AI marketing tools are disrupting all aspects of the marketing industry, from content creation to customer care, analytics, reporting and beyond.
Regardless of the support you’re looking for, you can bet there’s a shiny new AI marketing tool that’s recently launched and ready to meet your needs. As new tools pop up seemingly every day, however, marketing teams are at risk of AI hype burnout and are increasingly at risk of wasting valuable time, resources and focus if they fall into AI FOMO — fear of missing out.
There’s no shame in it. In today’s ultra competitive business environment where expectations are high, timelines are compressed and budgets are ultra tight, it’s understandable.
And, if we’re being honest with ourselves, we’re likely all guilty. We hear about what sounds like an incredible new tool from a colleague or competitor, and we race to try it. Only then do we try to find a place and a reason to use it.
This race to try the latest and greatest tool and not be left behind creates a risk of mindlessly using tools for their own sake and, costing us precious time, money and productivity.
Left unchecked, it can create an endless AI tool doom loop. Here’s how to avoid it.
AI Hype Burnout Definition
AI hype burnout, for marketers, is when fatigue and skepticism arise from the constant over-promotion and pursuit of the latest artificial intelligence tools that deliver inconsistent results. This can result in missed opportunities to adopt genuinely impactful AI technologies due to reduced trust.
Avoid Time Consuming AI Training
As time and resources are often our most limited assets, we need to be thoughtful about the quantity of new AI tools that we introduce to our business.
With every new tool we introduce, our teams could end up spending hours upskilling and learning the ropes for a host of new technology, some of which will be more useful than others.
With AI’s promise to make things quicker, more efficient and with less human input than before, counteracting that with lengthy training and the frequent introduction of new tools is an easy way to lose more than we gain from AI.
Instead, marketing leaders can better prepare their teams for new AI tools by being clear on the outcomes and key performance indicators they expect. This empowers teams to more precisely test tools and develop quick-start guides that assess or demonstrate the tools’ value. Teams will benefit from that hands-on learning experience, while sharing tips, learnings and insights with one another.
Take a Before-and-After Approach
Marketers must take a strategic approach to avoid the AI hype game. AI can be most powerful in a “before” (analysis and research) and “after” (execution), which is the core of a marketers’ work.
- Before: How can we use AI as an artificial assistant, helping us gather market data, insights and understanding audience’s challenges, among other details?
- After: We all want to create unique content, especially now that people and algorithms tend to spot AI created content. But can we find ways to increase productivity by using AI to repurpose content (copy or images) for different channels and formats?
By focusing on measurable and tangible outcomes and how they will impact KPIs, teams can look for tools that will add value and solve existing pain points or obstacles.
If the starting point is not outcomes focused, however, teams can lose focus by exploring and testing every single tool on the market that won't help them with their specific issues. Defining and prioritizing use cases is critical.
You can also do this at a functional level for individual team members to focus more on their own goals. For instance, designers can focus on tools that help with images, copywriters on writing assistants and project managers on note takers.
Once the experts have done their due diligence and identified what works best for the business, they can share this information across the team for everyone’s benefit.
How My Team Uses AI Without Risking Burnout
Recently, my team and I have been taking a collective approach to using AI marketing tools.
- We start by examining the areas in our marketing engine we can improve, whether that’s our objective alignment and goal pursuit with pace or the productivity in our creative, content, product and performance marketing teams.
- Based on this analysis, we can identify the specific business outcomes we want to achieve and what success looks like. This disciplined approach forms the brief for sourcing AI tools that’ll help us achieve these objectives.
- The selected AI marketing tools enable us to respond to a business need, which has more value from a return on value perspective. Additionally, because everyone joins in on the journey — from technology early adopters to fast followers — the whole marketing team benefits from the learnings.
As a team, we’re better able to quantify the value of the AI technology we end up using, and can apply those learnings to create a roadmap of projects going forward. We have to be thoughtful in harnessing the full power of these tools, resisting FOMO, or risk falling victim to AI hype burnout.
