Why Artificial Intelligence Won’t Replace Marketing Jobs

For many decades, technological advancements have stirred both excitement and a considerable amount of anxiety. Concerns for technology over the years have gone from the ‘rise of the machines’ to Y2K to the effects of social media on human interaction. The current technology being widely discussed is AI, which is rarely out of the news. According to X owner Elon Musk, AI is ‘going to replace all human jobs’. On paper, this makes our futures very uncertain. But how much truth is there? Will AI replace all marketing jobs? Or is marketing one of the jobs that AI can’t replace?

This guide is here to calm your fears that, despite Musk’s claims, AI will not replace marketing jobs anytime soon. We will first explore some of the ways that AI is currently supporting marketing teams. We will then discuss the drawbacks of AI and why you should feel confident investing in digital marketing apprenticeships to bring talent that will benefit your business and drive its success. 

How is AI Currently Supporting Marketing? 

While AI isn’t replacing marketing jobs anytime soon, that’s not to say that it is not a highly effective tool that can elevate strategies, improve customer experiences, and increase profits. Here is a selection of the key ways in which AI is supporting marketing: 

Creating Social Media Posts 

One of the most popular uses of AI for marketers is creating content for social media. Examples of how this can be used for social media posts include:

• Content Creation - AI can generate ideas, suggest subject matters, and inspire and create titles and headlines for social media posts. 

• Audience Data Analytics - AI can help marketers better understand their audiences by gathering and assessing data, enabling them to create more effective, appealing, and relevant social media posts. 

• Posting and Scheduling - Artificial intelligence-powered social media scheduling tools can help marketers automatically post their content at the most effective times and optimise content for specific social media platforms. 

Supporting Blog and Landing Page Writing 

As we explore in more detail later on, it is highly unlikely that AI will ever have the creativity and personal touch of a human writer. However, this doesn’t mean AI cannot be useful in blog and landing page writing. 

Examples of how this can be used for blog writing include:

• Research Assistance - AI can help gather statistics and information to support arguments, saving time and effort in research. 

• Improved SEO - AI tools can help analyse SEO in content and recommend relevant keywords to target in a piece of writing. This can help blog posts rank higher in search engine results, driving more organic traffic. 

• Grammar and Readability - AI can proofread content for grammar errors and typos and suggest ways to improve the overall readability of a blog. 

• Reduce Writer’s Block - AI can inspire content writers by brainstorming ideas, suggesting titles, and generating outlines. 

Examples of how this can be used for landing page writing include:

• Optimisation - AI-supported analytics help marketers analyse important data such as website bounce and load times. This information allows them to allow marketers to optimise the pages and elevate the customer experience for improved website engagement. 

• Design - AI can suggest layout and colour schemes for a landing page based on user behaviour data and best practices. 

• Content Creation - AI tools can generate titles and calls to action and help create body content tailored to the target audience, product, and service. 

• A/B Testing - Machine learning and AI algorithms can be used to assess user behaviours and identify effective landing page elements. This enables marketers to produce variations of landing pages and run A/B testing to understand the most effective page design and layout, which helps drive conversion rates. 

Video Creation and Optimisation 

Alongside content, visuals such as videos and shorts have become popular for marketers to engage with their audiences. Examples of how AI can support video creation and optimisation include:

• Editing - AI tools can automate audio mixing, video cutting, and colour correction tasks to streamline editing and improve efficiency. 

• Performance Insights and Analytics - Video analytics tools can give marketers in-depth insights into their videos' performance. By analysing metrics such as engagement rates, view counts, and audience demographics, AI can recommend optimising areas such as thumbnails, titles, and content to drive overall performance. 

• Performance Analysis and Optimisation - AI can analyse performance metrics, provide insights, and optimise areas such as thumbnails, titles, and topics to improve engagement and visibility. 

Campaign Automation 

90% of people in marketing jobs say automation and AI help them spend less time on manual tasks. AI can automate several aspects of campaign execution, particularly repetitive and time-consuming tasks such as deploying ads, sending targeting emails, scheduling, and managing social media posts. This helps reduce manual tasking while continuing to ensure that campaigns run on time. This helps marketers reduce their workload, spend more time on important areas such as customer relationship management and market research, and reduce burnout and stress. 

Understanding Brand Perception 

As we all know, customers are highly opinioned and expect brands to understand how their expectations, views, and needs change over time. Businesses that fail to adapt to these changes can risk alienating and losing their customer base to their competitors. 

Luckily, social media has made it easier for marketing teams to know what their customers say about their brand and competition. However, due to the vast nature of social media, keeping updated with these sometimes subtle changes can be overwhelming for marketers. 

AI can help marketers scan for mentions of relevant keywords related to their company across multiple social media platforms. This data can help marketers understand how customers perceive their brand, the messages that resonate best with them, and how customer behaviour changes over time. 

