How to Build AI into Your Marketing Workflows

Artificial intelligence is transforming how marketers work, but knowing where to start can feel overwhelming. At a recent EM Lunch & Learn, AI consultant Damon Brennan shared practical ways to incorporate AI into everyday workflows.

With a background in video production and program management, Damon now helps companies implement AI through training, strategy sessions, AI-readiness audits, and automation creation. Be sure to watch the recording of the live demos below, but first, Damon has covered several foundational elements about AI.

Understanding AI: Power in Pattern Recognition

At its core, AI excels at pattern recognition rather than storing facts like a traditional database. It’s been trained on massive amounts of content from the internet and also marketing campaigns, blog posts, ads, and customer communications.

When you ask AI to write an email, it’s not pulling from a saved template. Instead, it’s building a response word by word, predicting what sounds right based on everything it learned during training.

Damon says, “It knows how language works and what phrases go together. It knows how to sound confident, persuasive, or empathetic.” This makes AI particularly effective for many marketing use cases as you’ll see below.

AI Use Cases for Marketing Teams

What are LLMs especially good at for marketing?

• Content Ideation and Drafting. AI excels at generating blog post outlines, email drafts, social media copy, and ad variations. You can request multiple options—ask for 5 headlines or 100 product names. AI won’t get annoyed by any request you make.
• Audience Personalization at Scale. Need to adjust messaging for different audiences? AI can easily modify content for various personas or funnel stages. Give it a piece written for Millennials and ask it to adapt the tone for Gen Z. It handles these shifts naturally with proper context.
• Research Summarization and Synthesis. AI can process large amounts of information quickly, turning complex marketing reports into executive summaries or analyzing customer reviews to identify common pain points and sentiment patterns.
• Campaign Optimization. Generate multiple CTA options, test ad variations, or brainstorm improvement ideas.
• Brainstorming and Creative Jam Sessions. Use AI as a thought partner to generate ideas for events, themes, taglines, and names. For example, you could prompt AI: “Give me 10 quirky names for a new B2B podcast” but it’s up to you to provide the “taste” – what actually sounds good.

Prompt Structure: The New Marketing Superpower

Good prompting is like writing a creative brief. Include these key elements:

• Context: Define the role you want AI to play and the audience. “You’re a content strategist writing for B2B SaaS founders.”
• Task: Clearly state what you want accomplished. “Write a LinkedIn post summarizing a new product launch.”
• Constraints: Specify format, tone, word count, or style requirements. Do you want bullets, paragraphs, or a specific voice? Example: “Make it friendly and under 150 words.”
• Examples: Feed AI as many examples as possible – specific outputs like brand voice, other blog posts, emails, articles, etc. – it can mimic them very well.

Remember to iterate for perfection. Prompt, review, refine, and reprompt until you achieve the desired result.

Things to Consider When Using LLMs

To be sure, AI can “hallucinate” or generate outputs that are incorrect, nonsensical, or completely fabricated, despite appearing accurate and plausible. Here are a few considerations when using LLMs to generate marketing content.

• Privacy and Data Protection. Be cautious with sensitive information. While you can adjust settings to prevent training on your data, avoid inputting customer data or personally identifiable information into public AI tools.
• Human Oversight is Essential. Always keep a human in the loop. AI can be confident but completely wrong, and maintaining brand voice requires human judgment. Consider AI output as a strong first draft that needs human refinement rather than using it as final copy.
• Legal and Ethical Awareness. Companies need clear governance around AI use, including disclosure policies for AI-generated content. Many organizations are establishing guidelines about when and how to acknowledge AI assistance in their materials.

Damon’s ChatGPT Demo Highlights

Damon brought these concepts to life using a fictional company called “Nest Together,” a modern money app designed specifically for couples to plan, share goals, and track expenses together. Here’s what he demonstrated using ChatGPT:

• Campaign Brief Creation. (Watch at 16:56) Using context, raw meeting notes, and content examples, Damon prompted: “You’re a senior marketing strategist. Based on the following notes from a strategy call, generate a clear, client-ready one-page campaign brief for a fall product launch. Write in a confident, warm tone, not too corporate. Avoid generic marketing speak or vague fluff.” Within seconds, AI produced a two-page brief including campaign overview, audience insights, key messaging, sample taglines and headlines, KPIs, and creative notes. AI is great for this use case since it’s only to give direction to someone else rather than using it in public communications.
• Logo Design with Iteration. (Watch at 20:02 – 26:49) Next, he demonstrated ChatGPT’s image generation by creating a logo for Nest Together. You’ll need to budget more time for this to be created. His prompt specified: “You’re a graphic designer creating a logo for a company called Nest Together” along with detailed requirements such as color palette and design style, plus he attached the campaign brief. Damon showed how you can refine prompts, request variations, and even ask ChatGPT to help you write better prompts by having it ask you clarifying questions. You can also create threads so you can maintain different versions of prompting and outputs.
• Instagram Ad Generation. (Watch at 26:55) Building on the brief and logo, Damon then created an Instagram ad by feeding ChatGPT both documents and requesting specific ad copy, headlines, and visual concepts. Damon cautioned when using AI-generated images, as there are telltale signs savvy users can spot. Consider what your customer may think when seeing them. Alternatively, you could use it to help you direct a designer to create the final images for you.
• Deep Research in Action. (Watch at 33:53) For a fictional U.S. electric bike company entering the Canadian market, Damon showed a market analysis that took AI eight minutes to finish, searching 23 sources, and performing 73 individual queries. The resulting report included market overview, customer segments, competitive landscape, and pricing strategies – complete with proper source citations. This level of research would typically require hours of manual work and multiple subscriptions to industry reports.

Looking Ahead: Automation and AI Agents

For advanced users, Damon introduced automation possibilities using tools like Zapier and Make to connect AI with existing workflows. Imagine automatically generating campaign briefs from meeting transcripts, then creating project tasks in Asana—all without manual intervention.

The future points toward AI agents that can take actions on your behalf, moving beyond simple question-and-answer interactions to actually completing tasks across multiple systems.

How to Get Started with AI

The best way to learn AI is by experimenting. As you become comfortable with prompting techniques, gradually expand to more complex applications like research synthesis and campaign development.

The key is viewing AI as a powerful creative partner rather than a replacement for human creativity and judgment. When used thoughtfully, it can dramatically accelerate marketing workflows while maintaining the strategic thinking and brand voice that only humans can provide.

Did you miss the live event? Watch the full session below. After you view the recording, we’d love to hear your feedback!

Editor’s Note: AI-assisted, human-edited blog.