Matching New AI Tech To Your Marketing Strategy

AI was not used to generate this writing or the visuals included.

With the ever evolving landscape of both small business and enterprise level technology, marketing departments across the country are struggling with one question: how should I restructure to prepare for an age of intense, automated competition? While the age old advice is certainly the foundation of any great marketing team, the monkey wrench provided by AI should be seen as an opportunity to gain an edge in the market and outpace your industry peers; but only if your marketing strategy, tech stack, and team structure are engineered to do it. This led me to question what my own strategy would look like, especially as I prepare to engage in new working relationships in 2026. Where would I begin and how would I structure my department to take advantage of this exciting time?

The Evolution of Automation

Graphic Via Skillmine

Before your organization dives head first into the AI revolution, you need to be aware of the data automation evolution. Data does not simply clean or organize itself. Workflows also don't change on a dime. Your organization will need to create and follow a detailed data automation plan and ensure your employees are following the same line of logic in their professional development and tactical execution of marketing tasks. No matter where your organization is in the included graphic, ensuring you've set your data up for success is top priority before tackling your AI implementation plan.

Small Business Tech Updates

As with any other time in history; your marketing department should be an extension of your brand's values, fundamental business strategy and of course; your organization's size and available budget. If you're a small business with a one man show as your marketing representative; you'll want to lean on the easiest AI tools to pickup and get started. This means consumer level technology is your best friend, and the secret here?

Most of your existing tools will incorporate AI for you. Whether it's Adobe Firefly automatically included in your subscription or Zoho CRM's new AI features, many of the tools you're already using across your current marketing department can simply be utilized to a greater effect with their new features. The best part is, many of these same services offer in depth tutorials and use cases, allowing you to educate your existing team in a timely manner, and build tactics that work within existing data pipelines.

In addition to understanding your current tech's upgraded abilities, you might consider augmenting arduous processes that aren't included in these services with new AI tools that integrate with existing tech well enough. Just be careful you aren't duplicating capabilities or increasing the barrier of entry for your marketing team to utilize these tools effectively. For example, Premiere Pro has introduced AI features to allow creatives to execute tasks that used to take hours. This is fantastic, but what about automated video editing? Premiere does not have advanced tools for automatically transcribing, editing, labeling, and exporting to different formats in the same place. CapCut, on the other hand, uses all the aforementioned features to bring true value to your team in the form of automatic content optimization across your various platforms.

Image via CapCut

This is one simple example, but this calculation should be made with each of your existing services to create a tech stack that is ready for the next generation of marketing, while keeping upgrade costs and retraining to a minimum.

Enterprise Level Tech Updates

For a larger organization or enterprises, AI driven upgrades to your tech stack will likely look a bit different from a small business. While the focus will remain on your team and reducing the need to upgrade by leaning on your existing services, data and the automated flow in which it is dispersed across your organization becomes much more important. Your foundational AI model and platform enablement tools set the tone for which marketing services might be best to use. Instead of optimizing for cost or ease of use, large organizations should focus on optimizing for the best data pipeline they can possibly build within their available budget. How personal can you get with customer information and how can that data be used across marketing to improve your personalized communication and operational capacity?

There are fantastic guides for building efficient and useful data sharing processes, but why is this important? AI doesn't run on magic. It learns from the context in which it is operating in, and pulls data from rich sources in order to deliver accurate insights and suggestions to their users. Internally, your data pipeline, used in tandem with AI/Automation services like Pardot or Zapier, should enable a powerful institutional data bank and operational workflow. This can then be utilized to train LLMs on the way your organization and teams work and think, and how they can change to better address the desired outcomes (more conversions!). For marketing in particular, this data should be used to improve campaign content, automation across your department and the ability to quickly summarize and analyze reports to glean actionable improvements to your funnel. Externally, this data should be used to boost creative productivity and provide opportunities to enhance your efforts by taking advantage of the speed that AI enables. At the department level, the services and tools you choose should connect seamlessly with the foundational models and data structure of the entire organization.

Wondering what AI tools you should implement with your strategy? Use this custom tool I made to see the best options now or visit Futurepedia for a complete AI service breakdown.

