The future of marketing is here.
AI-infused tools and systems are helping to run marketing processes in areas that are essential for making better business decisions, serving customer needs faster and in a more personalised manner, and ultimately driving up conversion rates.
And did you know that running your marketing agency with AI can tremendously expand the capabilities of your team so that you can accomplish far more, even with fewer numbers on your marketing squad?
However, it is not just about completing marketing tasks for your clients at breakneck speed. Beyond short-term wins, running your marketing agency with AI promises long-term progress as it allows you the benefit of scalability and adaptability—something traditional marketing agencies struggle with.
In other words, you will find it easier to grow to take on more clients and more complex projects, establishing a loyal client base over time as your successes with achieving marketing KPIs translate into credibility and trust in your AI marketing agency.
What is more? As your experience in running your marketing agency with AI grows, you place yourself in a good position to become a thought leader in your industry, one that sets a pace for others to follow.
Alright, I could rap all day long about the thrilling opportunities that running your marketing agency with AI unlocks, but let’s get to the root of the matter, shall we?
How do you even start to run your marketing agency with AI? How do you implement AI automation while keeping the human touch? What other precautions should you be aware of?
These and many other questions will be addressed as this story progresses. Keep reading.
Set Up AI-Powered Workflows
A key aim of setting up AI-powered marketing processes is to automate many repetitive tasks that absorb a huge amount of your employees’ time, freeing them to direct their energies to more complex tasks that require more creative work and nuanced human, cultural, social, contextual, and emotional understanding.
The goal here is not to treat these AI solutions simply as on-demand assistants but to use them to automate much of the specific structured order steps in content creation or email marketing workflows as the case or need may be.
These workflows outline the sequence of steps, AI’s role in each one, and the collaborative rhythm for all the different components of each task.
Setting up these workflows requires that, as an AI marketing agency, your team is clear about what processes (be it content creation, copywriting, or something else) are taking up excessive time as well as the goal of improving the identified process (maybe reduced cost or faster project delivery, etc.). You will even have to guide your team through vetting each AI tool based on its current capabilities and limitations when it comes to tackling the process at hand.
For instance, one AI tool might excel at content creation more than another, and a particular AI tool might be built just for data analysis. Don’t worry; I’ll give a rundown of 17 tools for several aspects of digital marketing in a bit.
So, how do you get started with setting up AI-powered workflows?
Firstly, you need to identify the pain points or bottlenecks in your existing marketing processes. This will show you suitable use cases (e.g., content or image asset generation) where you could deploy AI tools and solutions.
The second step is to outline your entire workflow from start to finish and then determine where AI could bring a meaningful bump in speed, quality, or cost reduction. The precaution here is to make sure you are only bringing AI in where it’s relevant and not outsourcing your entire workflow to AI.
The third step is to select and integrate the best AI tools for the identified process. Earlier on in this section, I promised to give a rundown of the 17 best AI tools for each aspect of digital marketing. Now, here it is:
Best AI SEO Tools
ChatGPT
Rating: 9.2/10
Free plan: Yes, free forever (limited access to ChatGPT 4o)
Pricing: $20 for ChatGPT Plus
Best for: best for crafting content that pleases search engine algorithms and utilizes insights from user behavior.
Contentshake AI
Rating: 9/10
Free plan: Yes, for seven days
Pricing: 60/month
Best for: Creating SEO long-form content that integrates SEO insights from Semrush’s robust competitive database.
Perplexity
Rating: 7/10
Free plan: Yes, free forever
Pricing: $20 for pro plan
Best for: Conducting high-quality research that scours all over the internet and even from your uploaded files.
