Understanding the Use of AI in Digital Marketing

AI in digital marketing isn’t some far-off fantasy anymore. It’s here. And it’s completely changing the game. 

Think smarter personalization, sharper predictions, and customer experiences that actually feel human. That’s what AI brings to the table. And marketing leaders are paying attention big time. 

In fact, according to research, nearly half of corporate leaders believe AI will have a major impact on productivity and efficiency as it drives real innovation. 

So no, this isn’t just hype. 

In this article, we’ll cut through the noise and cover what AI actually means for digital marketing today. We’ll look at real-world examples, challenges, and the tools you should know about. Yes, way beyond ChatGPT. Plus, we’ll show you how we can put AI to work for you. 

What is AI in Digital Marketing? 

Ever wonder how Spotify seems to know exactly what song you want to hear next?
Or how Netflix keeps serving up shows you actually want to watch? 

You can thank AI and the marketers behind it. 

Artificial intelligence in digital marketing is all about using smart technology to understand customers better and deliver experiences that feel personal. We’re talking data collection, natural language processing, machine learning, analytics… the whole package. And it doesn’t just crunch numbers. It helps marketers make smarter decisions faster, and automates a ton of repetitive work along the way. 

Here’s the real magic: AI can process massive amounts of customer data in seconds. That means you can spot patterns, predict behavior, and tailor messaging based on what someone actually does, not just who we think they are. And the more it learns, the smarter it gets. 

So yes, AI helps marketers be more effective and more personal. Customers get relevant content triggered by something they clicked, watched, or engaged with. It feels seamless because, well, it kind of is. 

But Here’s What AI Isn’t Doing 

It’s not replacing humans. Not even close. 

“There’s still a huge need for human writers, for human creativity, for human thought and strategy,” says Kerry Harrison, AI educator and copywriter. “We come to these models with our own objectives and our own ideas.” 

AI is a tool. A powerful one. But it still needs us to point it in the right direction. 

And smart companies know this. According to McKinsey, leading organizations aren’t just handing the reins to AI, they’re redesigning workflows, putting senior leaders in charge of governance, and hiring for new roles while retraining existing teams. It’s about building a culture where humans and AI work together. 

So What Does That Look Like Day to Day? 

Pretty much everything. 

From chatbots that answer questions at 2 a.m. to social media tools that schedule, post, and analyze performance across platforms. From writing first drafts of copy to generating visuals in seconds. Tasks that used to take hours now take minutes. 

That doesn’t mean the work is done. It means the work has shifted. Marketers can spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time on strategy, creativity, and connection. 

Bottom line? AI isn’t just changing how we market. It’s changing what marketers are capable of. And when used right, it helps businesses deliver experiences that don’t just feel personalized, they feel human. 

AI Tools Marketers Are Actually Using (Beyond ChatGPT) 

Let’s be real; ChatGPT gets all the hype. And sure, it’s useful. But it’s far from the only AI tool marketers are leaning on these days. 

From writing first drafts to automating workflows, optimizing ads to generating custom visuals, there’s an AI tool for pretty much everything now. And the best part? Most of them don’t require a computer science degree to use. 

Here’s a look at some of the most helpful AI tools out there right now, grouped by what they actually do. 

Content & Copywriting 

• Writer – A highly rated AI writing assistant that’s great for repurposing content and keeping brand voice consistent. 

• Jasper AI – Generates everything from blog posts to ad copy, plus basic analytics to go with it. 

• Perplexity – Think ChatGPT, but better suited for research. It pulls from web sources and shows you where the info came from. 

Design & Video 

• Midjourney – Turns a simple text prompt into original images. Perfect for social visuals, blog headers, or just experimenting with ideas. 

• Synthesia – Creates AI-generated video content. Useful for training, campaigns, or personalized video messages at scale. 

Data, Analytics & Optimization 

• Tableau – Turns messy data into clean, visual dashboards. Helps you spot trends and share insights without the spreadsheet headache. 

• Surfer SEO – Analyzes your content against what’s already ranking on Google and gives you concrete tips to improve. 

• Optmyzr – Built for PPC management. Helps optimize bids, budgets, and campaign performance. 

• Evolv.ai – Uses machine learning to fine-tune customer experiences in real time. Think A/B testing on steroids. 

