While AI might feel like a buzzword, it’s becoming an essential part of my work process. In this article, I’ll explore how specific AI tools have helped me streamline my day-to-day, enhance creativity, and free up valuable time for strategic thinking.

Quick Content Creation 

The challenge of consistently generating fresh, relevant content has long been a pain point for marketing teams. AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT are revolutionising this process, turning hours of brainstorming into just a few productive minutes. How you can use these tools depends significantly on your role, objectives, and ultimately the strength and detail of your prompts.

For Brands and Businesses

If you’re running a brand or business, your focus is likely creating consistent, engaging content that speaks directly to your customers. Think of AI as your always-on content strategist. It can transform how you approach both product and campaign content.

For product-focused content, AI excels at generating detailed descriptions, feature explanations tailored to different customer segments, and comprehensive FAQ content that anticipates customer needs. When it comes to marketing campaigns, AI can help brainstorm themes that align with your brand values and ensure messaging consistency across channels. It can also create educational, entertaining or aspirational content that helps achieve brand or business goals.

Modern Marketing Tip: Feed your brand guidelines and tone of voice to AI tools first. This ensures all generated content maintains your brand’s unique voice from the start.

For Agencies and Marketing Professionals 

For agency professionals, AI becomes your strategic partner in developing client solutions. It can streamline your strategy development by helping simplify complex ideas into clear narratives for presentations, quickly identify insights (which you can then validate with verified sources), and refine strategic frameworks and customer journeys.

When it comes to campaign planning, AI can help develop integrated campaign concepts, create channel-specific content strategies, and generate ideas for measurement frameworks. It’s particularly valuable in the early stages of projects or strategies, helping to explore different angles and approaches quickly.

I’ve also found LLMs particularly useful lately in the development of workshop facilitation, you can quickly run your workshop agenda through your chosen LLM, and it will provide ideas on how to facilitate and manage content and outputs that can then be refined and finalised to suit the context you know about the client or brand.

Modern Marketing Tip: Use AI as an initial point of discovery and ideation, but ensure you validate your ideas through research and your own creativity.

Data Analysis and Research

Most marketers didn’t get into the industry to spend their days knee-deep in pivot tables. This is where I love AI, transforming complex data into actionable insights. Tools like Claude can parse through your campaign data and excel documents, and not just show you what happened, but give some initial context that might help you to start to validate why it happened and what to do next.

Another useful platform is You.com. This platform is great at identifying research and sources. Instead of opening 20 browser tabs and trying to piece together insights, you get coherent, consolidated information that you can actually use. From tracking emerging trends to gathering competitive intelligence, it’s about working smarter, not harder.

Visual Storytelling 

Creating compelling visuals has always been a time-consuming process, but tools like Midjourney and Napkin can really help, if like me, you can get stuck spending hours on slide formatting and visualisation. These tools allow you to generate unique visuals that reflect concepts, text or ideas you are trying to bring to life visually. The key is being specific in your prompts and iterating based on results.

For data-heavy presentations, Napkin transforms complex information into clear, engaging infographics. The difference between a good presentation and a great one often lies in how effectively you can visualise your data.

Similarly, LLMs like Claude can help conceptualise data visualisations and presentation layouts. Whether you’re preparing for a quarterly business review or trying to turn complex ideas into graphics, these AI tools can suggest basic visualisation formats and organisational structures that you can then improve and build on. I’ve found this particularly useful when I’m stuck on how to present data effectively – the AI can propose different chart types, layout options, and visual hierarchies that I can then refine and customise. This approach has saved me countless hours of staring at blank slides trying to figure out the best way to communicate my insights.

Content Repurposing

Let’s say you’ve got a blog post that’s performing brilliantly. Instead of starting from scratch for social media, AI can help you extract and adapt the most compelling elements for different platforms. A 2,000-word blog can quickly transform into multiple pieces of content, each optimised for specific platform behaviours and audiences.

For Instagram, AI can help craft visual-first, emotion-driven narratives that resonate with your audience. On LinkedIn, the same content can be reshaped into professional insights and data-driven stories through carousel posts or thought leadership pieces. For platforms like X, AI excels at distilling your key messages into concise, shareable takeaways, while for TikTok, it can help adapt your content to fit current trends and entertainment styles.

The key is thinking strategically about each platform’s unique characteristics and using AI to adapt your message accordingly, rather than copying and pasting across channels. This approach ensures your content remains fresh and platform-appropriate while maintaining your core message’s integrity.

Cost Considerations and Tool Selection

Whilst AI tools can significantly boost productivity, it’s important to approach tool selection strategically. Many AI platforms offer free tiers or trials, but premium features often require investment. For example, ChatGPT’s free version provides solid capabilities for basic content creation, whilst the subscription offers access to more advanced features and GPT-4. Tools like Midjourney and some premium visualisation platforms require paid subscriptions from the start.

For brands and agencies, consider starting with a mix of free and paid tools based on your most pressing needs. You might begin with free versions of content generation tools whilst investing in specialised platforms for visual content or data analysis. The key is to measure the time saved and value generated against the subscription costs. Many teams find that the productivity gains and creative output quickly justify the investment, particularly when it frees up strategic thinking time that can be dedicated to higher-value tasks.

The Modern Brand Method 

I hope this article has inspired you to go beyond simply adopting AI tools – but start thinking about practical ways that you could leverage these use cases to elevate how you approach your work. The people and businesses that will thrive will be those that integrate these tools thoughtfully and habitually into their daily workflows. It will not only save time but also elevate the output of your work in terms of quality and effectiveness.

Like most new habits, the key is setting realistic goals and changes to your work pattern. You could choose one area where AI can make an immediate impact. Maybe it’s content ideation, data analysis, storytelling or repurposing content across channels. Create a simple process that incorporates AI tools in a way that feels natural and adds immediate value to you or your team.

Stop spending hours on tasks that AI can handle in minutes. Instead, use that time to think strategically and push yourself creatively. I know that for strategists like me, we often feel constrained by the limited time we have to think deeply about challenges and solutions we are looking to build. AI offers a dual solution: it not only frees up valuable thinking time but also enhances your creative process by acting as a constant companion to validate and refine your ideas.