Semrush Co-pilot
Rating: 9/10
Free plan: Yes, included with a Semrush 7-day free trial
Pricing: Free to use with a Semrush subscription
Best for: Automating routine SEO analysis and planning tasks and delivering personalized recommendations for your website right within Semrush
Best AI Tools for Social Media Management
Buffer
Rating: 8.6/10
Free plan: Yes (forever)
Pricing: From $6 monthly upwards
Best for: for scheduling posts across up to 11 social media platforms and ensuring that your content is optimized to align with each social media’s algorithmic rules, style, and audience
Vista Social
Rating: 9.5/10
Free plan: limited free trial for 14 days
Pricing: from $39 monthly
Best for: managing all of your social media accounts from one place and customizing your posts to the requirements of each social media channel
Audiense
Rating: 9.9/10
Free plan: Yes
Pricing: From $30 for X marketing and $1499 for Audience Intelligence
Best for: To fetch rich information about your audience on everything from customer segmentation profiles and cultural insights to insider knowledge of leading voices in conversations and survey panels.
Best AI Tools for Email Marketing
Reply.io
Rating: 9.6/10
Free plan: No
Pricing: From $99 monthly
Best for: Mass email replies complete with all the nuances that will appeal to your client business’s audience subscribers.
Jasper.ai
Rating: 9/10
Free plan: No
Pricing: From $39 monthly
Best for: creating engaging email copy infused with your brand’s voice and presentation style. Also offers a brand suite of apps and features for various aspects of email marketing.
Zapier
Rating: 9/10
Free plan: Yes
Pricing: from $19 monthly
Best for: connecting your email marketing platforms with other applications you use and expanding their email marketing automation features
Best AI Tools for Lead Generation
Customers.ai
Rating: 8.8/10
Free plan: No
Pricing: From $199
Best for: revealing a lot of information about your anonymous website visitors, such as their names, emails, demographics, website behavior, engagement levels, interests, and intents based on browsing patterns.
Seamless AI
Rating: 7.1/10
Free plan: Yes
Pricing: Customised pricing. Contact sales
Best for: finding the accurate contact addresses and professional profiles of potential leads for your products and services from its massive database of over 2 billion contacts and over 120 million companies
Carrd
Rating: 9.2/10
Free plan: No
Pricing: From $9 yearly
Best for: building responsive, all-device-friendly landing pages for harnessing your mobile traffic, selling products, or building a subscriber base.
Best AI Tools for Content Creation
Writesonic
Rating: 8.3/10
Free plan: Yes
Pricing: From $49 monthly
Best for: creating marketing content that outperforms the competition by integrating a lot of insights from competitor analysis
INK Editor
Rating: 9.6/10
Free plan: No
Pricing: from $49 monthly
Best for: quickly creating engagement-boosting text and visuals that hit your audience’s pain points and needs with a variety of storytelling techniques
Anyword
Rating: 9.6/10
Free plan: No
Pricing: from $49 monthly
Best for: Best for AI-powered content that sounds as human as possible, is customised to your audience’s buyer persona, and ranks well against the top performers in your industry.
Grammarly
Rating: 9.1/10
Free plan: Yes
Pricing: From $30 monthly
Best for: Best for ridding your content of any grammatical flaws and improving its tone to avoid being misunderstood.
Keeping the Human Touch Even With AI Automation
While AI tools can be extremely useful in generating content pieces in bulk, they cannot replace the experience, creativity, and nuanced insights that make us human and make our content resonate with other humans.
As an AI marketing agency, it is especially important to remember that you will be doing business with other humans, not with robots, and the same is utterly true of the clients you will serve with any marketing service such as content creation, lead generation, email marketing or something else.
It is best to view even the most advanced AI systems as exactly what they are—robots that are programmed to follow instructions—albeit very well. With that in mind, if you want your AI tools to create anything that is tailored to your target audience, then you’ve got to give very detailed instructions to that effect and then crosscheck the output to spot inconsistencies, biases, unethical content, and other errors that need ironing out.
Adhering to that precaution becomes critical when you consider that AI systems are still highly limited in understanding context and weaving emotion into their output. It is now up to you to provide very detailed prompts that guardrail your AI assistants to perform at their best and produce really amazing content in the shortest time possible.
Google’s (entirely appropriate) emphasis on EEAT (experience, expertise, authority, and trust) in their search algorithm is also another factor you can’t hope to discount. Although the human-esque acronym is not a ranking factor or a checklist, it is a core part of Google’s robust strategy to combat the increasing prevalence of AI-mass-produced spam content on the internet.
