How to Work with Your Bosses to Implement Modern Marketing Including AI

Marketers know that staying up to date with the latest marketing techniques is essential to stay ahead of the competition. Those who understand modern marketing are in demand in today’s fast-moving world. So how do you convince your bosses to implement new technologies like AI even when they’re skeptical?

Simply implementing new strategies using AI without a clear strategy and alignment with organizational goals can lead to wasted resources and missed opportunities. And if you have skeptical managers, it could get you in trouble!

Align Marketing Strategy with Organizational Goals

Here are a few ways to work with people in your company to implement modern marketing techniques.

Understand your organizational goals: Before you start implementing any new marketing techniques, it's important to understand your organization's goals. What are the key metrics that the organization cares about (like revenue growth)? How can marketing contribute to achieving those goals? Once you have a clear understanding of your organization's goals, you can start thinking about how new marketing strategies like AI can help achieve them.

Educate managers and executives: Many people do not fully understand what AI is and how it can be used in marketing. And your superiors in the organization may be embarrassed to admit that they don’t understand. Take the time to educate your colleagues about the basics of AI and how it can be used to improve marketing efforts. Share case studies and examples of how other organizations are using AI to achieve their goals.

Lead a task force: If you want to implement new ideas, perhaps you can start by pulling together a cross functional team of people to talk about what’s possible and how to implement the ideas in your organization.

Start small: Implementing AI across a company is a daunting task, especially if your organization is not familiar with the technology. Start small by identifying one area of marketing where AI can be used to improve results. For example, you could start by using AI from ChatGPT to help write blog post headlines and meta descriptions, and identify keywords from your blog post drafts.

Measure results: As with any marketing initiative, it's important to measure the results. Set clear goals and track progress over time. For example, if the blog posts with optimized meta data and better headlines are seeing more traffic, that is an ideal metric. Share the results with your stakeholders to demonstrate the value of AI in achieving organizational goals.

Stay up-to-date: Marketing and AI is a rapidly evolving, and it's important to stay up-to-date with the latest developments. Attend conferences and webinars, read industry publications, join the Marketing AI Institute and network with other marketers to stay informed about the latest trends and best practices.

Disclosures:

1) The first draft of this article was created using my personal AI bot (dubbed “David Meerman Bot”) which was trained with all 19 years of my blog posts (nearly 1,600 individual posts) plus six of my books including two Wall Street Journal bestsellers and a BusinessWeek bestseller. I use this private AI bot to help me create and edit from my own content. The key to this approach is it uses my existing content to create something new, not public internet content written by others.  Always remember AI = Data + Math. 

2) I’m an investor and advisor in the Marketing AI Institute.