How AI is Changing Digital Marketing (+ Why Marketers Shouldn’t Panic)

Digital marketers are leveraging AI for nearly every point of the buyer’s journey, from lead generation and analyzing metrics to predicting customer behavior and improving retention. But AI is best used as a helpful tool, not a driving force.

It’s tempting to view artificial intelligence (AI) as just another trend in digital marketing. But as time goes on, its ubiquity is becoming harder to ignore.

These days, AI technology and machine learning are main drivers when it comes to how campaigns are built, optimized, and scaled. But while they can certainly save you time and effort, using them without having a strategy or knowing the best ways to leverage them can have the opposite effect.

From predictive analytics forecasting to generative content, AI-powered tools and platforms are shifting the role of marketers from manually executing tasks and campaigns to strategic implementation to better optimizing.

We chatted with HawkSEM Co-founder and CEO Sam Yadegar for insights into the role of chatbots and generative AI platforms in search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, and digital marketing as a whole.

The tool is the instrument. Strategy is the hands holding it. (Image: Unsplash)

How AI can benefit digital marketing

If AI models weren’t bringing about positive results to marketing campaigns, the buzz would’ve probably died out by now. But that’s not the case.

Rather, we’re seeing these tools provide actionable insights and real-world benefits to nearly all aspects of marketing strategies, from better customer data analysis and conversion rates to email marketing and improved customer engagement.

“AI assists a lot with everything we do,” says Yadegar. “We’re using it for research, ad copy ideation, competitive analysis, trend spotting, and reporting.”

Yadegar says he and his team also have a growing internal prompt library built specifically around the agency’s clients’ goals and industries.

“It’s not generic or plug-and-play, it’s intentional,” he explains. “It’s tuned to each specific client, and we’re adding to it constantly.”

So, where do customization and the human touch factor in when using AI tools?

“This is actually where the real work happens,” Yadegar says. “These AI tools are built to work across thousands of accounts, i.e. one size fits all. Their recommendations are designed for the average account.”

Real-life professionals are the ones bringing the context, competitive landscape, sales cycle, customer experience, product inventory, business goals, and everything else that turns a finished campaign into an effective one.

AI as a marketing tool, not a strategy

“Execution without strategy is just noise at scale,” says Yadegar. “Anyone can spin up an AI tool and let it optimize. The question is, what are you optimizing toward?”

If you haven’t defined the right conversion signals, the right business outcomes, the right guardrails, you’re just going faster in the wrong direction.

Our experience has shown us that AI works best when it’s used to amplify your strategy. If you leverage AI but your marketing strategy is weak, AI just amplifies that too.

Yadegar offers this metaphor: think of it like a scalpel vs. a surgeon.

“A scalpel is an incredible piece of technology,” he says. “It’s precise, effective, and purpose-built, but it doesn’t perform surgery. The surgeon does.”

AI tools should be looked at like scalpels. They don’t understand your business, they don’t notice that your top-converting marketing campaign is cannibalizing your brand terms, and they’re not picking up the phone when a Google update tanks your ROAS overnight.

The tool is the instrument. Strategy is the hands holding it.

An AI tool won’t flag that a competitor just dropped their prices, or that your client’s pipeline quality shifted, or that a new product launch should completely change your bidding strategy. (Image: Unsplash)

The AI digital marketing tools we recommend

From aligning messaging to eliminating repetitive tasks, data-driven AI tools can help you optimize better and reach goals faster. Here are a few of our favorites.

• Optmyzr: This multi-pronged tool helps marketers automate bid adjustments, segmentation, surface optimization opportunities, and streamline reporting across Google Ads accounts, with streamlined workflows and AI features that help you iterate faster and more efficiently.
• Clearscope: This platform streamlines SEO-primed content creation by suggesting keywords to include, ideas for structuring your copy, and real-time grading so you can see how your content is primed to stack up in search results.
• ChatGPT/Claude: Marketers use these popular platforms to generate outlines, brainstorm angles, and produce rough drafts that can then be shaped into something that aligns with a brand’s content calendar, target audience, and brand voice.
• Jasper: Jasper is built for marketing teams that need structured, repeatable content workflows — particularly for ad copy, email campaigns, and landing pages at scale.
• Semrush: Semrush leverages AI to enhance its wide range of offerings, from keyword research and competitor data analytics to site audits and performance tracking.
• Canva: Don’t have a full-time designer in-house? Canva allows you to create on-brand visuals quickly, making it ideal for social media assets, presentations, and multimedia collateral.
• Buffer: Buffer simplifies social media management through scheduling and performance tracking, so you can reach the right followers on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and X, at the right time.
• HubSpot: The marketing platform’s suite of AI tools include blog and social post generators, as well as virtual assistants to help with email content, web building, reporting, and more.

Further reading: How to Use Generative AI for Content Marketing: Tools + Pro Tips

AI mistakes for marketers to avoid

AI-driven marketing continues to grow in popularity. But before you lean too heavily on marketing automation, make sure you and your team are set up to avoid falling into one of these common AI marketing traps.

Putting too much trust in AI tools

“A mistake is trusting the tool more than your judgment,” says Yadegar. “These tools react to historical data. They don’t anticipate.”

An AI tool won’t flag that a competitor just dropped their prices, or that your client’s pipeline quality shifted, or that a new product launch should completely change your bidding strategy.

They don’t join strategy calls. They don’t talk to the sales team. “Marketers get into trouble when they set it, forget it, and assume the algorithm has it handled,” he adds.

Thinking you don’t need to fact-check, review, and edit

You’ve likely seen chatter about “AI tone” — the distinctly neutral voice that is often a dead giveaway that a social post or other piece of AI-generated content marketing.

While it can be tempting to save time by simply copying and pasting AI content and calling it a day, you may actually be undermining your efforts in the process.

While natural language processing has come a long way in making AI outputs sound less robotic, it’s still crucial to ensure what you’re publishing is high-quality, accurate, and properly reflective of your brand.

No matter how the content was generated, everything your company publishes should be reviewed by a human with knowledge of the subject and your target audience’s demographics, needs, and pain points.

Automating just because you can

It seems like every day brings a new AI-driven tool claiming to make a marketer’s job easier. But the more automation you add into your processes, the more beholden you become to these platforms.

That’s not an inherently bad thing, but the fact is that these platforms sometimes crash, or have outages, or just plain get things wrong. If you rely too heavily on automation, you could risk a sub-par customer experience that could have been avoided by more hands-on attention.

Customer needs should always be top of mind, and they shouldn’t be sacrificed under the premise of saving a bit of time.

The takeaway

The use of AI is already deeply entrenched in the big tech brands you likely use every day. Google and Meta’s own AI is already running inside your account 24/7.

Smart Bidding, Performance Max, audience targeting all have sophisticated automation and AI algorithms baked right in. The result: when you add a third-party AI tool on top of that, you’re running automation on top of automation.

“That environment doesn’t need more automation, it needs sharper strategy feeding it the right signals,” says Yadegar. “That’s the focus, not managing keywords manually, but thinking harder about what you’re telling the algorithm to chase.”

There are plenty of use cases that point to using artificial intelligence with positive results. But our decades of experience have taught us that there’s no substitute for keeping personalized experiences at the heart of your marketing efforts.

Still not sure how to integrate AI marketing into your strategy? We can make it happen — connect with us to find out how.