Generative AI for Marketing – 3 Strategies to balance opportunity and risk

Generative AI is rapidly changing workflows with unprecedented productivity hacks. But for marketing leaders, it’s a slippery slope and you need to proceed with caution. While AI can deliver significant value, it can also derail the uniqueness of your content and raise compliance concerns.

How can you effectively and responsibly balance the opportunities and risks?

Particularly for businesses in highly regulated industries like financial services and fintech, it’s critical to plan carefully as you consider using Generative AI for marketing. Based on 20 years of helping clients with communications and AI analytics, we’ve targeted some key strategies that can help you move ahead in this new era of GenAI.

Using Generative AI for marketing – 3 strategies to reduce risk

It’s critical to understand when GenAI adds value and when it adds risk – and find the balance in between.

1 – Leverage AI for productivity gains, up to a point

Your approach to using AI should not be all or nothing. Yes, it can automate creation of text-based content, videos, podcasts and more, and reduce the time and resources you need to do it at scale. But AI should augment your marketing team, not replace them. It should enhance and expedite workflows, but not do everything for you. Why? There are multiple factors to consider.

As marketers, you’re responsible for all content distributed under your brand. You need to ensure everything adheres to legal and compliance requirements, and avoids introducing risk such as plagiarism, copyright infringement, and other violations.

Customer trust is another consideration. Your content still needs to sound like your brand voice, accurately reflect your value proposition, and infuse nuances relevant to your target audiences. That’s why the human touch is still essential. AI may speed up processes for you, but you don’t want to lose what makes your brand distinctive. If you generate AI content, treat it like an outline or storyboard, then manually tailor it to layer in the uniqueness that helps you differentiate from competitors.

2 – Focus on strategic uses for Generative AI

There are many creative ways to use generative AI for marketing. It’s not about creating content for you, but giving you a strategic tool to simplify tasks that previously made it harder to create your own content.

Particularly for engaging B2B audiences, with effective prompt engineering, AI can aggregate valuable research about the challenges, needs and perspectives of your target buyers. Or help you identify industry-specific use case scenarios for your solutions.

You can then use those insights to craft your own richer content. If you need more inspiration, AI can generate topic ideas and outlines, and uncover related sources you might reference as you flesh out details.

GenAI can also provide some editorial guidance, such as generating alternative headlines and identifying gaps or inconsistencies. Or, it might help you over some stylistic hurdles to shift the language or tone to be more conversational, engaging, or impactful, to better resonate with your target audience.

Another productivity boost is to leverage GenAI after you’ve polished your own net-new content. With the right prompts, AI can help you tailor alternate versions for different customer segments, industry verticals, or niche audiences.

As a reminder, any time you work with AI-generated content, you should still carefully review and refine it with your own enhancements and compliant language before distribution. It’s a crucial way to mitigate risk and help your business maintain some differentiation.  

3 – Tap into partner expertise in GenAI

It’s important to understand that the output of generative AI is only as good as your prompts. As early adopters and AI experts, even our team is constantly finding new ways to advance our prompt engineering to get better results.

Collaborating with an agency partner for marketing strategy and content creation – that also has AI expertise – can give your business a distinct advantage. As busy marketers, you don’t need to allocate resources to learning an array of tools and techniques. The right partner can help you save time and gain deeper insight for everything from product positioning and campaign targeting, to creating content for all channels, industry verticals, and segment or niche marketing.

A marketing partner with AI expertise may also be able to provide strategic advisory for how you can advance your own internal use of GenAI. For instance, establishing policies and governance for responsible AI usage, and audit trail processes to distinguish AI-generated content from your own unique materials.