With so many AI tools available and so many challenges around implementing them, marketers are struggling. Building an effective AI marketing strategy requires establishing an experimental culture, identifying your most important strategic goals, and ultimately testing and iterating to continuously improve. Data shows that Agile ways of working help immensely in this process, so it’s worth investing in Agile education and training as well.
When we recently polled 430 marketers around the world for our annual State of Agile Marketing report, we found that 93% of marketers were at least considering AI implementation. That’s not big news to most of us, as talk of how AI is transforming marketing (and business more widely) is everywhere.
More importantly, extremely successful marketers were 8x more likely to have fully implemented AI compared to their somewhat successful counterparts. The competitive advantage AI offers marketers is just huge.
But the other important AI takeaway we uncovered was just how few marketers had successfully integrated AI into their processes: just 17%. Clearly, there’s a huge gap between what marketers want to achieve with AI and what they can.
The biggest thing contributing to that gap? Ineffective or non-existent AI marketing strategies.
Based on our experience implementing AI in our marketing here at AgileSherpas and the data gathered from our annual report, here is a breakdown of how you can develop and implement an effective AI marketing strategy.
Challenges of Implementing an AI Marketing Strategy
With so many marketers failing to reach their AI implementation ambitions, it’s worth starting with a look at the challenges they face.
Knowing Where to Start
With an average of 6 new marketing AI tools released every single day (yes, you read that right) it’s no wonder marketers feel like they’re trying to drink from a firehose. The sheer number of tools available and the speed at which they are changing is totally overwhelming. So marketers end up paralyzed as they wonder where to even begin.
Tackling this challenge begins with accepting that your approach to AI isn’t going to be perfect. Instead, it will have to continuously evolve and adapt as you learn new things and tools themselves change. Beginning with a culture built around continuous improvement and experimentation. From there you can start small and gradually build up your capabilities as you go. The key is to start somewhere, even if that starting point is far from perfect.
Tackling Compliance Issues
We’re not going to pretend that concerns around AI and compliance aren’t well founded, they absolutely are. But how can you balance reasonable caution with your need to unlock the competitive advantage of AI implementation?
The first step is for marketing to view compliance or legal teams as stakeholders. Their input should be sought when building an AI marketing strategy. In that role, they can work with marketing to develop guidelines and rules for implementing AI while avoiding potential compliance issues.
Importantly, this does not mean compliance steps in and tells marketing what it can and can’t do. Having some back and forth helps ensure the rules you develop are workable for both sides. When marketers feel like their input was important to developing rules, they’re more likely to follow them.
Lastly, bear in mind that Agile both helps 91% of marketers meet regulatory requirements in addition to making it easier to build an AI marketing strategy.
Providing Enough Support
A common complaint we hear from marketers working on building an AI marketing strategy is that their leaders provide a mandate but not real support. When your boss simply says “get an AI marketing strategy up and running” marketers often feel frustrated because that’s a tough ask.
To increase your chances of success it’s important for leaders to actively support AI implementation. This is a difficult process, but knowing that leaders are ready to provide training and strategic insight goes a long way.
Steps to Develop an AI Marketing Strategy
1. Start with Culture
As we mentioned earlier, culture is an essential foundation for a successful AI marketing strategy. The reason has to do with change. Both the number of AI tools available and their capabilities (as well as possibly the regulations around their use) are all changing very quickly. An AI marketing strategy that’s ideally suited for one quarter may be totally out of date by the next.
To keep up with all of this, you need your AI marketing strategy to evolve and continuously improve with time. That means testing AI tools and iterating to find how they can best contribute to your strategic goals.
The importance of culture also comes through in our data. Marketers that had more autonomy, focused on a few high-value activities at a time, and were generally more Agile were dramatically more successful in implementing AI.
2. Set Clear Goals
Another common mistake marketers make when trying to implement AI is trying to improve everything. As a result, these efforts are unfocused and ultimately fail to really move the needle. Worse, this can contribute to marketers feeling overwhelmed and lost about how to even go about AI implementation.
Instead, you need to start at the strategic planning stage and identify which strategic goals you want to tackle with AI. Then you can focus your AI implementation on achieving those goals. Marketers will have a better idea of where to start, what to focus on, and will have good metrics to track their progress. AI implementation becomes easier and more effective as a result.
3. Test and Iterate
Unless AI innovation decides to stop (don’t hold your breath) marketers won’t be able to stop evolving and iterating their AI marketing strategies. Teams need to strike a balance between stability and experimentation, consistently testing new tools and applications without making their processes feel chaotic.
This becomes easier when you break work up into sprints lasting a few weeks. Each sprint is an opportunity to run an AI experiment or two. Then, you can take your learnings and feed them into your next experiments. Rinse and repeat. Chances are you won’t get it right the first time, but that’s okay because everyone has that experimental culture and understands that this is a continuous process.
This gives you a structured way to really implement an AI marketing strategy: gradually testing ideas until you really zero in on how AI can work for your organization.
4. Feed Learnings Back Into Strategic Planning
All that experimentation on the team level is great, but don’t forget to feed those insights back up into the strategic planning process. You might learn that AI is exceptionally good at one particular element of your marketing and decide to invest more heavily into it. Or you might conclude that more AI marketing training is needed to really get your strategy off the ground.
The Vital Role of Agile Methodologies in AI Adoption
As we’ve noted throughout this article, our latest State of Agile Marketing Survey found a robust link between marketing agility and AI implementation. Fully Agile teams were more than 3x as likely to fully implement AI compared to their somewhat Agile counterparts. Two thirds then reported that AI significantly enhanced their agility.
In other words, the relationship between AI and Agile is a deeply symbiotic one. The Agile culture of experimentation, continuous improvement, autonomy for achieving goals, etc. are all ideally suited for executing a modern AI marketing strategy.
For that reason, organizations interested in implementing AI in their marketing should seriously consider investing in Agile training and education. If you’re curious about what types of training and education get you the most value, we have answers! We surveyed marketers with that very question and found strong preferences for certification courses and self-paced video learning.
AI Marketing Strategy FAQs
How is AI being used for marketing?
Today, AI is used for nearly all aspects of marketing from managing campaigns, creating visuals and copy for ads, analyzing data, making strategic analyses, and streamlining manual processes. Importantly, new AI marketing tools are being released daily so the range of applications is always increasing.
How can you create a marketing plan with AI?
While you can simply ask a Large Language Model like ChatGPT to create a marketing plan for you, there are some tricks you should use. Ask the model to act as a marketing expert, feed it plenty of context, and be sure to iterate. Through practice, you can get better results and understand how best to use AI to aid in planning.
How can you promote a business with AI?
AI can help you develop a strategy, write copy, understand your customers, and more. Because the ways AI can help promote a business are so vast, the trick is to identify your goals and test AI tools to see how they can help you achieve them. Iteration is essential to build on success and figure out what works.
Take Your First Step Towards an AI Marketing Strategy
We specialize in training marketers and their teams in implementing the kind of Agile marketing that’s proven to be effective at implementing AI. Whether you’re new to Agile marketing and want to understand how it can aid your AI marketing strategy or are already Agile and want to take that leap, we can help. Just drop us a message.
Oh, and before you leave, why don't you pause for a second an get your copy of the 8th Annual State of Agile Marketing Report?
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