The widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed many aspects of daily life, and digital marketing is no exception. For marketers, staying ahead of emerging tools and trends is crucial. While AI may seem overwhelming at first, it has fundamentally reshaped how marketing campaigns are planned, executed, and optimized, making it an indispensable part of the industry.
AI helps marketers generate content at scale, quickly and efficiently. In the initial planning stages of a marketing campaign, tools like ChatGPT can help you flesh out your ideas. You can use AI tools to identify keywords, draft copy, edit and refine a document, structure campaigns, and more. Like any AI tool, your prompt is important, so make sure that you are providing any context necessary for your desired result. For example:
“Generate 10 headlines under 30 characters based on [this landing page] and including a combination of these keywords: [keyword 1], [keyword 2], [keyword 3].”
Platforms Google Keyword Planner and SEMRush are both essential resources for marketers, helping you find high-impact keywords for your campaign based on the set of criteria that you input (an existing set of keywords or a landing page). Use these tools to see historical search volume, CPM, CPC and more — and then pull your keyword set into the Google Performance Planner to ensure that you are spending the right amount of money on your campaign to succeed. Platforms like Google and LinkedIn also have AI-powered tools to aid in the initial stages of campaign planning, helping you identify budget based on your targeting breakdown. By using these tools, you can adjust your targeting and spend to ensure that you are meeting your KPIs.
Collecting event data (and assigning a corresponding value to these events) helps ad platforms use AI to improve targeting with predictive analytics, which predicts the future behavior of users based on historical data. Connecting the platforms where you are advertising to your website and passing back event data allows the platforms to creative predictive audiences based on website behavior. With the increased need for privacy, using first-party data whenever possible as a marketer is essential – making predictive audiences crucial for future planning. Use predictive analytics throughout your marketing campaigns to remarket and reengage with your audience.
Taking advantage of predictive analytics across marketing campaigns can help improve results by tying audience targeting and user behavior together. Lookalike audiences (an audience building technique which identifies new potential customers who share similar characteristics as your existing customers) have been around for a long time, but applying this same concept to user behavior takes performance to the next level.
By implementing and harnessing predictive audience analytics, you can enhance personalization for your audience through AI, increasing cross-platform engagement through personalized content, dynamic web assets and forms, and more. In a 2021 study, McKinsey found that 71% of customers expect personalized interactions with businesses, underlining the importance of using AI to deliver relevant marketing to our audience.
Dynamically enhance campaigns with AI to improve performance using in-platform optimizations. Google AI automatically optimizes headlines, descriptions and other assets based on ad relevance and overall performance to improve campaign results. Additionally, the platform’s AI can enhance your current assets in a variety of ways (for example, by pulling in sitelinks to other parts of your website, photos, etc.) to increase engagement with your ad. AI Max is a new campaign optimization rolling out to advertisers throughout summer 2025 that maximizes performance through improved search term matching and asset customization to deliver personalized content to users. Meta Advantage+ can increase campaign performance and efficiency in a variety of ways. This end-to-end AI solution can expand upon your targeting to reach additional users, ensure you are appearing on the most cost-effective placements, and even enhance your creative and copy to increase performance. LinkedIn Accelerate operates similarly to Meta Advantage+, using AI to improve targeting, creative and bidding to deliver 15% more efficient results compared to classic campaigns and over a 40% reduced cost per action.
Harness AI to deliver improved data, reporting and analytics — this is essential in a market that is oversaturated with information. AI tools can help marketers synthesize campaign and website data efficiently, identify trends and deliver accessible insights. Google Ads Insights and data visualization platforms can eliminate the need for manual data-sorting, providing instant visibility into performance metrics.
AI search features, search engines and generative AI, are shifting that the way users gather information. According to research by Bain, over 80% of consumers rely “zero-click searches” (searches that obtain the answer to a user’s query with an AI summary) at least 40% of the time. This has a substantial impact on organic traffic to websites and is reducing business’s overall share of voice, placing more importance on integrating longtail keywords into organic SEO and optimizing websites for AI.
As we move into 2026 and beyond, the integration of AI-powered tools and content generation will only deepen. Clients are already seeing the impact of AI-driven summaries on SEO, driving conversions and optimizing for AI-specific search patterns. Ethical considerations and the broader implications of AI’s influence on audience behavior will continue to shape discussions among marketers. AI is an essential part of the future of digital marketing, and understanding its capabilities and staying adaptable is the key to thriving in this evolving landscape.