6 Ways I Help Clients Improve Marketing ROI with AI

Marketing involves a lot of vision and strategy—as well as a lot of time spent sifting through data.

My clients have long relied on me to make sense of the data and deliver the strategies they need to move their business forward. And now I’m relying, in part, on artificial intelligence to help me maximize my clients’ return on investment with their marketing dollars.

Thanks to the machine learning and automation power of AI tools, I’m able to essentially outsource several routine creative and business processes to AI. This gives me more time to focus on the marketing strategy side of my job—and spend time working directly with my clients.

Here are six ways I’m currently using generative AI technology to work more efficiently and give my clients the best return on their marketing investment:

1. Speed up content creation
2. Streamline outreach and messaging
3. Create customer personas
4. Enhance competitor analysis
5. Supplement SEO and CRO work
6. Repurpose marketing content

1. Speed up content creation

ChatGPT is my favorite generative AI tool—I like its chatbot-style interface and the variety of plugins that enhance its capabilities. Its business value is enormous, and there’s one specific area I’ve found it to be most impactful: content creation.

A blog post for a client can take several hours to write. ChatGPT can reduce that time if I supply it with all the relevant details and use AI to generate my working draft.

I still need to revise and edit the draft to match my client’s brand voice. I find I’m saving time on every post, though, including my time spent editing.

Downloadable eBooks are another area where ChatGPT really shines.

These books are great for use as a lead magnet, but are time-consuming to create. Now, I can use ChatGPT to produce the basic content structure of an eBook.

I do still have to lay out the content and select high-quality images—AI image generators just aren’t yet able to produce realistic graphics—but I can have a full book done in a faster period of time. This gives me more time to devote to client strategy work.

2. Streamline outreach and messaging

AI tools have also become a key part of my outreach workflow—whether I’m working on generating new leads for my own business or helping clients with projects that require templates for email or LinkedIn messages.

In the past, it could have taken me the better part of an hour to write one script … and then I’d have to continue tweaking it multiple times based on different recipients.

Now, I can fire up ChatGPT and tell the AI:

• What kind of message I’m writing
• What the intended goal or outcome is
• Who I’ll be sending it to
• How the message should sound
• Any specific details I need it to include
• Whether there’s a call to action

In about five minutes, I’ll have a great script template. I do still need to edit each one a little to make sure they’re accurate—and sound fully human—but I’m saving at least 45 minutes per message script.

3. Create customer personas

A big part of developing marketing strategy is knowing exactly who you’re targeting with your ads or content. Correctly identifying who your audience is goes a long way in improving customer experience and increasing sales.

Buyer personas are the documents that I use to illustrate how each of a client’s target audience segments are unique.

Every audience segment gets its own persona. I typically write these up like a faux biographical profile of an example customer—complete with details on:

• Customer needs and wants
• Common attributes, including lifestyle and education
• Problems and expectations

I can give ChatGPT my client’s customer data sets—nothing confidential, just demographic attributes of each segment—and the AI will return a well-crafted writeup I can copy and format in one of my persona templates.

I can even use AI applications to help me create a customer journey roadmap. ChatGPT Plus plugins like Show Me Diagrams are great for generating visualizations like this:

‍

4. Enhance competitor analysis

I also use AI to speed up—and enhance—identifying and analyzing my clients’ competitors.

Through just a standard conversation with ChatGPT, I can:

• Analyze the readability, tone, and focus of a piece of competitor content
• Pick out potential keywords used by competitors—without having to read through the entire website myself
• Learn more about an industry or competitor company that’s new to me or my team

And with the help of additional ChatGPT Plus plugins, I can also:

• Have the AI generate a list of all the headers used on a competitor webpage
• Ask ChatGPT to review spreadsheets data I’ve collected about a client competitor, using its natural language processing (NLP) abilities to find similarities or gaps
• Use ChatGPT to review the content on PDFs created by competitors and used in marketing

I even have ChatGPT format its findings and results into different exportable formats depending on what I need, such as Markdown tables or .CSV files. It’s a fantastic time-saver.

5. Supplement SEO and CRO work

ChatGPT doesn’t connect to the internet, so I can’t use it to conduct all of my search engine optimization (SEO) and conversion rate optimization (CRO) research. It’s simply not able to access the required data sources.

I must still do a lot of manual SEO work, including researching keyword competition levels and cost per click (CPC) rates.

I can, however, use ChatGPT to speed up the process a bit.

For SEO purposes, I can share the data I’ve collected with ChatGPT and ask it to:

• Help me extract data points from a list
• Summarize information into skimmable paragraphs and lists
• Check for duplicates in a list
• Quickly check the length of titles and meta descriptions
• Generate new titles or meta descriptions for keywords

And with CRO—which is how we increase the number of people taking action on a webpage—I can use ChatGPT to help me:

• Quickly write several new versions of the microcopy on a button
• Generate alternate versions of a call to action (CTA) or headline
• Tweak existing copy so I can use it on a new version of a landing page during A/B testing

6. Repurpose marketing content

ChatGPT is also really useful for content repurposing. In the past, I might have had to:

• Write a blog post
• Create an email draft to announce the blog post
• Come up with three different blog post summaries to use on social media

Seeing as writing a blog post alone can take up to three hours, coming up with all this extra content could turn the process into a full-day affair.

Now, I can take the content of a blog post—whether I wrote it or had ChatGPT help—and ask the AI to turn it into:

• Social media content specific to different platforms
• Several versions of ad copy
• Email templates
• YouTube video and TikTok scripts

I’m then able to deliver all of this content to my client as a full promotional package for each blog post.

What isn’t AI good for?

I’ve found that AI-powered tools—including ChatGPT—aren’t useful for the strategy side of my job. Despite experimenting with many prompts, the AI simply returns ideas and frameworks that are too basic for me to use—I’d never want to show them to a client.

I still create all of my strategy documents, forecasts, benchmarks, plans, and projections on my own. And of course, I handle all the final decision-making on every aspect of a client initiative—even when AI is involved.

Embrace AI solutions in your marketing

I’m fortunate that my clients and their stakeholders are excited about embracing the potential of AI. Many of them already started experimenting with these emerging technologies on their own—and when they saw how it could help us do better strategic work together, they were sold.

And because I work with ChatGPT every day, I’ve developed a library of prompts and frameworks that allow me to work quickly and effectively. I’m able to use AI to its full potential.

I’m confident I can apply these same frameworks to any new client’s projects to help them see better returns—and a better use of their marketing dollars.

If you’re interested in learning how AI implementation can help you get more out of your marketing budget, send me a message on Upwork to start a conversation.

Upwork is not affiliated with and does not sponsor or endorse any of the tools or services discussed in this article. These tools and services are provided only as potential options, and each reader and company should take the time needed to adequately analyze and determine the tools or services that would best fit their specific needs and situation.