How To Leverage AI in Marketing Tactics

The marketing landscape has reached an inflection point. Artificial intelligence is reshaping how you develop strategies, engage audiences and drive results, and AI tools are helping teams keep up with the breakneck pace of change. According to the 2025 State of Marketing AI Report, 74% of marketing professionals say AI is either “critically important” or “very important” to their success in the next 12 months.¹ Meanwhile, 60% of marketers now use AI tools daily, nearly doubling from just 37% in 2024.²

Despite this rapid adoption, most marketers cite a lack of education and training as their top barrier to AI adoption.¹ If you’re a mid-level or management-level marketing professional seeking to develop leadership skills and secure upward mobility, AI literacy is now as fundamental to your craft as understanding your target audience.

This article explores how to leverage AI in marketing so you can work smarter, deliver better results and advance your career. 

What AI Brings to Marketing

AI represents a shift in what’s possible in marketing—not just faster execution, but new ways of understanding customers and delivering experiences. Three core AI capabilities are driving this transformation, and chances are, you’re already using at least one of them.

Efficiency

Most marketers turn to AI for one clear reason: to save time on repetitive, data-driven tasks.¹ The applications of using AI in marketing are practical and immediate. AI helps you schedule posts, personalize emails, analyze performance, brainstorm ideas and draft content. That saved time becomes your competitive advantage when you redirect it toward higher-level work like strategizing and building meaningful relationships. 

Data-Driven Decision-Making

Marketing has always required balancing intuition with data. AI tips the scale by analyzing huge datasets to reveal what’s working, what isn’t and why. Sixty-five percent of marketers now rely on AI to find actionable insights in their data, whether that’s patterns about customer behavior, campaign performance or emerging trends that would take weeks to spot manually.¹ 

Improved Personalization and Targeting

Your customers expect you to know what they want before they tell you. If you’re leveraging AI in your marketing role, you can do exactly this by analyzing browsing patterns, past purchases and engagement data to personalize experiences for thousands of customers simultaneously. Seventy-three percent of marketers already rely on AI for this level of personalization.³ 

AI in Customer Insights and Analytics

Some of the most powerful examples of AI in marketing come from customer insights. AI spots patterns in behavior that reveal who’s ready to buy, who’s about to leave and what messages will resonate.

Knowing how to leverage AI in marketing means applying it where human analysis falls short. AI can identify a customer’s purchase intent before they convert and even flag churn risk before it’s obvious. It can more accurately segment customers based on behavioral signals. The technology also analyzes sentiment across thousands of customer touchpoints simultaneously to identify shifts in customer perception as they happen rather than after they’ve become problems. 

AI-Powered Content Creation

AI is reshaping marketing, but it hasn’t eliminated the need for great content—it’s just changed how you create it. Half of all marketers now use AI to produce content,² and 57% rely on ChatGPT as their go-to tool.¹ Here’s where AI delivers the most value:

1. Copywriting and blog assistance: AI helps you generate initial drafts and brainstorm ideas quickly. The key is using it as a collaborative partner, where you let AI handle the first pass, then apply your strategic thinking and brand voice to refine the output.
2. Personalized email campaigns: Marketers use AI to analyze subscriber behavior and figure out the best time to send emails. AI also helps you personalize subject lines based on past engagement and predict—at scale—which offer will resonate with each recipient.
3. Social media content optimization: You can use AI to evaluate which content types perform best on each platform, see optimal posting times and jump on trending topics relevant to your brand. Forty-three percent of marketing professionals now consider AI essential to their social media strategy.³ 

Enhancing Customer Experience With AI

The experience your customers have with your brand is what often differentiates you from your competitors, and AI helps you deliver consistency at scale. AI-powered chatbots, for example, help you handle routine customer questions 24/7—answering FAQs, tracking orders and providing basic product information. Just be sure you’re using them strategically, though, as 90% of people still prefer talking to a human.³

Your marketing team can also leverage AI to make product recommendations that feel personal to each customer. You’ll be providing a service your customers want, as most people like the idea of personalized deals and tailored recommendations, even if it’s AI-driven.³

Behind the scenes, you can use AI in customer support to predict when a customer is getting frustrated and reach out before a small issue escalates to the point of customer loss. 

AI in Advertising and Campaign Optimization

Advertising requires constant optimization to maximize your return on investment (ROI). There are multiple ways to leverage AI to make your paid ad campaigns more effective:

• Programmatic ad buying: AI can automate the buying, placement and optimization of paid ads, so your organization is less likely to overpay for ad placement or reach the wrong audience.
• Real-time A/B testing: AI analyzes A/B testing results in real time and automatically adjusts to the “winning” version.
• Budget allocation and ROI tracking: AI predicts which channels will deliver the best results for your marketing objectives and can reallocate budget based on campaign performance. 

Best Practices for Using AI in Marketing

Successfully leveraging AI in marketing is straightforward if you’re following these best practices:

• Choose the right tools and platforms: The AI tool landscape is crowded and by no means set in stone. When you evaluate which AI tools to use, start with clear use cases rather than picking tools because they’re popular, and prioritize ones that integrate with your existing marketing technology stack.
• Balance automation with human creativity: AI excels at efficiency and pattern recognition, but your human judgment, creativity and strategic thinking are irreplaceable. You can use AI for tasks like initial drafts and data analysis, but apply your strategic thinking to interpret AI insights, maintain your brand voice and preserve the human elements that build genuine connections with your audience.
• Consider ethical implications and data privacy: If you’re using AI in marketing, be transparent about it. Protect your customer data, comply with privacy regulations, watch your AI systems for potential bias and always maintain human oversight of AI decisions.

Advance Your Marketing Career With Northwestern’s IMC Professional Program

AI is fundamentally reshaping marketing, from how you analyze customer data to how you create content and optimize your campaigns. The marketers who will thrive are those who adopt AI strategically while maintaining the human creativity, judgment and leadership that technology can’t replace. But understanding AI tools isn’t enough—the professionals who will lead their organizations through AI transformation and advance to CMO and VP roles will be those who combine strategic AI literacy with comprehensive IMC expertise.

Northwestern University’s Master of Science in Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) Professional program is designed specifically for aspiring marketing executives seeking C-suite leadership in this AI-driven landscape. The Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications pioneered integrated marketing communications and launched the first IMC master’s program in the U.S. in 1991—we understand what it takes to lead through transformative change.

The program teaches you how to think strategically about AI and other emerging technologies, equipping you with the leadership skills to direct AI strategy at the organizational level, not just use AI tools. You’ll gain immediate access to a powerful network of Medill alumni who hold influential marketing positions across various industries, providing invaluable opportunities for mentorship, collaboration and career advancement.

The live online format offers the flexibility to earn your degree while maintaining your career momentum, which means you’ll immediately be able to apply cutting-edge strategies to your current role.

Learn how Northwestern’s IMC Professional program can help you develop the skills you need to lead in marketing’s AI-powered future. View our admissions requirements and schedule time with an admissions outreach advisor today.