Marketing | Best Practices | Artificial Intelligence
With all the hype about large language model AI services like ChatGPT, I’ve spoken with many marketers and executives who are diving into using the tools but not thinking through how they will help achieve company goals.
Sure, play around and learn!
However, simply creating and publishing more and more AI generated content isn’t likely to benefit your company.
Instead, consider what your organizational goals are. If AI helps make what you are already doing better, great! But don’t just add it to the list.
Get marketing in sync
Most marketers have a collective difficulty getting our departmental goals in sync with the rest of the company. And our management teams go along with this dysfunction.
Think about the goals that most marketers have. They usually take the form of an epic to-do list: “Let's see; we should do a few trade shows, buy Google AdWords ads, maybe create a new logo, get press clips, produce some T-shirts, increase website traffic, and, oh yeah, generate some leads for the salespeople.”
Now many are adding: “Create more blog posts and web pages using AI”.
This lack of clear goals reminds me of seven-year-olds playing soccer. If you've ever seen little children on the soccer field, you know that they operate as one huge organism packed together, chasing the ball around the field. On the sidelines are helpful coaches yelling, “Pass!” or “Go to the goal!” Yet as the coaches and parents know, this effort is futile: No matter what the coach says or how many times the kids practice, they still focus on the wrong thing—the ball—instead of the goal.
That's exactly what many marketers are doing today. We’ve added AI to our lists while losing sight of the goal.
But do you know what's even worse? Our coaches (the management teams at our companies) encourage us to focus on balls (like more ChatGPT created blog posts) instead of real organizational goals such as revenue.
What we need to do instead is align marketing objectives with those of the organization. For most corporations, the most important goal is profitable revenue growth. In newer companies and those built around emerging technologies, this usually means generating new customers, but in mature businesses, the management team may need to be more focused on keeping the customers that they already have.
Nonprofits have the goal of raising money; politicians, to get out the vote (for them); rock bands, to get people to buy concert tickets; and universities, to get student applications and alumni donations.
Once you understand your goals, AI might help. Experiment to find out. But until then, don’t just add AI to your to-do list.
Headline: Created by ChatGPT-4 using text of my original blog post.
Image: Via Dall-E 2 with the prompt “Create an image that looks like an impressionist painting of a person creating a list of things to do.”
