Can AI Marketing Tools Boost Your Design Game?
- Irene Schouwenaar
The importance of design is too often overlooked in discussions about content marketing — and it’s all but invisible in conversations about the use of artificial intelligence in marketing campaigns.
AI graphic design tools absolutely exist. Everyone’s favourite late-night host married a cabbage based on a series of images created by DALL-E, an AI image generator. Disney has divided Marvel audiences by using AI to generate the title sequence of Secret Invasion. So why are there hundreds (if not thousands) of articles about AI in content marketing and almost none on AI in marketing design?
I can’t explain the lack of coverage. But given the vital role design plays in effective campaigns, I’d like to explore the role of AI-assisted design in the future of content marketing. Let’s dive in!
Design Can Make or Break Your Campaign
Compelling copy, solid SEO, and effective emails are essential parts of your content marketing strategy. But the photos, graphics, tables, and other visual elements your design team finishes them off with aren’t just icing on the cake — they can mean the difference between success and failure for your campaigns.
So don’t sell your design team short. They’re working hard to make sure your blog, email campaigns, and social media posts achieve the results you’re aiming for.
- Visual branding is key to establishing your brand identity, which helps you build relationships with potential customers
- Images can create an emotional connection with audiences that words cannot, enhancing the story you’re telling
- Graphs and charts can make data more accessible and compelling
- Design elements can make long, technical assets easier to read, increasing engagement
How to Use AI for Graphic Design in Marketing
We’ve established that good design is critical to your content marketing efforts. But where do AI design tools fit in? Will AI replace graphic designers — and do you want it to?
First of all, I am in no way suggesting that marketing teams ditch their design team in favour of a Jasper.ai subscription. The technology is really too new for agencies or internal marketing departments to make that kind of commitment. (Plus, we have some amazing designers here, and I’d like them to still be friends with me after they read this.)
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a role for AI in content marketing design. There are several ways design teams can leverage AI marketing tools to increase efficiency and boost engagement.
1. Reduce Manual Work
More than half of marketers spend at least five hours creating visual content each week — and 17.8% spend more than 20 hours. AI design tools can eliminate some of the more repetitive aspects of design work, like creating mockups or removing backgrounds, freeing marketers to focus on strategy and innovation.
2. Support Idea Generation
Some days, the ideas just aren’t flowing. It happens — marketers are only human. AI design tools can help get the creative juices flowing, producing images that can inspire new visual elements with just a few clicks. AI-produced designs don’t have to make it into your final campaign to serve a valuable purpose.
3. Bring Data to Design
It would take hours to dig through all your target audience data to identify designs that are more likely to resonate with them. But some AI marketing tools can quickly pick out designs that drive the most conversions, match user preferences or comply with accessibility targets. Graphics based on data can increase engagement and help drive conversions.
4. Handle Versioning Tasks
More than a third of marketing designers say they’d like the ability to automatically create different versions of the same content by simply inputting the core information. With AI graphic design tools, the task of producing an infographic to match your ebook — or creating designs that work for different platforms — could be reduced to a few clicks.
Will AI Tools Boost Our Marketing Design?
The TPM team still relies heavily on our human designers, but we recognize that there might be benefits to incorporating AI tools into our marketing design workflow. Follow along with our human vs. robot experiment, where we’re gathering data on how well AI content marketing tools perform compared to our experts. Want to know more? Contact us today!
