Tips on leveraging AI to adapt to change

For marketing teams striving to stay ahead of the curve, the ability to adapt swiftly to change is paramount to growth and gaining a competitive advantage.

And this isn’t just speculation — a recent Gartner survey found that 90% of marketing leaders believe that the marketing function needs to be more adaptive to changes in customer needs.

That’s because teams who are more adaptable have stronger customer satisfaction and retention (CSAT). In fact, Gartner’s survey data also shows that for companies in the top quartile of adaptability, 87% of marketing leaders report a higher CSAT. 

Yet in a rapidly evolving business landscape, where the marketing playbook is being reinvented by tools like AI, it can be difficult for teams to know what to focus on, how to most effectively leverage new technology, and how to collaborate well across functions and locations.

With all of this in mind, we were excited to chat with Jasper’s Head of Marketing, Meghan Keaney Anderson, during a recent episode of our Boundless series.

In it, she shares her firsthand experience of how marketing teams can use AI to create not only faster outputs, but better outcomes. She also dives into how to foster a positive culture of teamwork and how to differentiate your brand and content in a crowded market. 

Here are some biggest tips for high-performing teams.

Be intentional with AI and emerging technologies

A McKinsey study of more than 400 use cases found that AI has the potential to contribute the most value to marketing compared to any other company function.

Given the technology’s enormous potential, it’s no wonder that marketing leaders are increasingly embracing the technology. Yet Meghan recommends that when getting started with AI, it’s important to proceed not with caution — but rather, intention.

“First, find the angle that matters most to your business — whether that’s AI for marketing, AI for ad copy, AI for ethics — and go deep on that rather than try to swell the whole ocean. ”

“In this relentless cycle of a new innovation or release coming out every week, be inquisitive, rather than reactionary. I would caution people to take a beat,” she adds. “Engage with it, ask questions, understand it deeper, don’t feel like you have to volley back immediately at every single breaking news.”

A few other tips Meghan shared for designing an AI marketing strategy:

1. Set standards: To create a strong AI foundation, it’s essential to start by creating company standards for each tool in regards to their security, use, and experimentation.
2. Play with purpose: Once standards are in place, Meghan says it’s time to “play with purpose. First, it’s important to understand what problem you’re trying to solve with the technology, then measure its effectiveness, and then decide to scale it up if it actually solves that problem.” 
3. Assess your risk: Understand the limitations and weaknesses of AI, so you can identify and address things as they crop up, such as biases and lack of representation. 

Remember: originality is the new currency

Every marketer is familiar with the pressure to churn out content quickly for the sake of search engine optimization, but with the advent of AI, Meghan says quality, rather than quantity, is no longer a nice-to-have, but a business necessity for marketing teams.

“In a world where anyone can create content super fast, information gets cheap,” Meghan says. “You need to put more emphasis into how to stand out to create something that is original and unique.”

Fortunately, Meghan says that while a lot of AI outputs are generic, using the right tools can help teams create customized content. For example, Jasper integrates companies’ brand and style guides to create content that’s on-brand and unique to that company.

Even still, she believes that now more than ever, marketing teams need story hunters, researchers, and journalists to create that deep-dive, valuable content. “People who think they can lay off their marketing team or writing team because they’ve got an AI tool now, are sorely mistaken,” says Meghan. She adds that it’s also important for teams to be strategic about reinvesting the time gained from automating content.

“Maybe it takes you less time to write a blog post, but you may want to take that time back and invest it into conducting original research, interviewing people or just doing more ideation to make that blog post higher quality. You may also want to spend more time thinking about how to distribute and repackage that content for different uses.”

In addition to content creation, Meghan says that the ways people discover content, products, and companies online is undergoing a major transformation as search engines begin using AI. For example, Google’s zero-click searches present users with the answer without them having to click on the website as a way to improve the user experience.

This will cause website traffic to decline in the coming year, so it’s important that marketing teams understand and optimize their content for zero-click SEO results and use other avenues to glean customers and achieve their goals. 

Create internal frameworks to foster collaboration

Jasper is an entirely remote company with a marketing team of about 15 people. Like many distributed workforces, teams struggled with feeling disjointed, siloed work, and broken communication. To mitigate this, Jasper adopted a model called SPADE (Setting, People, Alternatives, Decide, Explain) to help streamline the company’s decision-making process.

Meghan describes it as a “mechanism for talking about the situation analysis, which is the setting.” You then lay out the people that are needed, and follow that up with discussing trade offs and alternatives. Finally, you decide and justify that decision. She adds that it may seem like an obvious approach, but then you “realize you’re running a million miles an hour and stuff gets missed. ”

Jasper also created an operational framework to help communicate company-wide strategies and achieve goals. “By operating system, I don’t mean technology. [Instead] it’s a process of making plans on an annual and quarterly basis,” says Meghan.. “So, for example, heading into a quarter, we get together and talk about the strategy for that coming quarter. We do that at an executive level, and then we have a follow up team meeting to trickle everything down to the people who need to pull it off.”

She adds that having these universal frameworks in place has been instrumental in helping Jasper adapt quickly to market shifts, break down collaboration barriers, and scale. “It sounds like the boring stuff, but it is really what can make the difference between a team that is off-kilter and a team that is running well together.”

Keep marketers in the driver’s seat

Finally, Meghan reminds marketers to always “keep humans in the loop” and be careful about over-automating decisions based on technology.

“AI is great when it can surface to you insights that you wouldn’t have otherwise seen,” says Meghan. “But the marketer should still be in the driver’s seat and make the decisions.”

To hear more about how Meghan and Jasper maintain marketing velocity and to learn more insights from other business leaders in the world of tech, check out our Boundless webinar series.