Let's get to the details

Building a tech stack is important, but once it is built, how can you use new software to create value that justifies the big move? Start with your people. Training and development are more important now than ever, and recruiting will likely need to take into account the new tools and workflows you have in mind. Be patient with your workforce, because hastily planning AI tool adoption can result in sharp tool abandonment, reduced morale, and reverting back to old processes. Once your marketing team is embracing new AI features naturally, use new insights that AI tools provide to improve what your team is already good at, and experiment with ideas you might have previously seen as resource intensive. If your current funnel values email marketing; improve personalization, content, and data analysis with AI; but don't change your entire strategy just because you have new tools. That'd be like a NASCAR driver in first place, stopping at the pit to change tires that aren't worn down.

graphic by Jared

Instead, use AI to amplify your existing approach and experiment with new tactics, such as providing a landing page for every email campaign triggered in your CRM. This might've taken your team hours or days before AI, but today, landing pages can be generated in minutes and perfected by human designers and writers. The same can be said for social direct message campaigns, text campaigns, paid advertising, organic content marketing and more. This truly is a top to bottom of the funnel game changer. The biggest impact of AI on marketing? Your team can provide more value in shorter time to the leads you'd like to nurture, to the point of buying your product or booking your service.

"Providing Value" Takes on A Whole New Meaning

Do you currently provide a PDF guide on how to choose the best XYZ, in order to retain customer information or for retargeting? With AI, you can provide much more than a PDF as a lead magnet. You could easily offer visitors a free application that chooses the best XYZ for them using services like Replit or Base44. You could provide a personalized video by cloning your employees with a service like Agril and write a script that pulls data from existing sources to ensure accuracy. The possibilities are truly endless and will only increase over time as AI reduces the work hours required for advanced marketing tasks. When you work with, and eventually automate these value based tactics, they can greatly impact leads at various destinations in the sales cycle, leading to higher engagement and more conversions.

Want to implement AI tools and services in order to provide your website visitors with enhanced tools? Contact me today to start a discussion about the most useful tactics in 2026 and beyond.

Strategic AI Content Optimization As A Differentiator

Before the wide adoption of automation and AI, content optimization could be a slow grind. Today, optimizing your content across your strategy is as easy as connecting your various channels to your AI service and allowing it to parse your results for instant insights and feedback (excluding SEO, because it's changing everyday) The important thing; don't let AI drive your content creation strategy. The technology is great at creating simple content at scale, reformatting content to work on any device/platform, and working with humans to devise content that will perform well in certain contexts. Though this will greatly increase the quantity of content your team can publish, it's important to focus on quality (especially in an age where most teams are throwing AI slop to the wind, the Blue Ocean strategy is still a great resource in the age of AI). Matching your brand's style, tone, timing and human interactions is just as important as creating content quickly. Evaluate the perks of automated content generation while recognizing your brand's innate values. Build a content strategy which melds the two together; resulting in the most efficient yet brand accurate content you could possibly produce.

Evaluating Costs

Costs in the age of AI is an interesting concept. Some organizations may be able to completely disregard this concept, as your foundational AI model and it's connected services could calculate these costs for you, and provide recommendations for improvement. Like any other service, marketers should judge the ROI gleaned from AI services by evaluating its use cases in a real environment. Evaluate a new service's ROI by asking the following questions and supporting them with results; How much time does this save in working hours? What employee will utilize this tool, and are they utilizing it effectively? (hours saved should be measured with or by the employees using the services) Is the AI cost recurring or flat? (many AI services charge by API usage, so evaluating might require averaging usage costs), What percent of the funnel is improved (meaning KPI's at the exact point of usage) from this singular service or tool? Like all other marketing costs, you want to ensure positive ROI over weeks, months, and eventually years. If a service or tool is too inconsistent or overly expensive; try another in the category or reevaluate your strategy to match costs.

Moving First

graphic by Jared

This can easily be said for any technological leap in marketing technology: the early bird gets the worm. In this case, the early bird has automated advanced marketing tactics and funnel automation, to the point that any newcomer in the space will be sorely behind by the time their strategy and implementation catches up. Marketing Directors and Managers should be training their staff on new AI tools and services while analyzing results from some of the changes that have occurred pre 2026. As we move into the future, marketing teams will be smaller, and that means leaders should be closely analyzing workflows to decide key personnel to be trained and position responsibilities that will be altered by the use of AI. If you haven't been motivated to change your strategy, don't wait another six months, because it could be far too late to earn lost market share.

Wondering if your marketing candidate is up to date on AI workflows and has the ability to learn new AI processes? Use this tool I created to see how your candidates compare.

Want to see proven AI workflows and tactics? Contact me today to start a discussion about your organization's AI implementation plan.