How Marketers Can Stay Competitive in Digital Marketing in an AI World

Marketing thought leaders scream that AI can become your most skilled tool in performing hundreds of tasks. Just think about it: according to the World Economic Forum, 34% of all business tasks are already performed by machines. As of 2025, around 66% of AI outputs are still inaccurate or lack the nuance of human execution—but AI is constantly improving. If you haven’t started working with it yet, now’s the time to catch up.

Of course, you don't need to perceive AI impact on marketing as a magic wand, but according to McKinsey, by 2030, about 50% of all tasks related to business management, service, data processing, etc., can be automated. That sounds great, but it is also a bit frustrating.

If AI already took my salary, why rush back in? Because artificial intelligence marketing jobs aren’t just replacing old roles, they’re creating new ones for marketers who know how to adapt digital marketing in AI world.

There's no need to ask the main question: AI or human, sound the alarm or panic and throw away all the marketing certifications you've earned over the past 10 years. Now more than ever, it's important to focus on the skills needed for AI success.

Kieran Flanagan, CMO at Hubspot, prepared a fascinating post on this topic. The clever marketer asked him a great question: "If starting as a marketer today, what's the number one skill you'd master?." And Kieran answered that the best one would be curiosity.

You see, the trend of creating goal-oriented questions is definitely at the top. You can read the full post here: 

Moving forward, let's explore what skills for AI can help marketers preparing for the future of artificial intelligence and whether it's truly possible to boost lead generation by 400% in today’s market.

We want to be very clear and honest, so no one tactic can't predict 100% success in your industry or company because all business cases are unique and faced with specific problems. 

At the same time, who owns the information, he owns the world (in our reality, if you know information, you will win the budget debate with your CEO or CMO)

Let’s explore how the needs shift to become AI-focused in today’s landscape.

Which Marketing Behavior Can Benefit From AI?

If you want to know what is one of the things a digital marketer should do with respect to product considerations or service considerations in the AI era, you will lose because marketing tactics work in a complex like a big anthill. Don't figure it out? Let's check it step-by-step.

What Is AI, and How Is AI Used in Marketing?

AI, in simple terms, is a set of techniques for processing and performing several complex functions once exclusive to humans, such as understanding spoken language and analyzing data in text and visual formats, demonstrating AI's adaptability in different environments and use cases.

AI in marketing is another tool that allows marketers to analyze large amounts of data faster, conduct in-depth research, generate creatives for advertising campaigns, upgrade their skills, and much more.

In fact, professionals in their field test AI every day and discover new opportunities for its use in marketing, too. Do you need to accept all these options on faith? Sounds very doubtful.

Should you check daily how much it aligns with your strategy and business goals, and how much it increases efficiency? The answer is clear: you should. After all, what is one of the things a digital marketer should do with respect to product considerations? 

It’s to continuously test, analyze, and adapt. Testing hypotheses, analyzing outcomes, and summarizing results may seem routine—but it's one of the most important activities for driving productivity and making data-driven decisions.

Key Impacts and Benefits of AI in Marketing Automation

Every successful marketing case should be reviewed, and every AI use case needs timely evaluation—because there's still no definitive answer to the question: will marketing be replaced by AI?

Suggesting to review the following points, which can significantly boost your marketing strategy.

1. Predictive Analytics and Hyper-Personalization

Suppose you correctly connect AI-based tools with touchpoints, such as a website. In that case, it will be able to transfer the maximum amount of information about the consumer to the marketing and business team, namely, their full path, involvement in specific positions, preference history, bounce rate, and so on.

Such data will help create highly personalized content covering the consumer's pain. This behavior will also help create an omnichannel approach to your target audience.

2. Scaling Content Creation

Although there are currently enough high-performance tools that help speed up content production and repetitive tasks, such as a message on a social network, content for advertising, standard instructions for product using, etc.

This content marketing and ai scaling is associated with risks. The most obvious is that search engines are ambivalent about content people do not create. Stories in which you create a new site, fill it with articles in the shortest possible time, and then get banned have already appeared in the marketer's cases. 

