13 Ways to Use AI in Digital Marketing (& Why You Should)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere — it's no longer a distant concept or a luxury reserved for tech giants. It’s here, right in our hands, and it’s already reshaping customer interaction with online brands.

Marketers know it, too. AI is a top priority for marketers around the world, with 75% already using or testing it in their workflows — and yes, they’re seeing returns.

Still, knowing that AI matters and knowing how to use it are very different things. In this article, we’ll break down what AI in digital marketing really means, list out top AI digital marketing tools, and share real-world examples to help you figure out where artificial intelligence fits into your digital marketing strategy.

What is AI in Digital Marketing?

AI in digital marketing is exactly what it sounds like: using artificial intelligence to help you become a stronger, faster marketer. This includes things like analyzing data, understanding customer behavior, automating busywork, personalizing content, predicting outcomes, and making smarter decisions across your marketing channels.

Behind the scenes, it’s powered by a few core technologies:

• Machine learning (ML) spots patterns, gets smarter over time, and improves performance
• Natural language processing (NLP) understands and generates human language
• Predictive analytics forecasts what’s likely to happen next
• Generative AI creates text, images, and even videos from a prompt

Remember, AI isn’t here to replace you. Savvy marketing teams use it to handle the heavy lifting, so you can focus on messaging, storytelling, and big-picture thinking.

Why You Should Care About AI in Digital Marketing

If you’re drowning in data, racing to keep up with content demands, and trying to meet sky-high customer expectations with the same (or smaller) team, it’s time to leverage AI.

AI fills the gap between growing demands and stagnant team sizes. It automates the repetitive stuff, pulls insights out of messy data, and delivers personalization at a scale no team could manage on their own. Every customer gets relevance, speed, and a tailored experience without burning out your team.

Even better? AI gives marketers breathing room. By automating analysis, testing, and execution, it frees you up to focus on strategy, creativity, and big-picture decisions without sacrificing quality.

That’s why AI integration in marketing strategy has more than doubled in recent years, and global AI marketing tech spending is rising to the tune of billions each year. The reality is that if you’re not using AI, you’re behind.

Pros & Cons of AI in Marketing

Properly using AI in digital advertising can completely change the game, boosting productivity, unlocking fresh ideas, and driving data-driven decisions. But it’s not without its tradeoffs. Let’s take a look at the good and the bad:

Pros of AI in Digital Marketing

• Stronger ROI: Used strategically, AI improves targeting, performance, and returns without blowing up your budget or headcount.
• Personalized experiences: Customers want to feel seen, not spammed. AI lets you tailor content, offers, and interactions at scale without drowning in tedious manual work. In fact, 71% of consumer-facing brands credit AI with enabling real-time personalization.
• Smarter, data-based decisions: AI spots patterns, trends, and insights in large data sets that humans miss, helping you make informed choices and giving you a real competitive edge.
• More speed and productivity: 76% of marketing leaders say AI has significantly improved productivity and strategic execution, and it’s easy to see why. By automating repetitive tasks, accelerating analysis, and even generating copy and artwork, AI significantly frees up teams’ time.
• Faster testing and optimization: AI also makes it easier to test ideas, learn quickly, and refine marketing campaigns in real time, leading to stronger performance.
• Better predictions: From demand to behavior, AI forecasts what’s coming and gives you actionable insights so you can plan ahead.

Cons of AI in Digital Marketing

• Data quality and accuracy issues: AI is only as good as the data it’s fed. 30% of AI users report inaccurate outputs at least once, which can lead to unhelpful recommendations and potentially costly decisions.
• Privacy and data security concerns: AI runs on data, and lots of it. 41% of chief marketing officers say data exposure is their top AI worry, making strong governance, secure tools, and clear data policies a necessity.
• Copyright gray areas: AI-generated content can raise ownership questions, especially when training data isn’t transparent. Without oversight, you might accidentally publish content that isn’t 100% original.
• Bias and ethical issues: AI models learn from historical data and can unintentionally reflect or amplify existing biases. Studies show bias in up to 38.6% of AI-generated facts, which is why human review still matters.

