Prior to the AI explosion, justifying the addition of a new member to your marketing team could be an uphill battle.
But with a new age come new opportunities, particularly when it comes to scaling. The allure of AI is it can potentially help startups and established companies alike achieve more with fewer resources.
A marketing team of four might once have felt dwarfed by a competitor's 100-person department. In 2024, though, strategically integrated AI can now enable that scrappier team to compete head-to-head—and even win—as it refocuses on high-value tasks by automating repetitive work.
Here are some AI-centric roles that marketing teams are already starting to adopt.
Dropping generic prompts into ChatGPT to generate milquetoast blog posts does not an AI content marketer make. If you’re hiring for an AI Content Marketing Lead, you’re looking for someone with a much broader range of skills and a tech-forward approach to content creation.
What an AI Content Marketer brings to the table is an ability to synthesize large volumes of data to derive actionable insights, turning these into content strategies that can target diverse audiences at scale.
The result? Highly specific, decidedly non-robotic content that’s tailored for more customer personas than you could previously target with a small content team.
A skilled AI Content Marketer brings a mix of technical chops and creative thinking, and should have:
That’s how AI content marketers are able to instruct AI tools meaningfully to produce blogs, videos, and landing pages that actually generate traffic and drive conversions at scale.
Of course, it’s also their job to maintain quality control—treating the AI output as a “first draft” that’s then finessed by a human editor.
“In terms of how it's impacting workflow, [adding an AI Content Marketer is] essentially like creating a new feature in a SaaS tool,” says Write Wiser’s Nadine Heir. “The strategy is focused on using AI to speed up service to customers, and ease the internal team's need to do repetitive jobs, while matching the high quality that the internal team can produce.”
The aptly named Tomorrow.io was touted as having posted the first ever AI-focused marketing job listing in early 2023.
Ruth Favela, who filled this pioneering AI Marketing Specialist position and describes herself as a “Swiss army knife” in the role, stresses it requires the candidate to be well-rounded as a marketer. It should be “someone who wants to learn and try new things”, she says, as opposed to a person that comes in with preconceived notions of what works and is resistant to change.
The AI Marketing Specialist is a true cross-functional hybrid. In many ways, it’s a whole team rolled into one.
You might expect someone in this position to have a hand in:
AI-powered marketing can drive scalability by maximizing output from a single source.
For instance, how do you derive ten pieces of marketing content from one core piece, Favela asks? Well, why not through a “video-first, AI-driven content strategy” in order to funnel your work into a multi-channel strategy?
Let’s look at a hypothetical scenario in which a brand decides to dedicate bandwidth and budget to producing a short educational video about a new product. After this major lift, a talented AI Marketing Specialist might:
Market and internal research lies at the heart of accomplishing all of this. It’s a question of how you mine the company’s vast datasets for audience and customer insights, says Favela.
AI unlocks insights that humans might miss. Within the Stagwell Marketing Cloud universe, that includes platforms like QuestAI, as well as SmartAssets (which analyzes creative assets to predict and improve their performance) and PRophet Influence (whose ‘brand safety’ features use AI to surface any red flags with content creators your brand might partner with).
Customer experience (CX) is often the most stretched thin of teams within a company. Limited budgets mean that many brands struggle to provide adequate support through human teams, and old-fashioned chatbots have a well-deserved reputation for robotic, unhelpful answers that only drive customer frustration.
Here, AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants—”conversational AI”—might offer some welcome respite, especially for startups.
AI customer experience technologies can interpret queries and deliver personalized, consistent responses to questions and common issues. Martech tools can even integrate sentiment analysis into customer experience to detect dissatisfaction and enable instant messaging adjustments.
None of this can happen in a vacuum however; it all requires a dedicated, ongoing effort to train the AI tools on the company’s customer data and target personas.
That’s where the AI Customer Experience Manager comes in. They’ll:
Crucially, this role defines clear goals for an AI-driven strategy that streamlines support and improves satisfaction. This involves mapping out the customer journey and user interactions, and identifying touchpoints where AI can be most impactful.
In a perfect world, your budgets would be endless, and the biggest problem would be sourcing all the new talent you want to hire and onboarding them on the amazing SaaS solutions you’re adopting.
Of course, a mix of human ability and AI tech can still generate big results, even when you’re working within small margins. Maybe you can only hire a single AI Marketing Specialist, rather than a robust team—but pair this person with the right technology, and they’ll work magic.
Your hiring decisions should still be based on and reflective of your company’s growth stage, team structure, long-term vision, and immediate needs—not because AI is a shiny new toy. The same goes when choosing to onboard any new AI tools—here are some great questions to ask before adding new platforms to your tech stack.
Stagwell Marketing Cloud has AI-powered options that can help optimize processes and cut down on rote tasks—so that you can apply your talents to the creative work that matters. Here are just a few ways that the SMC suite can change the way you work.
