How to protect your Marketing career against the threat of automation and AI

Developments in marketing software have taken place at a breathtaking rate, making many aspects of the marketing and creative function not just easier, but borderline obsolete.

The divergence into content by all specialists in the marketing field has meant many marketers now need to write the content that they’ve historically planned, delivered and assessed.

Why know that the rise of the T-shaped marketer has meant organisations in all sectors are increasingly looking for specialist marketers but with a broad marketing knowledge.

But several major developments have removed the mystique and skill required in some roles and replace it with machine learning. This means a number of aspects can be handled by AI technology.

Which roles might be at risk?

If you are a marketer who has built a career on the following types of skills, you want to follow the advice that follows in order to protect yourself and improve your chances of career longevity.

1. Design (Canva)

At the time of writing, Canva is embarking on major internet, radio and TV advertising supporting it’s cut-price graphic design software. For around £10 a month, users access thousands of ready made templates for social media graphics, documents, presentations and increasingly more complicated digital media like animation and video too.

It’s not an AI, but with the incredible breadth of resources, it has made the creation of a whole brand and all the supporting habits needed to successfully market a business available to anyone with an internet connection and device.

And although there are some limitations to what it can do when directly compared to products from Adobe or dedicated graphic designers and marketers with some design smarts, it is a very attractive proposition for many.

2. AI Copywriting for Marketing (Jasper)

A second area is copywriting. More and more marketers are turning to AI copywriting applications like Jasper to help them generate first draft content quickly, that can be edited and put in front of target audiences.

I’ve run a few polls on social media to evaluate feedback and it seems marketers are happy using it in this way. My experience is that AI generated copy needs some work to make it sound unique and relevant – particularly in technical B2B markets, but there is no denying the attraction in being able to punch in some key references and generate a fast and dirty first draft.

As it’s machine-led, it learns as it develops so it will improve the more work you put through it.

And there are softwares now that you can use for the upfront keyword searching and even the editing, so the whole process could in time, be completely outsourced.

For marketers trading on their ability to write, this could become a big challenge.

3. AI Video for Marketing (Synthesia)

Video is an expensive marketing commodity given the need to scripting, storyboarding, shoot and editing time. Because of this, and driven by the need for more digital video content, there is a developing market for AI video generators with products like Synthesia.

These technologies give organisations the ability to quickly turn any text, email or presentation into a professional-looking AI video.

They come pre-loaded with avatars and templates so you can quickly add text and create videos with no professional editing required. And they can be output in upto 65 languages.

These AI videos are not likely to replace personalised corporate presenters and interview “talking head” style videos, instead for any kind of training, staff or customer onboarding, corporate communications or explainer videos.
This could have a devastating impact on video focused marketing professionals if your organisation sees the power in swapping your expensive video skills for an AI software that can cover 75% of the work.

4. AI Social Media Marketing (Sprout, Hootsuite, SocialPilot)

Social media management has probably seen the most innovation as more tech startups strive to build customers at volume using affordable software to streamline the content distribution and reporting process.

While new technologies come on the scene all the team, offering something slightly different, they are surprising similar when directly compared. They are usually priced per user / number of accounts being posted to, offer a single screen planning dashboard, in-built analytics and scheduling capabilities. Some even offer prompts to be used in social content.
The challenge these paid-for technologies have is that they connect to the main social media channels through API links and these can be removed if the AI’s encourage users to break the terms of use. There have been numerous examples in social media history of technologies falling foul of terms of use – most notably when it comes to aggressively and inauthentically building audiences.

But it’s an area of incredible and ongoing automation. And it’s beginning to connect with the AI copywriting, AI video and online graphic design technologies referenced – meaning you could now create copy, create graphics and video and have it posted across social media with an increasingly lighter touch.

5. AI Data Integration for Marketing (Zapier)

If you provide your value to your organisation by providing reports and analysis of marketing activity and acting as the facilitator at the centre of implementation, you might be in trouble.

Applications like Zapier are building bridges between software to send and receive data to smooth the process of managing and interpreting data.

Gone are the days of manually taking email open and click data from your email software and manually adding it to your database, segmenting follow up reports for sales teams. You no longer need to manually process enquiries, form fills and new subscribers as Zapier “Zaps” can be set up to help softwares talk to each other.

You can do the same with your website data, email data, social media data CRM and sales performance metrics and then create powerful real-time dashboards online.

So even data, once platforms are connected, can run almost on autopilot.

It’s a massive area and one we’re going to be exploring in more detail over the coming months.

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How do you protect your marketing career from AI and automation?

It’s conceivable as commerce moves to digital products, memberships and subscriptions that other areas of the marketing discipline will be impinged upon.

So, how do you protect your marketing career from AI and automation?

There are two ways – and they are linked. The answer lies in being creative and being strategic.

Just three years ago, John Able, VP of cloud and innovation at Oracle talked about how creative skills were going to be critical in protecting workers from being replaced by robots. (Link at end of article).

The ability to be able to react to constantly changing events and the ability to empathise are two aspects of the lived human experience that will endure in the workplace.

At MMC Learning, we speak to hundreds of prospective students every week and many are looking to fill skills gaps, improve their knowledge, be more attractive to their current employer or in the job market.

And these are the two areas that we find ourselves constantly coming back.

If you have a strategic grounding in the essentials of marketing, you have a framework to make sense of what is happening around you and can make confident predictions on what may happen if you follow different courses of action.

And if you can match this knowledge with creativity – in the open-minded creative sense – you’ll intuitively recommend, design and implement marketing activities that will have a greater impact on your organisation.

It’s true that AI machine learning, just as being human, improves through consistency and repetition, but the difference for the human marketer over the machine is the ability to emote.

With so much of marketing actually being about how customers think, how they feel, what they want and what they do, there will always be a need for the strategy, direction and creative input, regardless of the tools used.

How do you get more strategic or more creative?

Fundamentally, it starts with adding a qualification to your practical experience.

MMC Learning offers a wide variety of learning options from entry level right though to MSc level, with a modular approach that can be tailored to suit your current and future career needs.

As a business on a mission to support marketers make the most of their marketing careers – but also a business that uses technologies to improve our own processes and system – it’s definitely something we’re keeping a keen eye on.