5 proven strategies for maximizing marketing impact with AI

Bottom line: AI mirrors your input. The more precise and professional your approach, the more relevant your results. As Microsoft Copilot's Curtis Beavers puts it, AI reflects your level of precision and professionalism.

Many people instinctively interact with AI politely, adding "please" and "thank you." While this courtesy feels natural and morally right, it carries an energy cost. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has explained that every extra word increases processing load and energy consumption. At scale, this very human politeness contributes to a larger carbon footprint.

It's a fascinating dilemma: should we extend courtesy to machines for ethical reasons, or prioritize concise interactions to minimize our environmental impact?

Bonus: Prompt generators

Another valuable tool worth mentioning is the online prompt generator, especially helpful for structuring complex requests. These AI prompt generators take a handful of keywords and transform them into detailed, well-crafted prompts—incredibly useful when you need precisely structured output, like summarizing podcasts or turning rough notes into comprehensive guides.

2. Leverage generative AI to spark creativity

When it comes to creativity, we all draw from familiar mental frameworks. Ask ten people to sketch a house in ten seconds, and you'll likely see similar drawings based on conventional templates. AI works the same way. The first idea it generates is often a "default reference"—something we've seen before. But here's where volume changes everything.

Challenge yourself to draw 20 different houses in 3 minutes, and you'll quickly move beyond the traditional blueprint, exploring concepts like high-rise condos, farmhouses, or medieval castles. In marketing, when brainstorming campaign ideas, generating high volumes of concepts pushes you far beyond safe, familiar territory.

Techniques like "Crazy Eights," where team members each generate 8 ideas, work beautifully with AI. Consider this scenario: a restaurant chain's loyalty program mobile app saw minimal usage during dining experiences. Customers, absorbed in conversations and menu browsing, seemed reluctant to engage with the app. The challenge became: "How do we encourage users to interact with the app between restaurant visits?" rather than forcing in-restaurant usage. Feed this challenge to an AI tool with clear objectives, context, and expectations, requesting twenty diverse solutions. Then test these ideas using an iterative approach.

This method breaks conventional thinking patterns and uncovers creative angles that might never emerge from traditional brainstorming alone—plus it delivers significant time savings. Whether generating content ideas, event concepts, or blog headlines, AI rapidly produces numerous options to refine, prioritize, and test.

3. Create personalized assistants to optimize recurring tasks

Picture this common scenario: you need to transform messy meeting notes into a polished, detailed report. It's time-consuming and tedious work. The solution? Build a custom AI assistant.

An assistant is essentially a specialized AI model configured for specific needs. You can develop assistants with targeted instructions—imagine one that transforms meeting notes into structured reports, following predefined guidelines for format, context, and tone.

This approach eliminates repetitive instruction-giving. Simply feed the assistant raw notes, and it'll organize information into coherent SWOT analyses, actionable recommendations, or executive summaries.

Assistants can also tap into custom knowledge bases, functioning like dedicated AI libraries. Consider an assistant designed for proposal writing, equipped with a private knowledge base containing all company documentation. When describing a past project with emphasis on collaboration, simply engage this assistant. It pulls relevant information directly from your documentation and structures it into comprehensive responses covering context, challenges, approach, solutions, and outcomes.

Building custom assistants requires zero programming skills. You can automate recurring workflows—from document analysis and report generation to crafting job descriptions.

4. Create tailor-made experiences to engage and stand out

A compelling trend is emerging: companies are increasingly moving away from generic ChatGPT interfaces to embed AI directly into their products and services. This "AI unbundling" creates personalized, intuitive experiences while delivering sophisticated capabilities behind the scenes.

Stripe exemplifies this approach by integrating OpenAI models into their technical documentation, helping developers find answers faster by analyzing and synthesizing information across multiple documents.

Through a collaboration between La Ruche and Mirego, a crowdfunding platform gained AI-powered functionality that helps users craft and customize project descriptions. The AI adjusts tone and length while correcting spelling errors, ultimately improving the quality of campaign proposals.

Apple takes a similar approach, seamlessly weaving AI throughout their ecosystem: generating images in Messages, transforming rough sketches into polished AI illustrations, and enhancing email tone.

This integration strategy isn't about deploying the most powerful AI model—it's about delivering smooth, value-added experiences directly within existing products.

5. GEO: Optimizing content for generative search engines

With the emergence of AI-powered search engines like Perplexity and Bing AI, traditional SEO is evolving toward a new paradigm: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). These platforms don't just rank links—they synthesize information into comprehensive answers, forcing marketers to rethink content strategy to maintain visibility in AI-generated responses.

Here are key GEO best practices to implement: