is shallow. AI-powered copywriting tools are not evolved yet enough to provide human quality content. Yes, for generic topics maybe, but as soon as you hit a niche, you see that AI's content is superfluous, and sometimes dangerously wrong. So the learning here is to Use ChatGPT for ideation ONLY, not content creation.
- How to use AI for marketing campaign optimization?
I have heard this question atleast 3 times from different people, but we at AAI have not worked on A/B testing or real-time performance analysis. But all I can say is that in this data-intensive field, you need to be able to have a system where you can automate your data entry - from meta or google - onto an excel sheet or an internal database first. Once you have that automation, analysis should be easy - even uploading the sheet in ChatGPT Plus (paid version) should be able to yield the analysis easily!
- How much does AI marketing automation cost, and is it a good investment for my agency?
This question deserves a long answer since it will shed light on helping you see something you wouldn't be able to unsee, so please hear/read carefully. I`ll give you a brief background here first. How does one calculate the ROI or scalability of a perpetual machine? We at AAI specialize in creating reliable AI automations for business which work like employees. We have created a tool like AI Frontdesk, which emulates all the business processes a receptionist can do. We'll let you be the judge of ROI yourself - here is simple economics - Our tool costs a fixed $8500 (plus commission) for a lifetime subscription to the software - the tool works 24x7x365, works perfectly, never breaking off the script, never takes a break, never asks for a raise, and never quits. What $ amount would that efficiency be worth, compared to a human receptionist taking say $40,000 every year with all the human limitations?
So now I`ll come to your question - you asked "How much does AI marketing automation cost, and is it a good investment for my agency". If you read the above comparison, today as of 2024 when AI has not yet taken over even 1% of business processes known to man, you have no idea what investment even means! Working with people is an expense, not an investment. Working with such an AI is actually an investment - one cash outlay to get a lifelong income of work being done correctly every time. Five years down the line of AI automation, and you will be shocked at how much cheaper and more efficient everyone in the world became when they use AI Automation (Flavor 3) to maximize their productivity, even including the receptionist you fired - who has now btw reskilled and sells AI-based frontdesk management services.
- How can I integrate AI tools seamlessly into my existing marketing workflow?
It's actually quite easy if you have good quality tools. Most cloud-based tools by themselves are adapting to AI, but if you have hosted tools, even then you can use an AI Automation Agency like us to help you by integrating APIs like that by OpenAI.
However, beware! Most AI Automation companies do not know simple issues regarding how to maintain transparency / client's confidential data privacy when working with ChatGPT or other AI APIs etc. Everybody can call the API and integrate an API, but we hope you will choose an AI Automation Agency which knows how to use the API properly without compromising your client's data! For any questions, contact us!