AI Digital Marketing Tools That Will Make Your Life Easier

So, which AI tools should you use? It depends on what you need them for. Here are a few AI marketing solutions you’ve probably heard of (and maybe some you haven’t):

• ChatGPT: With 800 million weekly active users, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is one of the most popular AI tools — and for good reason. You can use it to brainstorm ideas, generate outlines, summarize research, draft copy, repurpose content, and more.
• Claude: Similarly, Claude is widely used for writing, analysis, and long-form content support.
• Jasper.ai: Jasper.ai is also one of the top digital marketing AI tools for text generation. Whether you need catchy headlines, engaging ad copy, or carefully crafted long-form content, Jasper can help.
• Gemini: Need help with research, content creation, data analysis, or even image generation? Google’s Gemini has you covered.
• Leonardo.Ai: Leonardo.Ai is a powerful AI image generator that’s completely revolutionizing how we source images. All you have to do is type in a bit of text, and it will create images. No more searching stock libraries, commissioning photoshoots, or designing assets from scratch!
• Drift: The Drift chatbot enables real-time conversations with visitors, enhancing lead generation, reducing drop-off rates, and enhancing customers’ impressions of your company.
• Tableau: Built for data visualization and analysis, Tableau’s products can help you turn complex datasets into clear dashboards, trends, and forecasts.
• Surfer SEO: Mastering search engine optimization (SEO) and making the most of it isn’t easy, but Surfer SEO lifts the burden by giving you SEO recommendations that will help your pages climb the SERPs.
• Meta Ads Manager: Behind the scenes, Meta Ads Manager relies heavily on AI to optimize targeting, bidding, and creative delivery across Facebook and Instagram. You’ll be able to set your goals and messaging, while Meta Ads Manager can continuously adjust campaigns to improve performance and maximize ad spend ROI.
• Mailchimp: You can count on Mailchimp’s AI to predict best send times, personalize content, create multi-step campaigns, optimize performance, and more.
• Buffer: When it comes to social media management, Buffer relies on AI to streamline scheduling, analyze performance, and suggest improvements to posting strategies. It supports 11 social platforms and powers millions of posts each month.

These are just a fraction of the many AI digital marketing tools out there. You don’t need all of them, and you shouldn’t just go with the first one you see. Test out a few and see what works best. The best AI tools are the ones that fit your goals, save time, and make your life easier.

How to Use AI in Digital Marketing: 13 Tried-and-True Strategies

Now let’s get into the nitty-gritty: how to actually use AI in your marketing strategy. While there are endless applications, here are some ways you can get started:

1. Content Creation

Between brainstorming campaign ideas, writing ads, drafting landing pages, sending emails, and producing long-form content, it’s easy for even the most content marketing teams to feel stretched thin. Deadlines don’t slow down, resources don’t magically grow on trees, and there are only 24 hours in a day (and even the most passionate writers don’t want to spend all of them creating content).

Enter AI. Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Jasper can:

• Brainstorm topics
• Build outlines
• Repurpose existing content
• Generate headline, CTA, or copy variations
• Draft first versions in your brand voice in a fraction of the time

Just be sure to review and refine the output so speed and scale don’t come at the expense of consistency or quality.

2. Image & Video Creation

From social media posts and display ads to landing pages and email campaigns, the demand for high-quality images and video ads never lets up. Visual content drives customer engagement, but producing it at scale means more time, more specialized skills, and often a bigger budget than most teams have.

Enter tools like Canva, DALL-E, and Leonardo.ai. These platforms don’t just generate images, social graphics, and short-form videos (though they’re great at that). They can also resize assets for various channels, suggest layouts or visual styles based on your brand, and develop templates without compromising quality or cohesion. Since there’s no need to start from scratch each time, you can scale visual production, trim down design cycles, test creative variations with ease, and move faster across campaigns.