Gone are the days when first-hand experience and expertise didn’t matter. Now, to stand out as unique, you must have read the book you are reviewing, using the software you are recommending, and so on. The point is you must have experienced what you are writing about.
The implication for AI marketing agencies? Use AI to blitz through time-consuming tasks, but always rely on your subject matter experts—go hire if you have none—to do the actual creative work of putting together something that will resonate with your client’s audiences.
Also, leave it to AI to generate outlines and headlines and even brainstorm content, but let human experts turn those ideas into real stories backed by experience and expertise.
AI also excels in handling repetitive administrative tasks but let your human team handle high-value strategic projects.
Even more precautions are required to strike the right balance between the human touch and AI automation when it comes to customer service. AI chatbots can run 24/7 and lead to drastically reduced response times, but none of that should come at the expense of the emotional connection and nuanced understanding that your clients would rightly expect of you.
The key here is to restrict AI customer service to what’s strictly necessary such as handling inquiries on routine questions or quickly surfacing answers to questions already answered in the FAQs. For more complex issues or when a client is getting frustrated, program your AI systems to quickly transfer the conversation to a human support agent. Give your clients the choice to speak with human support right from the outset.
10 Strategies For Running a Marketing Agency With AI to Maintain a Competitive Edge
Build a Strong Value Proposition
Unless you are breaking new ground with an unheard-of idea, chances are there is a multitude of marketing agencies that promise businesses and individuals the same benefits you are hoping to lure clients with.
The question is, what’s different (in a better way) about your spin on helping clients satisfy their marketing needs and reach their sales targets?
That’s where your value proposition comes in. It’s a clear and short statement of why you are the best choice.
It’s both your unique selling point and a critical conversion factor. You can have the best product or offer the best service, but their potential will remain hidden if there’s no strong value proposition to call out their differentiating factor.
But please don’t make the mistake of confusing a value proposition with your mission statement, tagline, or slogan. While they overlap in some ways, the last three have their own distinct form, function, and context of usage. Learn more about their differences in this HubSpot article by Laura M. Browning.
It makes sense to align with your management about your value proposition. There should be internal agreement about what a feasible and sustainable value proposition would be for your AI marketing agency, considering its strengths, resources, competitors, and weaknesses.
AI tools can also help simplify the task of writing your value proposition. Jasper and ChatGPT, for example, could help clear writer’s block and generate a variety of ideas and perspectives from which to craft your value prop.
Leverage Data-Driven Decision-Making With AI
As an AI marketing agency, you are saddled with the huge responsibility of taking care of your client’s business needs. As your user base expands, the amount of data you need to process around their unique market factors and consumer behavior also increases exponentially.
Now, how will you run your marketing agency with AI in the context of data-driven decision-making? It will be by deploying AI tools and AI-powered solutions to process these vast datasets of information quickly and without the cognitive biases or sentimental factors that plague human analysis.
This will significantly boost your chances of uncovering patterns and correlations that could have slipped past your radar if using human data analysts alone.
In the long run, you will be better equipped to make effective business decisions on behalf of your clients and run their marketing campaigns forearmed with objective insights rather than subjective opinions and judgment.
Assisting your data-driven decision marketing efforts with AI also lends itself well to analyzing your client’s past marketing campaigns with a view to optimizing future ones. AI data analysis tools can go over their past successful campaigns, harvesting metrics like website traffic, social media engagement, conversion rates, and more to isolate whatever worked well and use it as a basis for optimizing future campaigns.
The more you use AI to assist with your data-driven decision-making, the more control you have over your digital marketing with greater ROI in view.
Specialize in a Niche Market
Choosing the right niche is a key preparatory step that will help you cement your reputation as an industry leader in that field as clients begin to discern the unique benefits that come from making you their go-to AI marketing agency amidst an ever-swelling sea of competitors.
Choosing a profitable niche boils down to several factors, the foremost of which is to increase your ROI. To zero in on this high-potential niche, you need to consider not only your strengths, successes, and available resources but also your competitors and the market demand.