What remains to be done is to focus on AI human content and maintain a low % of AI content in your marketing channels. We have already encountered the problem of people not trusting the content they find since they do not see expertise in it, but they increasingly read phrases and expressions familiar to AI.

3. Optimization of Advertising Campaigns

AI allows you to analyze the data of your potential customers in real-time. It would be stupid not to use this to adjust advertising campaigns: geo, targeting, and budget. This use can optimize the use of advertising investments, and this is another plus to prove to your CMO or CEO why you need another AI tool.

4. Automation of Routine Tasks

We have already talked about content automation above, but it happens that operational activities take the lion's share of the load from the marketer; in the era of AI in marketing, it would be nice to automate, for example, email personalization, lead scoring, or social media management. 

For example, Hubspot uses AI to automate posting on social networks: scheduling publications, analyzing customer sentiment, creating content, and adjusting the social media strategy. The Hubspot AI platform can evaluate leads based on their behavior and engagement, thus determining the highest probability of conversion and launching lead nurturing campaigns.

5. Multi-Channel Marketing and Extended Customer Journey

AI can be integrated into marketing funnels to predict user behavior, provide more granular audience segmentation, and seamlessly assist the customer in decision-making.

Giants like Starbucks use AI (their system called Deep Brew) to analyze customer behavior and send them personalized offers through the app.

Amazon and Walmart use machine learning to predict customer demand by analyzing transaction history and browsing patterns.

In implementing AI in marketing and business processes, it is essential to focus on ethical considerations, brand voice consistency, mitigation of AI bias in text, etc.

Thus, the shift in the marketer's role is taking place in the direction of using AI tools and aligning them with the brand for maximum productivity. The time is not far off when brands will be awarded for corporate social responsibility and the humanity of the brand's sound.

Will Marketing Jobs Be Automated? Essential Skills Every Manager Needs in an AI-Driven World

Hard skills development is a permanent condition for any marketer. But even if we were talking about this top list 5 years ago, it would be different. Let's take a closer look.

Digital Marketing in an AI World: Essential Tools and Technologies Every Marketer Should Master

AI is a new tool in the business world, and it is pretty evident that you need to know its mechanics, features, and predicted performance to use it to the maximum. Of course, it all depends on whether you are a solo marketer in a company or a team player, but let's make a general list of skills.

1. Ability to Create Content Based on AI

To create content with the help of an AI assistant, you need to know the corresponding prompts. Naturally, you can look for them in public sources, but it also makes sense to test them based on your experience since your AI assistant learns by interacting with you.

This growing skill set is especially valuable for those exploring AI jobs with no tech experience, where prompt engineering and content generation are in high demand. Excellent platform for quickly creating articles, posts, landing pages, and newsletters is Persado. It uses NLP and generative AI to produce fairly humanized content.

2. AI-based Social Media Management

We have already discussed above how much this can speed up the process of a social media manager. But there is an essential piece of advice: do not hand over complete social media management to AI.

It should be a 50/50 job. An AI assistant will be able to respond ideally to requests from potential clients, analyze their behavior, and adjust advertising campaigns. A marketing manager should monitor compliance with a pre-defined strategy and align content with the brand's voice.

3. Ability to Automate Email Campaigns

Here, it is essential to understand that the primary goal should not contradict quality. AI Email tools such as Lavender automate email composition and A/B testing. This skill will be a great addition to classic outreach, accelerating the speed of sending and increasing click-through rates.

4. Using Predictive Analytics to Create a Marketing Strategy

It has long been known that if a marketer does not rely on data in their marketing strategy, then the created strategy will not be an action plan but rather a fairy tale.

This means that the ability to use data on purchase history, interaction channels, transaction closure duration, and segment customers makes it possible to create personalized campaigns, optimize the channels used, and budget.

In short, with the help of such a skill, you will have the power to turn raw data into realistic predictions and, accordingly, results-oriented marketing strategies.

