Marketing used to be a matter of throwing stuff against the wall and finding out what stuck. Sure, there was data, but it came in slowly, well after the marketing content was already knocking around in the world.

AI and social media change that dynamic considerably. Now, marketing messages can be made and uploaded in real time, with little to no overhead cost. When they do land, marketing professionals can see the impact immediately.

In this article, we look at how and why marketing managers should make AI an integral part of their next marketing campaign.

What is AI?

It’s not Tony Stark’s Jarvis. It’s not even exactly your Alexa device, although that comes quite a bit closer. Alexa is in the AI family but is hindered by the largest and most common obstacle inherent to this sector of the tech industry: self-learning.

Often called “self-supervised learning” this barrier is one that every AI program must eventually cross to become fully realized.

AI in marketing combines with automation to generate granular data reporting. It won’t talk to you, the way Alexa does. It will provide forecasts, recognize patterns based on your usage, and make future recommendations accordingly.

AI, coupled with automation can enhance marketing services but they are still a long way from replacing the human touch.

Content Scheduling

In social media marketing, timing is everything. Yes, the post that you throw up online will technically remain there basically forever. However, it’s the classic tree in the forest dilemma. If it arrives and no one is there to click on it, does it even exist at all?

The ideal time to post will depend on your demographic. For example, if you are selling to children, your posts might gain the most traction during the lunch hour — when they get to spend a little bit of cafeteria time on their phones.

If you are catering to professionals, you’ll probably want to wait until around seven o clock. At this point, they are home from work and easing into their home lives.

But if seven o clock sounds unpleasantly like a time you’d rather be doing something different than work, you’re in luck. AI allows for content scheduling. Using this framework, you can write an entire week’s worth of posts and have them automatically uploaded at the time the data indicates you should.

This means your audience is always seeing posts at the right time, even though you are logging normal business hours. Automated posting also helps to reduce the risk of missing your moment. Life happens, and Twitter waits for no one. By scheduling your posts out, you won’t have to worry that you’ll miss your ideal window for posting ad copy online.

You also want to be able to publish certain types of content at the right time. It’s not just that your audience has an ideal time for looking at social media, but also that they are most likely to respond well to certain types of content at different times of the day.

For example, if you are creating social media content for a restaurant, you may want to rethink that seven o clock posting time. Sending posts of food out into the world right after your audience has eaten might not land as hard as they will at, say, ten thirty in the morning when people are feeling hungry and getting ready to eat.

Republishing AI and automation gives you insights into which types of posts are doing well and when. Using this data, you can help increase the impact of every post you make.

Social media copywriting produces a truly enormous amount of data. During your campaign, you want to be able to track it all in an easy-to-understand framework. AI and automation can help to organize and distill your reporting into a user-friendly dashboard that shows you only information that is relevant to your goals.

Really, data is at the heart of what any marketer is doing. It’s how you found out that your audience is online the most at seven, but that they are more interested in food at ten. It’s also the way you learn how long they linger on posts. Do they keep scrolling, or click on your profile to find more? Do they like/share/repost/or keep it to themselves?

There are so many different ways your audience will interact with your posts. Understanding them all makes it much easier to work toward specific goals.

Optimize Content

AI and automation can also help you optimize your content by identifying words/phrases and other factors that were common to your most successful posts. Versions of this service can even provide a comparative analysis, measuring your posts against those of the competition to distinguish what they are doing better than you.

Copywriters of course know that words matter, but they have historically had to pull them into existence through imagination and intuition. And hey — these are still skills you want to have in the bag. But AI sharpens and hones them, making it easier to feel out what’s working and what isn’t.

What AI Doesn’t Do (Well)

AI can be used to generate social media posts. You’ve probably seen them before, even if you didn’t quite notice it. They usually feel like they were written by someone on the edge of a major break from reality, but then enough normal social media posts read that way for the bot-generated ones to pass.

These posts have their own agenda, of course. To drive up engagement, spread information, or —

It doesn’t matter. This is not how you want to use AI. Social media marketing messages need to be crafted deliberately with your target audience in mind. What AI is really doing for you here is freeing up more time for marketers to focus on their message and helping to manage the enormous amount of data that goes into a modern marketing message.

There’s a buzz here and there about AI-generated copy getting smarter and better. Even the very best of what exists right now isn’t very good and certainly not at all worth the time it saves. Use AI as a tool, not a crutch, and you’ll find that your next social media marketing campaign is more effective than you could have imagined.

About the Author

Ryan Ayers is a researcher and consultant within multiple industries including information technology, blockchain, and business development. Always up for a challenge, Ayers enjoys working with startups as well as Fortune 500 companies. When not at work, Ayers loves reading science fiction novels and watching the LA Clippers.