What AI means for your digital marketing strategy

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Explore our AI video series

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Explore our AI video series

Transcript

AI. Unless you’ve been living under a rock with particularly bad WiFi, you’ve probably heard more about AI in the past couple of years than… almost anything else.

But with all the hype, most organisations are still left with more questions than answers:

• How can I get ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI overviews to mention my brand, my company, me?
• Can AI help us stay ahead of our competition by predicting trends and customer behaviour?
• With the rise of AI, are websites, as we know them, dead?

As a digital marketing agency, we hear these kinds of questions all the time.

So, to give you a clearer picture of how AI fits into real marketing workflows – and what it means for your organisation’s online presence – we’re sharing how we use AI to deliver results day to day, and what the rise of AI means for our clients’ digital presence. 

In my role as exceptional™’s Director of Growth, AI is like having a sounding board that never sleeps.

I use ChatGPT practically every day – it’s become an integral part of how I work. Whether I’m refining pitch messaging, planning ideation sessions, or pulling together competitor comparisons, it helps me pull all the info, and get to strong ideas, fast. 

But that’s not all. AI is also useful when simplifying complex digital marketing strategies for our clients, so that they can easily understand and feel confident in every action we’re taking to help them meet their goals. 

Here’s an example. At exceptional™, we use a model called the “Digital Marketing Flywheel” that maps key marketing activities to specific audience groups. It’s a simple, visual way to show how each part of our strategy works together to build momentum, improve our clients’ ROI, and deliver long-term impact.

When I’m onboarding a new client, one of my first things I do is to take everything we know about their audiences, stakeholders, and current marketing activity, and use ChatGPT to help map that information onto the Digital Marketing Flywheel. 

That simple activity helps us quickly spot what’s missing in their marketing strategy, and what we can focus on first to ensure that their new strategy fully considers the buyer journey, and shows the right messages to the right people at the right time.   

In digital marketing, you can’t just consider how you or your agency are using AI. It’s just as important to understand how your audience is engaging with AI as well.

After all, AI is already reshaping how people search, engage, and make decisions online. 

That changes the rules of digital marketing. Google, HubSpot – practically every online tool you can think of – now come with built-in AI helpers that pull insights from across your data and the web. That has huge implications for how your audience expects to find and interact with your brand.

In short, every business now needs a generative AI strategy.

It’s not optional – it’s essential. Just like SEO became a cornerstone of digital marketing during the rise of the Search Engines, managing how your brand appears in AI-generated content is fast becoming a critical part of the marketing mix. 

AI isn’t just another tool – it’s already changing the world of digital marketing, both on the strategic end, and for consumers. The businesses that embrace that and integrate AI into their digital strategies early will be the ones who lead the way.