What to use for this is a set of AI assistants (prompts) for each task performed since AI assistants tend to give more precise answers if they are focused on one focal task.

5. Ability to Integrate AI Tools into Your Marketing Strategy.

This is not about technical integration (the support team will do this) but about understanding which tools will be needed in marketing processes and how to use them in the best way. Of course, each business is unique.

However, if we set an important factor as a goal - optimization of time spent on specific tasks, then a good option is to integrate your CRM system with an AI assistant.

This option allows you to synchronize customer data from different channels and launch personalized campaigns based on actions in real-time. A great example of such a platform is Hightouch.

6. Ability to Use AI tools to Create Visual Content.

Especially if you are a solo marketer or a content creator who runs several social accounts, you need to be able to create realistic images and videos and align them with the corporate style of your business.

Ideogram is a conditionally free AI tool that quickly creates hyper-realistic images on request. And HeyGen is suitable for generating avatars for video marketing.

7. Using AI tools in Research

Each business project is unique, and you need to stock up on your own stack of AI agents (prompts), which will help you research a specific topic - faster and more efficiently. Chat GpT (model o3), which uses advanced reasoning, is very suitable for deep research.

But remember the important points: an AI assistant can quickly analyze large amounts of data and make hypotheses. But do not trust it 100%. Always check the sources of data and the logic of thinking and results, and ask the right questions. There are already several cases where AI agents can lie. It should become your partner, not your boss.

Data Literacy: Interpreting and Utilizing AI-Generated Insights

An era is coming when it will not be so important whether you are a junior marketer, lead, senior, or even a whole team lead. All that matters is whether your campaigns are performing in leads and whether fulfilling your tasks leads to results.

It should be a good motivator because any actions of a modern marketer should lead to positive changes for the brand. But this is impossible without using data competently and in the right direction.

Today, a typical marketing lead (from business to business, this is certainly unique) produces hundreds of clicks and interactions on various sites and social networks. The ability to interpret their behavior data means using them to improve your campaigns and increase lead generation.

The ability to segment the audience and close their pain points will never lose relevance; it's just that AI-driven customer Segmentation opens up new opportunities for marketers.

For example, the Smart Billboard Campaign partnered with Google’s Gemini to create outdoor ads that tailored their messaging in real-time to 299 New York City neighborhoods. The idea was to use local data dynamically, and they generated over 6,000 unique headlines in 29 hours, maximizing relevance and engagement.

Another great example of how deep analytics can help retain customers is Netflix’s recommendation engine. Their idea is so simple that it’s genius. They analyze what users watch, how long they watch it, and even the time of day and make personalized recommendations. This way, they were able to increase user engagement and reduce churn.

The key is to mine data with AI and process it using key metrics. If you haven't encountered this or feel problems, start with small samples, for example, a dozen conversations with your customers, which will help identify the reasons for the bounce or return rates. These ideas can be used to form hypotheses about what needs to be improved.

Analytical Thinking: Breaking Down Complex Data for Decision-Making

Marketers often put the ability to think creatively at the top of their skills. However, creative ideas based on facts can bring much more results than ideas based on guesswork (or, even worse, the assertion: this is what a competitor did).

According to SOAX research data, volume will nearly triple from 64.2 zettabytes in 2020 to 181 zettabytes by 2025. In such a huge array of data, marketers simply must learn to swim like a fish in water.

Analytical thinking is a skill that should be at the top of a CV because it helps marketers not only study and understand customer preferences but also make conclusions about behavior trends and align their marketing activities to them.

There was a clarification that you cannot focus only on "this is what a competitor did." Analytical thinking allows you to customize navigation by competitors' activities and quickly adapt to changes in the market.

Here are the top 4 tips for developing analytical thinking in concise statement form:

1. Practice asking critical questions to deepen understanding.

For example, look at your CRM, choose one metric ( bounce rate or MQLs) and ask:

• Why is it high or low?

• What action caused this shift?

• How does it compare week-over-week?