CRM, Automation & Workflows 

• HubSpot – The all-in-one. Attracts leads, manages campaigns, personalizes content, and tracks progress across channels. 

• Mailchimp – Still a favorite. Uses AI to predict the best send times and personalize email content for different segments. 

• Optimove – A customer data platform that uses AI to help you act on insights, not just collect them. 

• Zapier – Connects all the apps your team uses so they actually talk to each other. Huge time-saver. 

Chatbots & Customer Interaction 

• Drift – An AI chatbot built for lead generation and real-time customer conversations. 

• Manychat – Great for interactive experiences on social platforms, including WhatsApp and Instagram . 

• ChatGPT – Yes, it’s here too. Useful for building custom chatbots, drafting email campaigns, brainstorming ideas, and walking customers through purchases. 

Social Media Management 

• Buffer – Clean, simple, and reliable. Helps you schedule posts, track performance, and curate content across platforms. 

Platform-Specific AI Assistants 

• Copilot for Microsoft 365 – Helps draft plans, write blog posts, create social copy, and summarize documents right inside the apps you already use. 

• Gemini for Google Workspace – Similar vibe, but baked into Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and more. Great for summarizing info and automating repetitive tasks. 

• Adobe Sensei – Brings AI into Adobe’s creative and marketing tools to help with personalization, image editing, and campaign optimization. 

• Google Marketing Platform – Combines analytics, ad management, and predictive modeling in one place. Built for teams that want deeper integration. 

 

No one’s using all of these at once. But chances are, a few of them could make your day-to-day noticeably easier. The trick is matching the tool to the task and knowing that AI works best when you’re still the one calling the shots. 

But tools alone don’t drive growth. Strategy does. 

We share this info because we believe in empowering marketers but we also know that software without a plan is just an expensive tab. That’s where we come in. We help agencies and brands not just adopt AI, but adapt it to their specific goals, workflows, and audiences. 

Think of us as the team that makes AI actually useful. 

Examples of AI in Digital Marketing 

Here’s the thing about AI: it’s not a single-channel play. It works across social, search, email, ads, and automation. It’s pretty much everywhere customers actually spend time. 

And it’s not industry-specific either. Beauty brands use it. Streaming services use it. B2B companies, e-commerce stores, nonprofits. If you have customers, AI can help you understand them better. 

Let’s look at a few brands doing it right. 

Sephora: Beauty, Meet Bot 

Sephora didn’t just dip a toe into AI. They dove in head first. 

Their Virtual Artist App lets customers try on makeup and see how a shade of lipstick or eyeshadow looks on their own face before buying. No store visit required. Meanwhile, their AI-powered chatbot helps shoppers find products, book appointments, and get answers at 2 a.m. in their pajamas. 

E-commerce sales jumped from $580 million in 2016 to over $3 billion. By 2024, that number is projected to hit $3.6 billion. Not bad for a chatbot. 

Netflix: The Algorithm That Knows You Too Well 

Ever feel like Netflix gets you? That’s not a coincidence. It’s AI, quietly working in the background. 

Every time you pause a show, rewind a scene, or binge an entire season in one sitting, Netflix is paying attention. The platform tracks thousands of data points per user, including: 

• Age, gender, and location 

• What device you’re watching on 

• Whether you finished a movie or abandoned it halfway 

• What you browse but don’t click 

• How many times you watched that one episode of The Office 

All of that data feeds into one goal: keeping you watching. And it works. Smarter recommendations mean happier subscribers, lower churn, and a much healthier bottom line. 

Zalando: Turning Browsers Into Buyers 

Here’s a challenge most e-commerce brands know well: what do you do with customers who aren’t looking for anything specific? 

For European fashion giant Zalando, that’s 78% of their Gen Z audience. These shoppers come to the site just to explore. No search term. No product in mind. Just curiosity . 

So Zalando asked: what if we treated exploration as its own job to solve? 

Their answer: AI-generated product videos. Dynamic, animated, eye-catching… a far cry from the standard white-background product shot. The goal isn’t just to show inventory. It’s to create a sense of discovery, to make browsing feel less like scrolling through a catalog and more like walking through a well-merchandised store . 

