Beyond the Buzz: The Real Potential of AI in Marketing for Startups

Introduction

Whether you’re already tapping AI for blog post writing and image creation or you’ve been putting off learning this new technology, there’s no question that it’s making waves in the startup space. If you wait too long to incorporate AI into your startup business, you could be left behind.

Globally, the AI market is expected to grow to $407B by 2027, Forbes reported. This technology can be particularly useful in marketing, where it’s expected to reach a value of $107.5B by 2028. 

For startups, AI makes it possible to do more with your marketing, even if you only have a small marketing team or your founders are doubling as marketers. According to Stastista, AI can be particularly useful for search improvements, like creating content that aligns with what people are searching for online.

However, this technology does have its drawbacks, and startups that aim to market their brand and products successfully will need to understand not just the technology itself but also how it is impacting marketing at large.

With a little help from a pro, your startup will be on the way to using AI for marketing wisely—and successfully.

A conversation with Meghan Keaney Anderson

With over 20 years of experience, Meghan Keaney Anderson knows a thing or two about marketing. Anderson currently runs global product marketing and communications for Watershed, a sustainability platform for enterprises. Before that, she was the head of marketing at Jasper, an AI company that provides marketing tools, and was the former VP of marketing at HubSpot. Meghan also spent nearly a decade at HubSpot, where she rose to VP of Marketing.

She’s seen the tide shift in marketing, especially with recent developments in AI, but her advice can resonate with startups and major companies alike. Here’s what Anderson had to say about utilizing AI for startup marketing.

HSFS: What are some things that startups and/or small marketing teams should consider when they are starting to approach AI?

Meghan Keaney Anderson: I think honestly, whether you're small or big, the big question is not the “how” or the technology itself. It's the sort of “where” and “in what ways are you going to use this to actually advance your strategy?”.

I've worked in AI before, and oftentimes I find that when people dive into AI, they do it out of a mandate or a curiosity, and they haven't put enough time into figuring out what strategically you want AI to do. Because it can do almost anything. 

I think if you're just getting started, figure out the places where the manual work is the biggest tax on your team. Try to see if there are places where AI can fit in there.

The way that I liked, very tactically speaking, was in marketing organizations, still using maybe your solo marketer to come up with the core idea. But then use AI to reframe that and repackage that into a dozen different formats and channels. That kind of scale is what AI can give you. If it allows your one team member, or maybe you're doubling as CEO and marketer, it allows you to sort of own the idea and own the strategy, and use AI to amplify it. 

HSFS: What are some of the biggest misconceptions that you've heard about AI and marketing, and some of the myths that can be busted?

MKA: The one that I feel most strongly about is this is not a replacement for your marketers. I think that it's meant to be a tool in their hands. And the reason why I say it's not a replacement is, if you just leave everything to AI, you will find pretty quickly that it's great at patterns, it's great at proliferation. It's not great at original ideas, and it's not great at understanding your strategy or your customers just yet. And it makes mistakes. 

So having a core strategist who deploys AI in thoughtful ways is the way to go, as opposed to saying, “I'm just going to have AI write all the content on my website and call that marketing.”

HSFS: Based on what you’re seeing, what are the most effective methods to invest in to have the biggest impact?

MKA: We are at the precipice, or in the early days, of some major shifts in marketing. I think that we're moving from a stage in marketing that was heavily performance-drive, as in highly measurable and optimizable and granular, to one that is a bit tougher to optimize for. What I mean by that is that search engines are going through a major change where they're integrating more AI into their outputs. That means that inherently, you're going to have a harder time ranking for certain terms and driving people back to your site because of that. I definitely think SEO is very much a well-worth discipline to to bring into your company. But it's going to change a bit, right? 

The same goes for paid performance marketing for ads, etc. We're going through the shift with cookies right now with them going away, and so that channel is getting harder. What's really interesting right now is acquisition, like net new acquisition through digital channels, is getting tougher.

On the flip side of that, we have more tools at our disposal through AI and other means to create really personalized experiences at scale for customers and for existing audiences than we ever have.

I think what you'll see is the balance shift a bit from net new acquisition to getting more value and being more tailored when it comes to the audiences that you have, I think that's one big shift. Another big shift is in a time where anyone can create any amount of content with AI, you're going to see a rise in the volume of content, and then a premium put on really original,  unique, remarkable content. I think we'll see brand storytelling and narrative and community come back in ways that we have really haven't seen for decades. 

