Key skills for marketing in an AI-driven future

There’s no doubt that generative AI is already having a significant impact on digital marketing and affecting the day-to-day roles and activities of marketers across all disciplines. 

Every iteration of generative AI tools comes with more features and functionality, with more potential applications in marketing. So, just like it’s been ever since generative AI exploded into the mainstream with the introduction of ChatGPT in late 2022,  it can be a major challenge just to keep up with the technology, let alone to dig into what it means for how we do our jobs (or if we even have jobs) in the future. 

A 2023 survey of marketing professionals indicates that many marketers do believe certain jobs within the sector are at high risk, such as content writers (just under 82%), email marketers (just under 43%) and social media managers (just under 34%). But the more realistic outcome is that marketing roles will evolve to include and utilise AI, rather than being replaced by it. This is about more than just marketers learning how to use AI tools well (although that is also important), it’s really about what skills are needed to go beyond this and bring to the table things that AI can help facilitate but can’t actually do in a meaningful way.

In this article, we look at key skills marketers can equip themselves with to genuinely thrive, rather than just survive, through the AI revolution.

Understand how LLMs and other generative AI technologies work

Practically speaking, understanding the basics of how generative AI actually works, especially in relation to the tools used in marketing, is something that all marketers can do. This can be a daunting prospect, especially if you don’t have a technical background, but there are some brilliant free resources out there that can be a big help. 

A couple of examples of useful reading on this topic include:

• Quick guide to generative AI, with some SEO and other marketing-related examples from Semrush.
• What marketers should know about LLMs by EvolveDash.

Getting to grips with how generative AI produces what it does will help you to not only understand how you can best utilise it for your own role and business, but also identify its limitations, along with what you can bring to the party which AI cannot i.e. all of the things that are uniquely human qualities. 

Practise critical and qualitative analysis

AI is great at handling large amounts of data and making some kind of sense of it all. However, generative AI can’t apply context to insights in the same way that humans can. 

Qualitative analysis

As an example, in content marketing and SEO, a common task to perform is a content audit on a website. 

Some AI tools can be very useful in gathering data and metrics on content performance from various sources, then bringing it into one table or sheet in an organised way. You can create custom prompts that will enable AI to score pages/content by your pre-set KPIs and highlight those that need improvement etc. But AI can’t actually tell you if a specific page or piece of content is meeting the current needs of the human users you are trying to reach and connect with in terms of the information you’ve providing. 

Yes, it can tell you when a page was published. No, it can’t tell you if the content includes references to events or cultural happenings that are now out of date and will make your content look old and irrelevant to humans.  

Yes, it can tell you whether a page reaches your criteria for pageviews or engagements, but it can’t tell you whether your content actually solves the user’s problems informationally, whether the tone of voice is right for your specific target audience or how other websites do a better job of communicating similar things.

Essentially, AI tools can give quantitative insights, but they fall down when it comes to qualitative information – they can’t experience your content like a human actually does, because AI isn’t human. 

Critical analysis

In terms of applying critical thinking, it’s all about context. Just because something is a market trend or because a competitor does something a particular way doesn’t make it necessarily right for your business to do the same. 

AI can’t tell you if a trend or strategy aligns with your specific brand ethos, values and objectives, or whether it will resonate with a niche segment of your audience. Only you can know this, by applying your very human experience and knowledge to the idea. 

As anyone who has used generative AI tools knows, the output isn’t always accurate or suitable for the intended purpose. Generative AI can’t make reasoned judgements, it can only replicate or regurgitate information that it has gathered. We’ve probably all seen examples of when AI tools used to produce content have ‘hallucinated’ – simply made up statistics, sources or quotes.

Factual inaccuracies are one thing, but when humans are evaluating generative AI output, we also need to take into account any biases (based on the data fed into the tool), inconsistencies in logic and, of course, ethics. 

Using similar critical analysis skills to those we used during school history lessons to assess the reliability of sources is essential when utilising generative AI in marketing.

Cultivate empathy

Depending on who you talk to, generative AI may or may not be capable of empathy. A 2023 study found that AI chatbots scored significantly higher than medical professionals in the empathy stakes when answering the same questions from patients – but does this say more about the time pressures and potentially the communication skills within the medical profession than about AI? 

Does it even matter whether empathy is ‘real’ or artificial if the human on the other end of the interaction feels heard and understood? Or is artificial empathy from AI even potentially ‘better’ than fake human empathy that pays lip service but isn’t genuine? 

These are important questions that no one really has the answer to yet, but in terms of marketing, AI is not capable of putting itself in the shoes of your customers in the same way that people can. 

By cultivating empathy as a marketer, you’re always focusing on the customer first, rather than on your own agenda, at every stage of your strategy. 

Marketing isn’t just about theory – it’s about forming human connections, which don’t always follow standard logic, and that isn’t something that AI is capable of. Yet. 

Use your conscience and judgement  

AI doesn’t have a conscience. It can ‘learn’ about what might be considered right or wrong, but this very much depends on the specific data used to ‘train’ the specific AI tool or LLM. 

From a marketing perspective, the use of conscience and judgement is absolutely essential. It’s why we get someone else in our team to ‘sense’ check our ideas, or how we know when a particularly good or bad time to publish or release a particular story might be. Do very human marketers sometimes still get things wrong? Absolutely. 

But the ability to use the soft skills we’ve already mentioned, to put yourself in the shoes of your target audience and apply context and judgement to your marketing will help you avoid making big ‘should have read the room’ mistakes like the Kylie Jenner Pepsi advert. 

Take reactive marketing for example. A human marketer can use their conscience and experience to judge if jumping on a particular social media trend on behalf of a brand or releasing an expert comment on a trending topic is the right move. AI has limited memory and context, will not know the intricate nuances of your brand, and so is unlikely to make the same decisions and have the same attitude to risk. 

Developing soft skills that work with AI marketing capabilities

Generative AI is here to stay in marketing, but there is still a lot of ambiguity about its role and the overlap there is with marketing professionals and their skillset. We’re living in exciting times and the ostrich head-in-sand approach isn’t an option if marketers want to stay ahead of the game and make the most of the opportunities in front of us. 

It’s essential for marketers to further hone their soft skills like those already mentioned, which complement what generative AI can do, but add a moral/ethical safety net as well as having the bigger picture context and years of experience that can make all the difference to the success and results of marketing activity. 

In practice, that means utilising AI tools when they can make our lives easier and more productive, but focusing on providing that uniquely human link when it comes to strategy, human connections and relationships. This combination means that by working together, AI and marketers can drive the industry forward into exciting new territory, while the humans stay well and truly in control of the journey.

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