And what better way is there to spy into your competitors’ successes and failures than to leverage the best AI tools for marketing agencies? AI-powered platforms like Sprout Social (for social media analytics), Semrush and Ahrefs (for competitor SEO analysis), Klue and Crayon (for competitive intelligence and competitor analysis), and more are powerful ways to get a backdoor into your competitors’ marketing strategies and identify the gaps in their system oblivious to them right now.
If competitor analysis exposes areas where you can undercut your competition’s offers or one-up their strategies, market research gives you a clear view of where there is a lot of potential and where the needs of consumers, in general, have not received the right attention. AI-powered tools like Google Trends and keyword research platforms are there for you.
Over time, your clients may begin to give you their cents for more services as you put up a strong showing within your niche. This can lead to even more opportunities for growth.
Offer Performance-Based Pricing
For an AI marketing agency, performance-based pricing is a no-brainer. Here’s why:
When running your marketing agency with AI, the AI tools and systems you use for various aspects of your services can significantly maximize the efficiency of your efforts and the quality of your results. This bolsters your confidence in your marketing agency’s ability to deliver just the results your client businesses need.
That being the case, you can liaise with your clients to agree on key performance indicators (KPIs) that define success—clear expectations for you, the service provider, and outcomes that are directly linked to your client’s business goals.
For instance, if you, as a marketing agency, are helping a product review website gain more visitors, success could be defined as an X% increase in website traffic every month or before your contract ends.
For you, the digital marketing agency, that target means you should place a greater emphasis on SEO and paid ads. The client gets a measurable outcome or a tangible result for their investment.
You and your client can then decide on whether payment will occur only if that target is met or whether a baseline fee will be paid if you hit half of the X% target.
Either way, you prove to your client that you are ready to commit yourself to their success and that you are taking full responsibility for their ROI. This performance-based pricing system also simultaneously gives you financial motivation to exceed expectations and minimizes the risk to your clients by ensuring that they get what they pay for.
Master the Art of Personalization—With AI
As a digital marketing agency run with AI, personalization is at the core of your mission to help your clients crush their business goals.
Research by consultant McKinsey shows that for a whopping 71% of consumers, personalized content is a must and 76% of those consumers get frustrated when their interactions with businesses aren’t personalized.
You get the jokes. Consumers expect their favorite brands to deliver personalized experiences to them and these brands, enterprises, and companies will also require such from you.
Use AI-powered tools to collect consumer data about user behavior, preferences, and interactions along with contextual data like location. Then, use the patterns and trends that crystallize to segment your clients’ business audience based on similar behavior and characteristics.
That will allow you to (again with AI) recommend products, services, and content that aligns with user preferences and demographics or take a consumer to specific sections of your client’s website or app that are most helpful to that consumer.
Aside from personalized and intelligent product, service, and content recommendations, personalized ad targeting is another way you help your corporate clients maximize the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and spend the least amount of money to reach the right audience with the right message.
Build Authority with Thought Leadership
Thought leadership is something that you can’t afford to neglect as an AI marketing agency. No doubt, any brand relying on your help to grow its customer base will also want to become an authority brand in their industry, for which they will need you to develop thought-provoking content pieces.
However, your marketing agency will also need to stand out as an industry leader among a growing pack of competitors. You will need thought leadership content to establish enough credibility to attract and retain enough loyal clients who trust you and are eager to recommend you to others.
Though leadership and content marketing share some similarities, they diverge in radical ways. Both of them involve serving your audience with insightful and thought-provoking pieces, but one (content marketing) is simply a stepping stone to the other (thought leadership).
In thought leadership, the focus is less on converting and more on establishing your AI marketing agency as an expert in that industry. You are not merely validating your reliability or even authenticity but are cementing your status as an influential authority in that industry—someone who can proffer unique insights and unexpected solutions that challenge the status quo and even trigger dynamic shifts in the industry.
Your thought leadership content could be anything from counter-narrative opinions that challenge the conventional wisdom of your industry to industry analysis that discusses and derives practical lessons from trends and industry disruptors. You should also get your clients to speak for you, as people put more stock in what others say about you than in what you claim about yourself.