“We serve 29 different markets with different languages and style preferences plus over 7,000 brands,” said Mattias Haase, Zalando’s VP of content solutions. “Static images with white backgrounds are no longer enough.” 

AI isn’t just for personalization. It’s for inspiration. And in a world where most shoppers don’t know what they want until they see it, that’s a massive competitive advantage. 

Your Turn 

These brands didn’t get here by accident. They invested in AI, tested what worked, and kept iterating. You don’t need Netflix’s budget or Sephora’s team to start. 

Top tip: Spend an hour browsing real-world examples of AI in marketing. Not to copy but to get your brain thinking about what’s possible. Sometimes the best inspiration comes from seeing what someone else figured out first. 

How to Use AI in Digital Marketing (Without Getting Overwhelmed) 

Here’s the good news: AI isn’t some exclusive club anymore. You don’t need a massive budget or a dedicated data science team to get started. Tools are cheaper, easier to use, and more accessible than ever. 

But most marketers still don’t have a plan. 

Here are three practical ways marketers are using AI right now and how you can too. 

1. Content & Image Creation

Marketing teams are under constant pressure to produce more content, faster, across more channels. But quality takes time. And time is exactly what most teams don’t have. 

Enter generative AI. 

Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Jasper have exploded in popularity because they solve a very real problem: the blank page. Need email subject lines? Done. Ad copy? Easy. A landing page draft, blog outline, or social caption? A few seconds, tops. 

You can even use AI writing prompts to tailor content for different audience segments; personalization at scale, without the all-nighters. 

But AI is a starting point, not a finish line. 

“People use AI because it’s lower cost and highly scalable,” says Mischa McInerney, CMO at the Digital Marketing Institute. “But if it doesn’t come from a strong creative platform and data-driven insights, then it’s just spray and pray.” 

So by all means, use AI to write faster. Just make sure you read it, edit it, and inject some actual personality before it goes live. 

2. Customer Service & Support

Chatbots aren’t new. But today’s AI-powered chatbots? They’re different. 

They don’t just regurgitate FAQs. They understand intent, recognize context, and can actually hold a conversation. When a customer wants a quick answer at 11 p.m. on a Sunday, the chatbot is often the first, and sometimes only, point of contact. 

But customer support is just the tip of the iceberg. AI can also: 

• Personalize messaging based on past interactions 

• Anticipate what a customer might need next 

• Streamline the checkout or booking process 

• Route complex issues to the right human agent, with context attached 

Here’s a stat that should stop you mid-scroll: 88% of marketers say they need to increase their use of automation and AI just to keep up with customer expectations. That’s from Mailchimp, and it’s not a prediction; it’s already happening. 

3. Customer Segmentation

Segmentation used to mean exporting a CSV, building messy Excel formulas, and making your best guess at who belongs where. It worked. But it was slow, rigid, and prone to human error. 

AI does it differently. 

Instead of manually grouping people by age or location, AI looks at behavior, interests, purchase history, engagement patterns and finds clusters you might never have spotted on your own. Then it updates those segments in real time as people’s actions change. 

That means you can: 

• Send relevant messaging without guessing 

• Adjust campaigns on the fly, not next quarter 

• Use NLP to scan customer reviews and feedback, then feed those insights back into product development 

And recommendation engines? That’s segmentation too; just automated, personalized, and invisible to the customer. They just see products they actually want to buy. 

4. SEO: Adapting to an AI-First Search World

Here’s something a lot of marketers don’t realize: AI isn’t just helping us optimize for search. It is search now. 

Google has been using AI algorithms to crawl, index, and rank content for years. But the game changed in a big way with AI Overviews (formerly called Search Generative Experience, or SGE). Instead of just listing links, Google now generates direct answers, pulled from multiple sources and summarized by AI. 

So what does that mean for your SEO strategy? 

For starters, AI can help you: 

• Automate keyword research by analyzing actual user behavior, not just search volume 

• Optimize content structure, meta tags, and headings faster 

• Predict shifts in search behavior and algorithm updates before they happen 

And with voice search and visual search growing fast, AI helps you optimize for how people actually search today, not how they searched five years ago. That means focusing on natural language, long-tail keywords, and proper image metadata. 