Do this weekly. Make it a habit, not a once-in-a-quarter audit.

2. Use visual tools like mind maps to organize and connect ideas.

• Practice using Google Sheets to build pivot tables, filter by segments, and visualize trends.

• Track small experiments - A/B testing subject lines, ad creatives, or landing page layouts.

Bonus: Still afraid and ask if will AI take over marketing jobs? Learn more about the analytics and other marketing courses in the Marketing Kawowarka review.

3. Apply analytical frameworks (SWOT, PESTEL) for structured problem evaluation.

4. Follow the data trail in campaigns and rework thinking into repeatable strategies.

For every campaign, build a flow like this:

• Goal (1000 MQLs)

• Channels (Organic, Outreach, email, etc.)

• Metrics (form fills, open rate, time on page, etc.)

• Outcome (what worked, what didn’t)

• Hypothesis for next time

Prompt Engineering: Crafting effective AI Instructions for Tailored Outputs

Lately, across the job offers on the LinkedIn platform, there are many more artificial intelligence marketing jobs and vacancies related to prompt engineering. This is quite closely related to the ability to ask questions correctly and analyze the results obtained. But compare two AI prompts:

First:

“Write a post for Facebook about zero-trust security.”

Second:

“Write a 600-word post for Facebook, explaining zero-trust security to a non-technical audience using the airport security analogy. The style of your description should be conversational and match with the general "XYZ" brand tone of voice.”

Most likely, the text that you received after the second prompt will be more relevant to your request. Creating a prompt is very similar to writing a brief; only the performer, in this case, is your AI assistant, and the more accurately you can explain the incoming data, the more likely the text will be adapted to your request.

Want to Get Better Results from AI?

Here are practical tips to help marketers master crafting effective prompts.

1) Build a goal and understand what you need from your prompt: ready-made text, tips, templates, etc. It sounds logical, but so often, this step is skipped.

2) Use your daily tasks as a practical example of creating a prompt.

By using your examples, you will more accurately understand what information is missing and what needs to be improved.

3) Create prompt templates for repetitive tasks: for example, cold email for a specific buyer person with CTA or text for a post carousel. 

4) Practice your prompt-observing skills: read and review existing prompts, for example, 70 AI Prompt Examples from Hubspot

5) If you feel that you have already studied all the information available in the public domain, but you feel unsure about creating prompts, try the Prompt Engineering and Generative AI course, which will help you master and improve your skills with the guidance of experts.

6) Subscribe to opinion leaders' AI prompt creation and stay up to date with AI industry updates faster. You can start with Nat Eliason and Ben Tossell 

Martech Proficiency: Navigating Marketing Technology Platforms

Martech Proficiency: Navigating Marketing Technology Platforms

Martech skills allow marketers to automate work processes (the main thing here is not to get lost in what you should automate and proposals of automation platforms) and transform marketing from manual to efficient and scalable operations.

Here is the heart of the question: what does it mean to have Martech skills? It means a deep understanding of marketing tools and the goals of integrating such tools.

The ability to manage these tools is no less critical. Of course, every modern Martech tool has tech support that will help with seamless integration and onboarding.

However, it is essential to understand that you are integrating a tool not because everyone does it or because there is a discount on the tool. You must clearly understand why the tool is needed and even predict how long it will take to bring the planned results.

What results can you achieve by mastering Martech skills:

1) Automation and more accurate implementation of repetitive tasks. For example, lead scoring.

2) More detailed audience segmentation and, as a result, sending more personalized messages.

3) Omnichannel strategy implementation for a more seamless lead journey

4) Access to real-time data analytics

Here are the top 3 Martech tools that are worth paying attention to:

Category: CRM + Marketing Automation

The leader is HubSpot, which combines email marketing, social networks, lead generation, content management, analytics, and CRM into a single ecosystem.

Category: SEO + Content Marketing and Competitive Analysis

At the top of the leaders is Semrush, which is focused on keyword research, website audits, backlink tracking, and content marketing and AI optimization.