3. Social Listening

Social media moves fast. Really fast. And trying to manually track every mention, comment, and trend across platforms simply doesn’t scale.

AI-powered tools like SproutSocial, Hootsuite, and Brandwatch uncover meaningful insights, emerging trends, new opportunities, and shifts in audience behavior in real time. You’ll know what people care about and can adjust your content, messaging, and campaigns to stay relevant and in tune with your audience. No endless scrolling required!

4. Sentiment Analysis

Knowing what customers say about your brand is important, but knowing how they feel is better. With customer sentiment visibility, you can identify potential problems earlier, refine messaging, and make effective choices to improve customers’ experiences. And AI can help you get there.

Solutions like Profound, Brandwatch, MonkeyLearn, and Sprout Social use NLP to evaluate and classify tone, emotion, and intent, meaning there’s no need to manually scour reviews, social posts, and surveys to understand sentiment and spot patterns.

The result? Faster, more thoughtful responses, smarter messaging, fewer brand surprises, and stronger performance. In fact, companies relying on AI-powered sentiment analysis see 25% more engagement in brand campaigns. Not bad for letting the robots read the room.

5. Customer Service

Great marketing doesn’t stop at the campaign. Customers also want to feel heard, helped, and taken care of. You can’t be online 24/7, but AI can.

Chatbots like Drift and Zendesk rely on NLP to:

• Answer common questions
• Guide users through key actions
• Route more complex issues to the right person
• Personalize content and messaging
• Anticipate customers’ needs
• Streamline purchasing
• Nurture leads
• Schedule demo calls

Think of AI-driven bots as your always-on, no-bad-days customer service reps. Customers receive faster support, your team gains time back, and retention gets a nice boost.

6. Customer Segmentation

There’s no denying it: customer segmentation works. In fact, 77% of email marketing ROI stems from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns — and the pattern applies across channels.

However, turning growing piles of customer data into accurate, meaningful target audience data is far from easy. It’s a slow, expensive process, but AI makes segmentation far more manageable by analyzing behavior, demographics, purchase history, and engagement patterns. You’ll know who to prioritize and how to speak to them in a way that converts.

7. SEO Optimization

Want to appear at the top of search results instead of collecting dust on page three? AI can help get you there.

AI-powered SEO tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Surfer SEO take the guesswork out of keyword research. They analyze massive data sets, size up competitors, uncover keyword gaps, and flag ranking opportunities. So, you can say goodbye to spending hours manually researching keywords or, worse, randomly picking a few keywords and hoping for the best.

8. PPC Advertising

PPC advertising, or pay-per-click advertising, isn’t just about getting seen. It’s also about getting clicked and converting. And with every click costing money, there’s no room for guesswork. You need your ads in front of the right audience, backed by strong messaging, and continuously optimized to deliver a strong ROI.

Luckily, AI-driven tools like Semrush, Zapier, and AdEspresso can help with every part of the PPC advertising process, including:

• Keyword research
• Bidding and targeting
• Ad creation
• Ad placement and scheduling
• Predictive analysis

9. Email Marketing & Personalization

With 4.59 billion email users and $9.7 billion in email marketing revenue worldwide, email marketing certainly isn’t dead. It’s crowded though, so simply sending weekly emails isn’t enough. How can you stand out? With timely, relevant, and personalized emails.

AI makes that kind of personalization possible at scale. While something like 6Sense can help you understand intent, tools like Hubspot and Mailchimp help manage customer data, analyze subscriber behavior, and automate personalized email workflows.

You’ll move beyond one-size-fits-all email campaigns and can send tailored subject lines, content, and offers, all without endless manual segmentation and personalization. Hello higher open rates, stronger engagement, and better conversions!