HSFS: Are there any brands or individuals that inspire you in terms of marketing?

MKA: I think Canva’s doing some really interesting stuff. They just had their latest major product launch. They did it in a really quirky, almost cringe-worthy way, but it stood out. It was a rap, and it got talked about, and it was very authentic to them, their personality. It got talked about for weeks afterward. 

I think they're leaning heavily into brand, and kind of being part of that shift I just talked about, but that's a major company with a lot of resources. 

When I think about smaller companies, there's a company called Credo in the AI space, I think they’re series A, they they work on AI governance. They've done a lot with thought leadership and really smart, expert-led conversations in these micro-events and online. They've leaned into thought leadership really well, and they've leaned into the data that they have. They've played the role of kind of helping companies navigate a changing landscape. So I'd point to them as well as as someone doing cool stuff.

HSFS: How can we address trust and accuracy when it comes to AI?

MKA: This is not just another new industry popping up. This is actually a sea change at the level of the onset of the internet or the level of the onset of mobile phones that were social. So there's going to be a lot of stumbling, to begin with, it's going to be a lot of things to sort out. And there are going to be a lot of companies that do this very poorly, both from a vendor-provider standpoint of AI software companies and from a user standpoint. 

I think the more that we can be upfront with where those stumbling blocks are—and stumbling blocks may even be too small of a term in some cases—the better. We're going to make this shift as a larger collection of industries. 

HSFS: Let’s say you’re at a scaling startup. How do you think about these big changes, and where do those changes come in?

MKA: What I've seen most often happen was, it would come from two directions. It bubbles up from the bottom with individuals wanting to try all these tools, because they're feeling overwhelmed with their work and, rightly so, trying to find ways to do that work better. Then we see it, sometimes delayed, come from the top when people are trying to figure out, “How do we organize all of this and make sure it's secure?”

I think that actually, if you can time it well, I think that's the right approach at a company-wide level. What you want to do is set security parameters for the tools that you have approved to use. Not all of these AI tools are created equal, and there are so many of them now that you really need to do a security check. You want to check privacy for customer data protection, and so those decisions around security and privacy need to be at the company level, usually coming  out of your security team, if you have that, or your IT team. 

Then, from the top-down leadership level, you also want to set some standards around use of AI. In what situations do we feel good about using this? Do we disclose how we use it on our website? How do we couple this with education on some of the biases and weaknesses that are in AI?

I have seen companies develop internal committees to tackle this in a fast way because of the  speed it’s coming, and I think that works well. 

Once you set those parameters, I think you want to enable your team members to go find new use cases and tools within those parameters that can advance their strategies or your company as a whole. You don't want everything to be so top-down that you miss out on some opportunities you may not have seen.

HSFS: What are some of the unique use cases you've seen for AI in marketing?

MKA: It’s probably not as surprising anymore, but it came after people thought immediately how to use AI to proliferate content. I really like the use cases of AI that are about synthesizing content. So, taking all the customer research you've done, taking every call or sales recording that you have, transcribing it, and having AI pull out the major themes to inform product direction or how you position and talk about your product. That's a great use case, especially when you need to understand different segments really well, going back to that point about how it’s like, “Let’s use AI to create more tailored experiences for the audiences that we have.” I think that's a great one. 

There are roles that AI can play in helping your team brainstorm or in being sort of a sparring partner to come up with or find new angles and ideas. Again, you know, it's just finding patterns.  It's not actually creative or intelligent, and so it takes you bringing that creativity to it. But it can help to have that well to bounce things off of. 

HSFS: Are there any AI tools specifically that you have experience with or that you would recommend?

MKA: What I like about Jasper, I'll give that nod first, is that Jasper allows you to upload a knowledge base and set a brand voice for your company. One of the coolest things is to be able to upload a brief on a particular audience or a competitive positioning brief, and then have your team be able to base all of their responses in that stored knowledge. To me, that was a major breakthrough. So it's not just this generic copy coming out. It's informed by your strategy. I think that's a great tool for that. 

If you're just getting started, frankly, of the underlying LLMs (large language models), I think that Anthropic's Claude is really great at long-form and at synthesis. That's the one I use most often in my free time.

From a visual, audio, and video side of the fence, I actually have liked the existing platforms, how they built AI in as opposed to a net new tool. So Wistia using AI to help create social cuts of your videos and Canva using AI to help you generate your images. I think that those existing platforms on the visual side have brought in AI in smart ways that frankly the text-based ones haven't done as well yet, which is why outside tools for AI text-based work, I find more interesting.