Increasing Conversion Rates 

As we touched on above, data analytics can be highly useful in predicting customer behaviour, such as social media behaviour, search frequency, and web visits. In addition to helping to improve the knowledge of marketing teams about their customers, it can help drive sales and profits. 

Marketing teams can automate the outreach process to customers using predetermined messages based on their online behaviour. AI software can then send personalised messages and promotional emails at the optimal time to drive more conversations, allowing marketers to spend more time planning and organising complex and effective marketing campaigns. 

So, Why Won’t AI Replace Marketing Jobs?

So, with artificial intelligence being such an increasingly helpful tool for marketing teams, are there grounds for concern that it will replace humans in marketing jobs altogether? Here are the key areas which make this highly unlikely: 

Creativity 

AI cannot replace human creativity, as it is limited to the data it provides. So, while AI algorithms can generate content based on existing data, they cannot create something completely new and original like a human. For example, AI might be able to analyse market trends and generate content based on them, but it can’t create a groundbreaking advertising campaign or fresh marketing strategy. The creativity and innovation that drive marketing success remain unique to humans and something AI has yet to replicate. 

Critical Thinking 

As we explored above, AI is excellent at gathering vast amounts of data and effectively analysing it. However, when it comes to making decisions using this information, it falls short in critical thinking skills. Critical thinking involves evaluating information, weighing alternatives, and anticipating outcomes based on various complex circumstances. 

While AI can simulate certain areas of decision-making by following pre-determined algorithms, it lacks the intuition, creativity, and contextual understanding that humans are capable of. Human decision-makers can handle ambiguity, consider ethical implications, and use judgment to make the right choice. 

Emotional Intelligence 

Marketing teams need to have the ability to understand, recognise, and manage their own emotions and those of their colleagues and customers. This skill allows marketers to build authentic relationships and empathise with their audience’s needs, goals, and pain points. AI is severely limited in emotional intelligence as emotions are subjective to each person, and AI’s assessment of them can be inaccurate and/or biased. Also, AI doesn’t have the human brain functionality for social interaction and emotional skills.  

Factual Inaccuracy 

Another issue with AI is that the ‘facts’ it produces aren’t always correct. This can be a serious issue, particularly if creating blogs to entice audiences. These inaccurate facts are often described as ‘hallucinations’. These inaccuracies occur because AI models are primarily trained to produce plausible-sounding answers rather than factually correct ones.  This is why platforms such as ChatGPT come with a disclaimer that reads, ‘ChatGPT can make mistakes. Consider checking important information’. 

The consequences of these AI hallucinations can damage the reputation of a marketing team and the wider business. For example, if inaccurate facts are included in content or videos, it reflects very badly on marketers' skills and attention to detail, leading to poor customer experience. Therefore, marketing teams still need to assess, check, and often correct the information AI produces. 

Ethical Concerns and Reputation

It is also essential to consider the ethics around AI’s role in marketing. These issues include data manipulation, algorithmic biases, and privacy breaches. These concerns pose potential reputational and legal risks and can also affect customer trust in a business. Therefore, organisations and marketing teams have to stay informed about AI advancements, be transparent about their use of AI, and establish guidelines for the team. 

Especially for agency marketing teams, external clients rely on them (and pay a lot of money) for their expertise, creativity, original insights, strategy, and decision-making. The outcomes may fail if these teams rely solely on AI to generate their strategies, ideas, and content. Additionally, if they fail to be transparent about their use of AI, they risk disappointing their clients and damaging their reputations.

Why AI Won’t Replace Marketing Jobs: Final Thoughts

While AI offers significant advantages to marketing strategies and results, the idea of it fully replacing humans lacks substance. AI undoubtedly has a solid role to play in various aspects of marketing, from content creation to campaign automation. Still, it cannot replicate the creativity, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence people can bring. Marketers can innovate, adapt, and empathise, factors essential for building authentic connections with customers and driving success. 

Also, while AI streamlines processes and provides valuable insights, its integration should be approached cautiously. Along with the issues above, ethical concerns surrounding AI highlight human marketers' irreplaceable role in guiding marketing strategies and maintaining customer trust. Ultimately, rather than replacing marketing jobs, AI should be viewed as a supportive tool that enhances expertise and marketing efforts for optimal results. 

Put simply, to answer one of our questions from the introduction, marketing is one of the jobs that AI can’t replace. 

Interested in a Digital digital marketing apprenticeship? Look no Further  

Now that you can rest easy knowing that artificial intelligence won’t replace human marketers, why not take your interest to the next level and invest in a digital marketing apprenticeship? 

Pareto’s digital marketing apprenticeship programmes provide candidates with an excellent opportunity to learn through a combination of vocational and on-the-job training. This supports them in developing the necessary knowledge and skills to succeed in their marketing careers and bring success to your business. 

Contact the team today for more information about our digital marketing apprenticeships.