3 ways AI-powered creative can help marketers save money (no ChatGPT)
With so much AI talk over the past year, it seems impossible to separate the hype from real business value, one that translates to good ol’ dollar signs. While it’s awesome creating images with Midjourney, and as the jury is still out on the benefits and risks of using ChatGPT to flood Google’s algorithm with articles, it turns out there are other ways we marketers can use this emerging AI-powered creative technology to be more efficient.
Content repurposing
As mentioned before, while creating content is getting easier, the demand for more and more of it still keeps its overall costs high. Content repurposing has been around since the creation of omni-channel marketing, and it has become a best practice to share each piece of content on Youtube, social media, your company blog, and more – with the required alterations and adaptations.
The thing is, on a large scale, these adaptations can add up quickly. Which is exactly why AI-powered content repurposing tools were created. These tools can crop your video to fit Instagram, with face-tracking to make sure the speaker is always in-frame; they edit highlights from an hour-long talk into 30-sec tidbits; and even write different accompanying texts to fit Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.
With AI-powered content repurposing, your team can focus on creating great content, and your audience can enjoy it wherever they are, at a fraction of the cost.
Creative Asset Management
Creating images and videos is easier today than ever before. Whether you’re taking pics with your phone or using a generative model, you can create decent pics in no-time. However, creating outstanding images still takes time. And as demand for visuals increases, your team is left with thousands of media files scattered around your Dropbox or Google Drive folders.
For teams over 4-5 people, things can easily get out of hand, as images start to get lost, and you need to spend time looking for them, or in some cases, recreate them altogether.
In larger organizations, there’s often a disconnect between departments, where the social media team might not even be aware of the imagery that the PR team has, or that used for newsletters.
If that sounds all too familiar, it might be time to consider using a AI-powered creative asset management platform. With AI capabilities such as face recognition, auto-tagging, and smart filtering by image color or emotion, your designers and marketers can save hours a week looking for the right image for their designs, create better work, and improve team communication.
Working on video? Many platforms also help you search within video, so that you can easily find that one clip of an influencer talking about a specific feature in your product, out of the gazillion shots you made that day.
By creating your internal media library while your competition still struggles to find their visuals in a cluttered drive, you’re gaining a competitive advantage that allows you to do better work quicker, which will reflect kindly on your marketing budget
Creative analysis and ideation
A/B testing is a double edge sword – on one hand, it’s a great way to optimize your ads and increase conversions over time. On the other hand – every experiment can cost thousands of dollars, and there are so many different parameters to optimize – colors, images, texts – that you have to go with your guts on most decisions.
While marketers’ intuition and expertise are important, they’re far from flawless. After all, that is why we do A/B tests in the first place. But what if I told you there was a way to know the results of an A/B test ahead of time? That means the cost of that experiment can now be used to generate more business, or to conduct other, more advanced tests.
That’s exactly what creative ideation platforms like Alison.ai are doing. Using the power of AI, together with lots and lots of data, they can predict with high accuracy which creative elements will be the best for your ad, or which color on that “sign up” button will yield the best results for your specific audience.
For many marketing teams, the ad spend is the first item on their budget, and changing a fraction of a percent in conversion can really move the needle on the company’s revenue. If you’re on one of those teams, starting with AI-powered creative ideation is definitely something you should add to your innovation to-do list.
Conclusion
As some of these technologies are just making their way into mainstream marketing workflows, you might be asking yourself whether it’s the right time to jump on the AI wagon, or perhaps it’s better to wait until the fog clears up.
In many ways, marketing is a zero-sum game. It’s a highly competitive market, and there are always other teams competing for your clients’ attention. If they’re saving thousands by reusing imagery; or if their ad spend yields 10% better results – you’re fighting with one hand tied behind your back, solely relying on your creativity to get you first to your client’s heart and wallet.
And as the tech moves at the speed of light, those who start building their workflows just six months early, might get a long-term advantage even when the rest of the pack starts catching up.
About the author
Guy Barner is the CEO of Tagbox.io, a startup building “the Google Photos for businesses”, helping teams organize their creative assets. Before starting Tagbox.io, Guy spent 10 years as a product manager and product blogger, with a passion for the latest tools and methodologies that help teams build products that are both delightful and deeply useful.