HSFS: What skills do you think marketers will have to learn and develop now in this new world of marketing, and how can AI help with developing those skills?

MKA: Just like little things that were really inaccessible to people who weren't editors or designers before, like, “Oh, I love this picture, but I just want to remove this one element.” These are really, really hard for the majority of marketers and people. Using AI as a marketer to kind of edge yourself closer to that developer, to be able to build things and not just write about them, I think those are the things that open you up and amplify your work. 

I think if we do this well, we'll take all the time that we used to put into content production, and we will reinvest those into the places where AI is not as strong. So we will reinvest those into research that goes into that idea. We'll reinvest those into the ideation itself and making sure that your creative angle stands out from the crowd. We'll reinvest that into clever distribution strategy, since distribution is going to get harder, so partnerships and pop-up events and things like that. 

It's not that there's this whole world of new skills to learn beyond just diving in and playing around with AI, learning its weaknesses, and investing in your AI literacy. But it's not like a reinvention of the foundations of marketing. It's sort of a shift into where you should put that emphasis. And that shift is what's going to give you the competitive edge in this changing world. 

HSFS: How do you think AI may impact organizational structures, such as what is handled in-house versus what is outsourced?

MKA: I do think org structure will be different. You know, I think that there are roles that we didn't really need before that we're going to need more of: editors, fact-checkers, people who are ensuring the quality of the content that we're putting out there because we're putting out more, faster. 

At Jasper we shifted toward writing a really detailed brief for every single project we put out there, knowing that that brief would turn into a dozen different assets in a full end-to-end campaign using AI. But that meant we had to put a lot more effort into that upfront brief, the strategy, the research, etc. So the sort of editorial lead I think is going to be more important, and they own that idea. 

We also had someone who, I don’t know if this is operations or if this is editorial, but somebody who owned the purity of the source knowledge base that was feeding our AI tool. Things get messy as you create more stuff. We all have had intranets, we've all had, messy Google Doc files. If you've got a tool like Jasper, where you have a knowledge base that is making your AI outputs better, you want to make sure that that is the most up-to-date, pristine source of truth in your company. So having someone who can defend and maintain that space is important, too. 

Where we had high volumes of people, we will see some of those roles contract, and that will shift. I think there is a push and pull with agencies and AI, because some of the work that we were hiring agencies for was about production. But agencies have always played a really strong role in helping inside teams navigate change and help them figure out the sort of new world of marketing. I think that agencies will shift more toward strategy consulting, implementation of AI, and helping people very quickly make this shift. That's going to be where their strength is, and I would still hire agencies to do that as well. 

HSFS: Do you have any final words to share about AI and marketing?

MKA: A lot of the focus right now is going toward the technology itself. Everyone's like, “Oh, what does this tool do? What does this update of this tool do?” It's very AI technology-centric. And I think that's interesting, and I think we should keep track of it. But what I would encourage people to do is actually broaden your aperture a bit and look not just at the technology and all that's changing with it, but look at the way that the landscape in the world is shifting and marketing strategy is shifting as a result of that technology—the things that we talked about, changes to search, the rise of brand, the rise of community. Those are actually the things that I would put even more attention on, and then lean into those with the assistance of AI. 

It's just like a slight adjustment because I think we'll miss it if we're too myopic or too hyper-focused on the technology itself. It really doesn't matter at the end of the day if you use ChatGPT 4 or Claude 2, or which tools you use. What matters is, are you thinking about how the world around you is shifting?

We are going to have companies that really leap forward in this time, and others that miss the boat and fall. And again, the difference there isn't if they adopted AI or not. The difference is,  they started to adapt their strategy to reflect the way the world is as a result of this surge in technology.

Conclusion

AI is here to stay, and while you don’t have to know the latest AI tool launch nor do you have to use it for everything, knowing how it’s changing the landscape of marketing is important if you want your startup to remain competitive. Startups may have small marketing teams, but utilizing AI is a great way to do more with fewer resources, from content creation to admin automation. 

No matter how you decide to incorporate AI into your startup marketing strategy, don’t snub this technology—understanding how it impacts the world around you can make sure you stay ahead of the curve. As Anderson pointed out, you don’t need to focus on the small details of each AI tool but rather understand how this technology is shifting how companies approach marketing, with more emphasis on brand identity, storytelling, and community.