Pro tip: AI Overviews aren’t going anywhere. Read up on how they work and start testing which keywords trigger them in your industry. That’s where the next wave of search traffic will come from. 

5. PPC: Smarter Bids, Better Ads, Less Waste

Pay-per-click advertising has always been part science, part gut instinct. AI is tilting that balance firmly toward science. 

Here’s what AI handles better than any human ever could: 

• Bidding and targeting – Adjusting bids in real time based on device, location, time of day, and even weather 

• Ad creation – Generating multiple headlines and descriptions, then testing which combinations perform best 

• Keyword research – Finding high-intent terms you would have never thought to target 

• Fraud detection – Spotting invalid clicks and protecting your budget 

• Predictive analysis – Forecasting campaign performance before you spend a dollar 

And this is just the beginning. As AI evolves, expect new ad formats, hyper-personalized targeting, and measurement tools that don’t just report what happened but tell you what to do next. 

PPC isn’t about outspending competitors anymore. It’s about outsmarting them. And AI is your shortcut. 

6. Data Analytics: Making Sense of the Noise

Marketers don’t have a data shortage. We have a data overload. 

Between Google Analytics, social platforms, CRM systems, ad managers, and email tools, the average marketing team is sitting on more information than they could ever reasonably process. So most of it just sits there. 

AI changes that. 

Instead of drowning in spreadsheets, you can: 

• Process massive datasets in seconds, not days 

• Spot patterns and anomalies humans would miss 

• Use historical data to predict future behavior, churn risk, likely next purchase andcontent preferences 

And here’s a practical tip: ChatGPT’s Advanced Data Analysis plugin (formerly Code Interpreter) lets you upload a CSV and ask questions in plain English. “What’s driving the drop in engagement this month?” “Which customer segment has the highest LTV?” It writes the code, runs the analysis, and shows you exactly what it found. 

That’s not magic. That’s just AI doing the heavy lifting so you can focus on strategy. 

In retail, this same approach helps brands manage inventory, forecast demand, and optimize customer service. In B2B, it reveals account-level trends that inform ABM campaigns. The principle is the same: better insights, faster, with less grunt work. 

 

7. Email Marketing: More Personal, Less Manual

Email isn’t dead. It’s actually thriving, thanks in large part to AI. 

The brands that send you eerily relevant offers at exactly the right moment? They’re not psychic. They’re just using AI to: 

• Analyze performance – Identify which subject lines, send times, and content formats actually drive opens and clicks 

• Trigger workflows – Set up behavior-based campaigns (abandoned cart, browse abandonment, post-purchase) that run on autopilot 

• Personalize at scale – Dynamic content blocks that change based on who’s opening the email 

• Craft better copy – Generate subject line variations, preheader text, and body copy tailored to different segments 

• A/B test continuously – Not just once, but ongoing optimization that learns and adapts 

AI can even score your email list by comparing engagement metrics and identifying which addresses are driving value and which are dragging down your sender reputation. 

Email used to be about batch-and-blast. Now it’s about relevance, timing, and personalization. AI doesn’t just make email marketing easier. It makes it effective again. 

The Future of Marketing Is Human-Led, AI-Powered 

New tools launch every week. Headlines swing between utopia and doom. And if you’re already juggling a full workload, the idea of adding “become an AI expert” to your plate might sound less like opportunity and more like exhaustion. 

But here’s what we’ve learned from thousands of marketers just like you: AI isn’t here to replace you. It’s here to free you. 

The mundane stuff—the repetitive writing, the manual data crunching, the endless back-and-forth on ad bids and send times—that’s what AI is actually good at. And when you let it handle those tasks, you get something back that you can’t automate: 

Time. Headspace. Room to think. 

That’s where the real marketing happens. Strategy. Creativity. Empathy. Connection. The stuff AI can’t fake, no matter how sophisticated it gets. 

The Bottom Line 

AI isn’t going to make your competition unbeatable. But using it intelligently just might. 

You don’t need to be the earliest adopter. You don’t need to overhaul your entire operation overnight. You just need a clear, practical plan and someone who’s done this before to help you execute it. 

That’s what we do. 

 – Let’s look at where you are, where you want to be, and whether AI is actually the answer. (Spoiler: it’s not always. But when it is, the results speak for themselves.)