Use AI to Provide Excellent Customer Service
As an increasing number of businesses throw their weight on your AI marketing agency for answers to their marketing needs and problems, you can expect to be bombarded with questions about your services as well as complaints and disputes around technical issues, financial commitments, service guarantees, and more.
An unaided human support team would quickly be overwhelmed by the deluge of queries anxiously waiting to be replied to, and no client would be happy with being placed in long queues enduring 30-minute long wait times or more. If that experience turns out to be a pattern, you’d corporate customers won’t have much reason to stick with you for much longer.
With AI-aided customer service, however, that grim possibility is all but waived aside as AI-powered chatbots and agents can improve response times and provide better experiences—round the clock, 24/7.
These chatbots and virtual assistants can effectively mimic human interaction and answer routine questions, handle initial customer inquiries, and reply to queries about order status, returns, and product information.
An example of AI customer support in action is LenosTube Super AI. For a bit of context, LenosTube specializes in growing your YouTube channel with authentic organic followers, views, comments, subscribers, and more.
In my testing of the AI chatbot on LenosTube, I pretended to be a visitor to the site who was interested in knowing more about their services, so I decided to task the AI chatbot with answering all of my questions.
I started with a question that had already been answered in the FAQ section of the website, and the AI spat out an identical answer to the one in the FAQs. This shows that the AI is deeply integrated with LenosTube’s customer service system and is continually updated to reflect the latest in LenosTube’s product and service offerings. That’s something an exemplary AI marketing agency would want to replicate with their customer service.
I then asked about LenosTube’s preferred content strategy for sustained growth, and it gave me something along the lines of:
“LenosTube emphasizes long-term channel development strategies. They recommend producing quality and monetizable content consistently, ideally aiming for at least one video per day. The focus is on building a channel with a well-defined niche, using analytics to understand what works, and engaging viewers to foster loyalty. This method is designed to create sustainable growth rather than just short-term boosts.” 📅✨
This is a well-informed AI chatbot.
Develop Scalable Systems and Processes
Scalability is one of the main ways an AI marketing agency is superior to a traditional one. The goal is to expand to be able to take on more workload, gain more clients, run your marketing agency on autopilot, and, of course, even become a thought leader in your industry.
And who doesn’t like the idea of being able to go on a guilt-free vacation without fear of your business shutting down in your absence?
You will need scalable systems and processes for all of that to happen. These systems grow alongside you and create value beyond client projects.
They ensure that your agency becomes more efficient at everything it does, such as handling more clients, campaigns, and team members as you win more complex projects with strict deadlines, near-perfect deliverables, and clearly defined team assignments.
This kind of growth is exciting but challenging, and often, the hustle that got you started in the first place just doesn’t cut it anymore.
Scaling up your AI marketing agency involves a host of strategies, such as developing standardized processes for every marketing activity you engage in on behalf of your clients.
You will need to lay even more emphasis on automating repetitive tasks with AI tools and give more priority to signing clients that align with your long-term goals—clients who bring challenging projects that broaden your perspective and who pay you what you are worth.
Invest in basics like better onboarding processes or training programs. Upgrade your tools to maximize efficiency and productivity. Invest in project management tools that can help you coordinate even multi-dimensional projects with relative ease.
Centralise communication by using tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams that bring information, messages, and updates in one place for real-time collaboration, client transparency, and easy file sharing.
Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, the team behind your marketing agency matters more than even the best tools and systems. Make smart hire choices, keep up-to-date with the latest in your industry, and build a culture of empowerment and accountability.
Focus on Long-Term Client Relationships
Building long-term relationships starts with understanding and empathizing with their needs, goals, challenges, vision, and pain points. Use every means at your disposal to research the needs they need to fill and how you can respond to them.
You could attend their webinars or live conferences for that in-person bonding and networking, and you could get more details about their issues with a Google search of their business. Use LinkedIn as well to learn more about their choice of employees. This can fill you in on their work culture and their human relationships management.