10. Predictive Analytics

No one can see the future, but AI-driven predictive analytics come close. Google Analytics, Salesforce, HubSpot, and other predictive analytics solutions analyze purchases, email opens, time-on-page, engagement metrics, and other data to forecast conversion likelihood, churn risk, demand, campaign performance, and more.

And top teams are already on it: 92% of the top-performing marketing teams rely on AI-powered predictive analytics.

With AI, you can:

• Anticipate what’s likely to happen next instead of reacting after the fact
• Prioritize high-impact opportunities
• Budget more strategically
• Adjust campaigns before issues arise
• Develop more effective campaigns that boost ROI
• Make decisions grounded in data-backed predictions

11. Lead Scoring

Not all leads are created equal. Some are ready to buy, while others are still in the early research phase. Lead scoring helps prioritize prospects based on how likely they are to convert, so your time (and budget) go where they matter most.

Traditionally, lead scoring relied on static rules and surface-level data like job titles or company size, but AI changes that completely. Now, you can rely on Salesforce, Hubspot, 6sense, and other tools to analyze real-time engagement, behavioral data, intent signals, and more. They’ll sum everything up in a tidy score, so you can quickly see which leads are sales-ready and which need further nurturing, shorten sales cycles, and raise conversion rates. Compared to traditional methods, AI lead scoring improves conversion efficiency by 31%!

12. Data Analysis

Feel like you’re drowning in data sets? Can’t make heads or tails out of dashboards, spreadsheets, and reports that keep piling up? AI can gather information from all your marketing platforms and then turn all that data into insights you can actually use.

Thanks to AI, you can:

• Detect data anomalies and performance issues early
• Predict customer trends and behaviors
• Personalize messages and experiences based on real data
• Develop marketing assets and campaigns that resonate and perform
• Step back and understand the bigger picture across your channels

It’s no wonder companies using AI for customer data analysis achieved an average 38% boost in marketing ROI.

13. A/B Testing & CRO

Tiny tweaks can drive big wins, but only if you know what to test. That’s where A/B testing and conversion rate optimization (CRO) come in, and AI makes both faster and far more effective. In fact, brands that use AI-powered A/B testing have seen conversion rates up to 28% higher.

Instead of manually deciding what to test, tracking results, and diving into the data to draw conclusions, AI and digital marketing tools like Optimizely, VWO, and Adobe Target automatically spot testing opportunities, prioritize changes, analyze results as they roll in, and even adjust variations in real time.

Examples of AI in Digital Marketing

So, where is AI making marketing waves in the real world? Pretty much everywhere. Here are a few big-name AI digital marketing examples you might recognize:

• Netflix: Netflix uses AI to ensure the right messages reach the right people at the right time. By analyzing viewing and browsing history, user profile information, watch patterns, and more, AI powers personalized recommendations, promotional messaging, and even custom artwork to keep customers coming back for more.
• Amazon: AI is at the core of Amazon’s personalization engine. It analyzes customer behavior and sales data to forecast demand, recommend products, and send targeted emails. This improves conversions, boosts customer satisfaction, encourages repeat purchases, and drives stronger ROI across the customer lifecycle.
• Sephora: Beyond using AI for SEO and landing page generation, Sephora uses AI to create more interactive, personalized shopping experiences through tools like virtual try-ons, shade matching, and chat-based assistants. Customers using Virtual Artist are 3x more likely to complete their purchases, and the average app session has quadrupled. Since introducing AI, Sephora’s online sales have climbed from $580 million in 2016 to $3 billion in 2022.

Amplify Your Digital Marketing Strategy with Terra

AI has opened the door to faster workflows, smarter decisions, and more personalized marketing, but technology alone won’t get you there. You need the right foundation, clear goals, and a team that knows how to use these tools thoughtfully and responsibly to see the most value from using AI in digital marketing.

Experimenting with AI for the first time? Ready to start tackling more advanced AI use cases? Want to apply AI where it actually makes sense? At Terra, we can help you develop an AI-driven marketing strategy that works.

Explore our marketing services or become a client today!