How AI is Changing Digital Marketing: What Business Owners Need to Know

18 July 2025

Explore how AI in digital marketing is transforming strategy, automation, and customer engagement for today’s business owners.

Artificial intelligence (AI) in digital marketing is often praised as a groundbreaking innovation, though it also faces criticism for reducing human interaction and potentially replacing certain jobs.

For marketers, it’s challenging to know how to use AI to maximize its effectiveness while avoiding watering down customer interactions. Small businesses especially cannot ignore the innovation. They must explore the technology and find new ways of using it to maximize efficiency to compete in today’s landscape.

So before you write off AI or implement it in every tiny aspect of your business, find out what you need to know about its usefulness in digital marketing.

What AI Digital Marketing Functions Are Business Owners Using?

First, let’s get familiar with what AI technology is and how it can serve your business. Some functions of AI include machine learning, natural language processing and predictive analytics. These functions can be part of any digital marketing program.

You can automate customer service while optimizing ad spend through machine learning that will watch for your highest-performing advertising avenues. As you’ve likely heard, AI can bring your business speed and efficiency when used well.

When it comes to marketing, here’s a look at some of the most common areas that AI has had an impact on.

Personalization: AI uses algorithms to tailor marketing messaging to a customer or prospect based on what you know about them. This can include their behavior when interacting with your company, their preferences and overall history.
Content creation: The tools can create social media posts, sales copy and even video content. This can help businesses save many hours of manual labor to focus more on strategy.
Advanced data analysis: Machine learning has been used in analytics for almost a decade now. Despite the rise in AI over the last few years, this is not new. The tech helps with showcasing patterns in even the most complex datasets, which business owners and marketers can then use for strategy insights and audience targeting.
Automated customer service: AI chatbots have transformed massive knowledge centers into more personalized interactions with brands. You can train the tool on your policies, how to documents and more to make the content available to customers as if they were interacting directly with someone on your team.
Further automation in marketing: Another term and tool in marketing that is far from new is marketing automation. So you’ve likely heard of and hopefully have been employing some form of automation in your inbound marketing strategies to make customer interactions fast, efficient and tailored to the customer’s needs. AI furthers this crucial marketing tactic by informing when to send a message, what the content should be and who should receive it. It’s useful in dynamic email content, behavior-based triggers and A/B testing.
SEO and paid ads: Some of the most data-driven strategies businesses employ are SEO and paid ads. AI can aid in completing competitive analyses, identifying trends in search terms, optimizing bidding strategies for ads and aiding in predicting campaign performance to manage a budget.
Visual and voice search: If you haven’t considered how you can maximize the usefulness of visual and voice search, now is the time. AI can help customers learn about your products and solutions when interacting with voice-enabled devices or searching using tools like Google Lens.

How Business Owners Can Maximize These Tools

AI in digital marketing can benefit businesses of all sizes. But you have to know how to use it and where to use it. For business owners looking to get started with AI, here’s a guide to next steps.

1. Review Your Existing Tools

Some software platforms have implemented AI well, while others are still experimenting and figuring out how to best employ the tech. Spend some time evaluating what you have and whether you might need to change certain tools for more modern solutions that capitalize on these functions. Or it might be a matter of employing the new functions, which admittedly takes time, exploration and research. But ultimately that time investment can pay massive dividends for years to come.

2. Explore AI-driven Content

Learn how tools like Jasper and Copy.ai work for generating AI-driven content. For visual content, Canva and Adobe Firefly offer tools for efficiency and effectiveness.

AI-driven content requires know-how in maximizing prompts and editing to get the best outcome. That’s why it takes some experimentation. Ensure your team is being critical about the content you’re generating through AI for best results.

3. Automate Your Marketing

Automation has sped up interactions between businesses and customers. If you aren’t using it yet, now is certainly the time to do so.

AI can support your email marketing automation, customer service and analytics reporting. You might start small with AI simply gathering details about a customer when they enter a customer service queue. Or you might go all in if you know you have a complex knowledge base that is challenging for customers to find necessary answers to.

While automation in marketing can make some businesses nervous because of the importance of customer interactions in managing a successful business, it is essential to increasing speed in response times. When trained and programmed well, AI enhances customer interactions.

4. Get Your Data in Order

For AI to be effective, you must have good data to help inform it. You need clean, centralized data to power your AI uses and automation. Consider all the places your data comes from and look into the best solution for housing it in one place to offer the best chance at getting automation just right.

5. Stay Up on Trends

As the newest tech available to business owners and marketers, AI is ever-evolving. To get the most from it, you have to stay up to date on trends and information about it. Perhaps the best way is to partner with a digital marketing agency who studies and follows these trends for you. But if you don’t have an agency partnership, regularly engage with trustworthy newsletters, webinars and training sessions to make sure your AI use remains modern as new tools and functions come to market.

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Risks of Using AI Poorly in Digital Marketing

While AI is a robust tool for interacting with customers and maximizing efficiency, it poses some risks if poorly implemented. You can harm your brand, upset your audience and waste precious resources. So when implementing your AI tools, ensure that you don’t do any of these things.

1. Lose Human Touch with Customers

You can’t generate so much of your marketing content that it comes off as cold or lacking in human interaction. Ensure you still have clear channels to reach a real person for complex customer service inquiries and screen all content you generate using AI tools so it is a good fit for your brand.

2. Inaccuracies

Business owners can’t use AI as a replacement for a marketing team. AI can generate faulty information or even just outdated content. This can harm your credibility and lead to challenging backlash, especially in highly regulated industries. Keep your business out of legal issues by reviewing content carefully.

3. Privacy and Compliance Issues

AI leans heavily on user data to deliver personalized messages. And while that’s great because it means you’re speaking directly to a customer’s needs, it can also lead to violations of privacy laws if your team isn’t screening that information carefully.

Using an Expert to Implement Your Company’s AI

New Light Digital can help you gain access to the benefits AI has to offer without subjecting you to the traps or setbacks of AI. Our experienced team will evaluate your existing tools and modernize your marketing efforts to make the most of automation and AI. Contact us now to get started.

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