When you successfully land these clients, focus on regular, meaningful communication and customer service that addresses their issues satisfactorily without keeping them waiting.
Set well-defined client onboarding processes that clearly communicate what each party (you and they) needs to do at each stage of the project. Also, always show a strong commitment to listening to your client’s feedback and using them to polish the quality of your services.
Developing client relationships that are empathetic rather than defensive (e.g., this is a valid concern vs. you are blowing up things) and leaving a lot of room for structured, heart-to-heart communications are some key ways to build long-lasting relationships.
Stay Adaptable and Keep Learning
As AI technologies keep evolving, they are getting more complex and proficient at taking on more grunt work for AI marketing agencies. AI marketing agencies, too, will have to keep managing large teams with diverse skill sets and executing multi-dimensional projects with tight deadlines.
Added to all of that is the fact that more clients will keep coming, leading to much larger workloads. It’s hard to see that an AI marketing agency is under a lot of pressure to keep adapting to the latest technologies and trends in AI to keep a competitive edge.
AI marketing agencies can stay relevant in this AI age by ensuring that they give their teams effective training on how to use AI tools to automate various marketing tasks.
However, resist any urge to rush your team to switch to the latest AI tools as soon as they are released. Remember, it’s not really about being the first to parade shiny AI tools. Your marketing teams must first learn how to extract every ounce of potential from what they already have so that these AI tools can help them work smarter, not harder.
Challenges and Considerations to Running A Marketing Agency With AI
Finally, here are some speed bumps to avoid to make sure that your AI marketing agency doesn’t suffer from the disadvantages that AI implementation can bring.
Data privacy and security
Data privacy and security are two of the biggest concerns that should weigh on the minds of every AI marketing agency. If you are thinking of starting an AI marketing agency, give deep thought to how your agency will avoid infringing on your customers’ data rights and secure whatever data it collects.
The challenge becomes more frightening when you consider that AI technologies aren’t built with a strong focus on privacy.
Also, with the way personal gadgets, from smartphones to home assistants, armed with all kinds of sensors and trackers, have become a ubiquitous part of our lives, the AI systems on them could collect all kinds of private data from your customers without their knowledge. From there comes the risk of collecting extensive data beyond what is necessary for strictly marketing purposes.
The challenge of data security comes from the fact that marketing databases are huge repositories of consumer data and, as such, are irresistible treasure chests for hackers and other bad actors. You can see why you will need to invest in the most robust data protection systems you can lay your hands on to prevent data breaches and preserve your clients’ trust in you.
Integration with existing systems
As an AI marketing agency, a large part of your concerns will be integrating AI solutions with the SaaS platforms you provide to your clients, and while that kind of pairing can provide unprecedented benefits in the form of a streamlined, personalized user experience amongst other benefits, you will have to grapple with the tasks of finding quality data to feed these AI systems.
You will also have to contend with the challenge of finding talent in the form of data scientists to implement AI-powered solutions without affecting existing SaaS platforms.
Ethical implications
Transparency around AI usage should be highly encouraged among AI marketing agencies as their clients need to know how brands use the data they collect to deliver personalized experiences to these clients. These will at least, help them to make informed choices about their interactions with the marketing agencies.
With transparency concerns come accountability worries, too. As AI systems pervade brand-customer relations in the form of chatbots and automated responses, it can become harder for customers to distinguish between AI-generated replies and human ones. This uncertainty only breeds further discontent when a customer’s specific needs are only half-addressed or ignored altogether.
Final Thoughts—Level Up as You Grow
Running a marketing agency with AI is neither too easy nor fiendishly difficult. You can’t cheat the process by outsourcing all of your client’s content needs and other services to AI, and there is so much to learn along the way.
For starters, invest in the right tools and focus on identifying where AI can automate your repetitive tasks. Stay updated on the latest advancements in how AI can help simplify your work. As you progress, consider leveling up to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
Also, scale up by upgrading your systems to tackle more complex projects with the help of AI, focus on clients that help you grow long-term, and maintain a tight-knit team bonded together by mutual understanding and solid, collaborative communication managed around a central hub.