Category: Content Creation + Visual Branding

In this category, the icing on the cake is Canva Pro, allowing you to create materials that are oriented to the brand voice easily.

Project Management: Managing Complex, Multi-Channel Campaigns Efficiently

A consistently necessary skill for a modern marketer is project management, which allows you to plan, control, and evaluate the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

However, the human factor remains necessary in project management since it is required to create proper coordination between all teams: content creators, designers, analysts, PPC specialists, outsourcers, and service providers to work on standard criteria.

Let’s explore the top 6 types of the knowledge and skills that can be used to create new products.

• Managing Deadlines and Consequences

Helps to prioritize and manage resources, avoiding bottlenecks and delays.

Tip: To improve this process, use a sprint-based approach to break down extensive processes into manageable tasks with performers and dates.

• Budget Control

Helps maximize ROI through well-designed budget allocation, expense tracking, and sprint adjustments based on results. It also greatly helps with Scrum skills under team goals.

Tip: Use expense identification tools like Trello, Asana, Monady, or simple Google Sheets to prevent expense inflation.

• Risk Mitigation

Helps combat potential risks early on and adjust tactical actions in case of force majeure.

Tip: To improve this process, identify the top 10 bottlenecks and plan actions to improve these processes.

• Quality Assurance

Helps plan for the quality of the product/service launch in advance.

Tip: Implement a checklist for each type of content before the conference launch.

• Reporting and Performance Tracking.

Helps track the performance of marketing strategies at various stages and make real-time adjustments.

Tip: Set measurable KPIs at the start and conduct retrospectives within 3 weeks to track results and redefine efforts.

• Flexibility and Adaptability

Helps improve marketing activities without changing overall marketing goals.

Tip: Use Agile marketing, review backlog priorities daily, and be prepared to quickly change your approach based on the market, competitor actions, or internal feedback.

Example: Launching a new product or rebranding an existing one may involve SEO, email marketing, social media, paid advertising, PR, offline events, influencer engagement, etc. The Marketing Project Manager coordinates schedules, ensures consistent messaging across channels, tracks budgets, manages vendor contracts, and reports on progress to stakeholders to ensure a smooth and successful launch.

Collaboration and Communication: Working together AI and Cross-Functional Teams

The art of close communication is critical in the post-COVID world when many teams are still working remotely and don't want to return to corporate office time. Despite this, it is necessary to be able to coordinate goals, share results, brainstorm, and be effective in the AI ​​era.

Of course, many online tools and operators monitor the visualization of remote communication. Miro's board is a successful example of using online tools for other teams. Miro has ready-made templates and the ability to start creating your creative work process from scratch.

Also, it is worth considering that many solo marketers or technical specialists have part-time work without deep diving into the company's corporate culture or aren't involved in the team's work process.

For such cases, we are developing MarketingKawowarka, a community for marketers who want to gain new insights, share experiences, conduct online idea generation, evaluate the success of their ideas, etc. Stay tuned and rock your positions with us.

Is AI the End of Human Creativity in Marketing?

The short answer is no; human skills will still survive. If you break it down, there are still key skills AI can’t replace—like creativity, emotional intelligence, and strategic vision (at least for now—who knows what tomorrow brings?).

But let’s focus on today.

Although AI assistants excel in data analysis, automating routine tasks and processes, and generating ideas and advice, they cannot reproduce emotional depth. Emotional intelligence turns marketing from simply selling a product to building connections on a deeper level.

Also, AI assistants are not distinguished by long-term thinking, that is, strategic marketing must see beyond the effectiveness of current campaigns, and take into account and coordinate strategies for the future. For example, your product is a simple website today, but what could it be like tomorrow?

An AI assistant can provide ideas based on what has already been created but not rely on your "market instincts," cultural differences, or evidence-based practices.

Therefore, skills such as AI matching with human creativity and emotional understanding maintain a competitive advantage by delivering authentic, strategic, and emotionally engaging campaigns.