How to Make a Marketing Plan with AI

So much goes into marketing a business—particularly a new one—to create awareness for new customers, and ensure loyal ones return. Real-time data and creativity help a business or entrepreneur remain nimble and ahead of the competitive marketing curve. It all begins with a plan. 

A marketing plan gives you guardrails and steps to achieve an overall goal, such as driving traffic to a new product page or generating more engagement on social media. A fantastic partner for marketers is artificial intelligence (AI). 

With the right goals and objectives, AI solutions can elevate a marketing plan’s ideation and execution. Read on to understand benefits of using AI in your plans, steps to making your AI marketing plan, and tips and best practices.

How an AI marketing plan works

An AI marketing plan isn’t a whole lot different than a regular marketing strategy. The key difference is that you use AI to help fill gaps in areas of, for example, market research, copy, or developing customer personas. The goal of using AI in your marketing strategy is to cut out manual labor or guesswork about what your customers want. 

Benefits of using AI for your marketing plan

The main benefits to adding AI to your marketing process are efficiency and support with data or brainstorming. The goal isn’t to replace your unique perspective, but help you get to your ideas faster.

Speed and efficiency

AI is fast at reading and processing information. For example, if you prompt an AI tool to generate a summary of what to include in every part of a marketing plan, it will “read” hundreds of plans, if not more, available across a number of sources to provide an answer to you.

Data-driven decision making

AI is constantly processing information, which means it can help summarize or present trends to you that can help you make better decisions. You can ask it to summarize customer feedback, help you forecast the success of your plans, and more, to help you guide your planning. 

Brainstorming and ideation

If you’re stuck on creating copy for a social media post, AI is a great partner in helping work through some writer’s block. If you’re promoting an apparel business, you can write a prompt in an AI tool like, “what are effective social media taglines for [insert apparel category]” to get a sense of what has already been created and where you can put your own spin on it. 

Learn more about how AI works

How to make a marketing plan with AI

Creating a marketing plan with AI is more about adding an AI tool to your planning, not just letting the tool generate a plan for you. Think of how you’d usually approach marketing a new product or service. You’ll still want to shape the different steps of a marketing campaign, where and how you’d like to publish, and how you want to measure the success of your plan. To add AI, you’ll simply slot in a tool where you need the most extra support. 

The following steps show how and when you can bring AI into your plan. It’s your choice—AI tools are flexible enough to be useful at nearly every step—but trust your gut about the marketing plan that’s right for you and your business.

1. Define goals and objectives

Start by understanding what you’re trying to achieve. If your marketing plan is focused on conversion, your research, implementation, and measurement will be different than if your goals are tied to awareness. 

You can absolutely use AI here to help ideate or brainstorm. For example, you can prompt an AI tool to provide you with a generic marketing brief for a brand awareness campaign, fill in information, and keep it as a working draft. This is perhaps one of the best examples of how AI can be a great partner for thinking through an idea and brainstorming rather than using what it generates in the final product. 

2. Select AI tools to use

There are an abundance of AI tools available in the market, and not all of them are going to be what you need for your marketing plan. Choose tools based on what you need to get out of them, and consider testing the same prompts on a few to figure out which creates the most helpful results for you.

 NOAN, a Squarespace partner, is one example of a go-to-market AI tool to help businesses and entrepreneurs build out a marketing strategy and business. The tool builds an understanding of your business and brand then provides building blocks so you can generate a strategy that you can execute on. 

3. Conduct research on market trends and competitors

Every marketing plan must have research to influence whatever decisions you make. For example, if you’re plotting out a full-funnel marketing effort that includes different content and data for awareness, consideration, and conversion, your research will need to be tailored to each phase.

AI can optimize and streamline your research process by providing you with information on your competitors. For example, if you’re looking to increase social media engagement, you could prompt an AI tool with: “Create a benchmark report that compares and summarizes [business name] social media metrics with five top competitors.”

Need to understand customer sentiment? Prompt the tool with something like: “Identify five pain points customers have mentioned in product reviews or on social media.” Be as specific as possible in your prompting and research. AI doesn’t do well with vague or generalized statements. You’ll get unclear answers in return.

4. Implement and analyze

Once you have the overall marketing plan in place, inclusive of goals, content ideas, and a basic structure that leads to success, it’s time to implement it. You don’t need to stop using AI once the plan is in place—consider bringing it in to execute on specific elements. 

You can use AI to generate copy drafts for newsletters, email, blogs, social media captions, or create visuals, and so much more.

It takes time to understand if marketing efforts are successful, but once you’re ready to start gathering information and metrics, you can bring AI in here too. Monitor your results and use an AI tool to help: Analyze and generate summaries to highlight the wins or losses in your plan. 

Tips for using an AI in a marketing plan

Once you have a marketing plan in place, consider the following tips and best practices to make the most out of the AI tool you’re using. There are a lot of nuances and context that can get lost in the shuffle if you rely too heavily on AI. It should be considered a partner like anything else in your marketing repertoire. 

AI doesn’t have to be part of every stage of the strategy

AI doesn’t have to appear everywhere to make the most out of incorporating it into your marketing plan. For example, you might choose to have AI help you conduct market research on customers buying handmade handbags, but not to create ad copy for an ad.

AI is a great asset where you need it. It’ll be helpful from the outset to understand what your goals are and how AI can best help you reach or plan for them. 

Edit and personalize 

AI isn’t always accurate. It’s important to keep in mind that, while AI technology has the ability to learn from and process an incredible amount of data, it’s not going to give you pristine copy or detailed market research you can use right away.

One of the prevailing myths about AI is that you should use whatever it gives you. Whatever answer your AI tool generates for you can be edited, changed, or not used at all, like anything else. The tool is a better partner if you understand its limitations and where you need to put your own creative or business spin on what it provides.

Be specific in your prompts but understand you have the power to edit what’s generated. Personalize whatever copy it generates and fact-check any research or information it provides you. Another key point to remember: Avoid providing any AI tool your personal or financial information.

Monitor ROI

For the most part, using AI as part of your marketing plan is relatively low-cost. That doesn’t necessarily mean it will always be that way or that it’s the best tool to support your marketing plan. For example, if you’re using AI to help generate email marketing copy but conversions are still low, consider adding other help, like a freelance writer. In this example, AI might be more helpful for automating the email send and processing data. 

The point is that AI is a nimble tool, but it’s still important to understand where you get a good return on investment for your overall marketing efforts. 

Understand the tool’s limitations

Approaching any work with a critical eye is crucial for success. That could be anything from the details of an image for a social post or the copy of a follow-up email to your customers. Staying on top of what you send to your customers has always been important, and that attention to detail can separate and differentiate businesses in the mind of a customer. That means it’s equally important to be critical when it comes to integrating AI into your marketing efforts. 

Not everything AI generates is going to be right for your business or brand, particularly when it comes to what you know about your own customers. It is, however, very good at automation, providing summaries for a lot of data and information, and being a tool where one can play with copy. Understand where and how AI can work for you and not against you.