How AI is a tool in the marketing toolbox
Jan. 10, 2024
This paid piece is sponsored by Click Rain Inc.
Artificial intelligence was the business buzzword of 2023. Proponents have hailed AI as the most impactful invention since the World Wide Web, while detractors sow fears about job loss and worse. What does the emergence of AI mean for your business today?
Sioux Falls-based agencies Click Rain and Lemonly are excited to share their approach to integrating artificial intelligence into their marketing toolbox.
A people-centered approach to AI
Click Rain and Lemonly are people-centered agencies, and that philosophy extends from our team to our clients to their customers. The audience for all our work is people, and our effectiveness as agencies is entirely reliant on our understanding of the people in this chain.
Human strategy and creativity are the keys to truly understanding these people and creating work that inspires, persuades and serves them.
That said, the humans on our teams have long used tools to make our jobs more effective and efficient. Marketing and design are industries that continually adopt, shape and are shaped by new technologies. Adobe Illustrator, integrated development environments, email automation, responsive search ads — these are all examples of tools that have made marketers and creatives faster, more efficient and just plain better at their jobs. Tools help us advance our craft by reducing the effort for mundane or time-intensive tasks, so we can focus on new and more advanced skills to best serve our clients.
ChatGPT, Bard, Copilot and Claude are new generative AI tools that can create detailed, customized, convincing-looking text outputs about nearly any topic from a simple prompt. Midjourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion can generate detailed and stylized images of nearly anything based on a small text input. The possibilities offered by these systems and the numerous platforms built off of their foundation are exploding.
These tools are revolutionary, but they’re still just new tools for the toolbox. While they may — and likely will — replace some of our other tools, they won’t replace the craftsmen wielding them. Along with being people-centered, Click Rain and Lemonly are future-focused. Our clients and partners know they can count on us to deliver an excellent experience and leading-edge solutions to their problems. We’ve been innovators in our space for over a decade, and we’re excited for the opportunity to keep innovating with this new tool set.
Our philosophy on AI
As a people-centered, future-focused marketing organization, our philosophy on AI is this: If a part of our job can be enhanced by AI, we believe it should be. We should use these new AI-powered tools to enrich our work and bring more value and better returns for our clients. It’s our responsibility to understand the capabilities and limitations of these tools and use them to be exponentially better partners for our clients than other designers, developers and marketers who don’t.
We don’t want artificial intelligence to replace human strategy and creativity, and we don’t think it will. But we do want AI to make our teams better at strategy, better at creativity and better at providing clarity to the humans on the other side of our work.
If we can harness these tools to be more efficient and provide more value to our clients, it’s our obligation to do so. This doesn’t replace the humans on our team, it just turns them into superhumans using the power of technology.
The data backs us up on this approach — a recent study by Harvard Business School found that skilled workers were more efficient and produced higher quality results by augmenting their own skills and knowledge with AI tools.
For each one of a set of 18 realistic consulting tasks within the frontier of AI capabilities, consultants using AI were significantly more productive — they completed 12.2 percent more tasks on average and completed task 25.1 percent more quickly — and they produced significantly higher quality results — more than 40 percent higher quality compared to a control group.
Click Rain and Lemonly are already known for being the best at what we do; as leaders in our space, we believe that by understanding and taking advantage of AI, our lead just got wider.
Adding AI to your toolbox
Do you want to add artificial intelligence to your marketing and creative toolbox but aren’t sure where to start? There are two ways to harness the power of AI for your business.
First, you can learn from the experts. Click Rain’s Bailey Wood recently spoke about AI-powered market research at the AI Edge Summit, and the upcoming Trendigital Summit will have an extensive focus on AI for marketers too. If you’re looking for more guided instruction and consulting on how to add efficiencies into your marketing through AI tools, reach out to Click Rain and Lemonly for our custom solutions and advice.
The second option is to leave it to the experts: partner with the agency that knows the ins and outs of AI so you don’t have to. Our mantra is “Better Every Day,” and part of that continuous improvement involves getting more efficient with our tool set, AI included. So when you partner with the superhumans at Click Rain and Lemonly, you’re harnessing the power of artificial intelligence for your company’s marketing and communications.
The world of AI is only going to keep moving faster and faster, and now is the perfect time to join in. By adding AI as a tool to your toolbox — either by learning and adapting or by partnering with the experts — you’ll ensure that this powerful tool is being used to your business’ advantage.
