Artificial intelligence (AI) has the ability to change the way we handle PR and marketing communications.
AI is an umbrella term for technologies which enable machines in order to perform cognitive tasks-such as seeing, writing, moving, reading, or analysing data – as-well or better than – humans. AI technologies may be trained on tasks by humans or, in the case of machine learning, learn to get better on their own.
You utilise AI every day, even if you don’t know it:
- Your phone’s voice assistant uses AI technologies like natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation (NLG) to answer your questions.
- Gmail uses AI to predict what you’ll type next and complete sentences for you.
- Amazon relies on AI to recommend products for you based on what you’ve bought in the past.
These are just a number of examples of how AI impacts your daily consumer life. However, if your work involves PR and/or marketing communications, AI could dramatically impact your professional life, too.
That’s as AI offers brands an unprecedented ability in order to increase revenue and reduce costs through more intelligent automation and machine-powered predictions.
AI in PR: The Conversation Has Just Started
Even though the number of AI tools accessible for PR professionals is growing exponentially, there seems to be little understanding of the influence this technology is having on the industry. For instance, the USC 2019 Global Communications Report demonstrated that 86% of PR professionals and students considered themselves to be “somewhat” or “not at all” knowledgeable regarding the application of artificial intelligence in communications.
Nevertheless, a significant portion of PR specialists reported that they were making use of tech services in order to conduct media monitoring, website analytics, social media management as well as social listening, all of which are likely to be using some form of AI. These findings make the suggestion that there currently exists a significant misunderstanding — perhaps a knowledge gap — regarding the actual state of AI technology advancement as it can be applied to supporting or evolving the capabilities in the PR industry.
How Is AI Being Utilised In PR?
The modern age of PR is digitally focused and, owing to this, AI is utilised in order to assist PR professionals with data management, identifying insights as well as automating tasks
AI Makes PR Data Management Simple
While humans become tired and bored after staring at hundreds of tables that are full of data, machines don’t. Properly trained AI systems don’t make mistakes.
So when it comes to pulling, organising as well as analysing data AI is a PR professional’s best friend.
Using AI-powered systems, PR professionals are able to build new campaigns which are based on real-world data. As AI technology is able to sift through and analyse tonnes of data, it can be utilised to help PR professionals identify the elements which will likely lead to a successful campaign that is based on the intended target audience.
It can also be used in order to eliminate some of the guesswork involved in PR, giving fact-based responses to questions such as:
- When is the optimal time to start a campaign?
- What are the most useful subject lines to boost email open rates?
- What type of copy content will my audience respond best to?
- Which journalists, bloggers as well as influencers should I approach?
Thanks to AI, PR can provide hyper-specific material and campaigns which are perfectly aligned with the target audience’s interests.
Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing
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