Artificial intelligence was the talk of 2023, and, as we progress into the new year, the market is becoming increasingly saturated with AI tools for this, that and everything!

While the AI boom presents a lot of opportunity, it also brings challenges as brands struggle to net the solutions that work for them from a veritable ocean of prospects, but we’re here to help.

In this bimonthly round-up, we cut through the hype and spotlight AI marketing tools that stand out in the crowd and might help you to improve your processes.

Featured AI for digital marketing

• ChatGPT vs. Microsoft Copilot
• Amazon Q
• Perplexity AI
• Synthesia
• Text to Speech
• Quillbot

ChatGPT vs. Microsoft Copilot

While Microsoft Copilot (formerly Bing Chat) shares its core technology with ChatGPT, it's important to note that they aren't interchangeable. Despite their common origins and general abilities, Copilot and ChatGPT have distinct features and can help you in different ways.

Quick comparison chart

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a standalone large language model (LLM) designed to behave like a chatbot. It uses state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques to understand and generate human-like text.

The free version of ChatGPT uses GPT-3.5 technology. It cannot browse the web and is limited to information available before its most recent update.

The subscription version uses GPT-4 technology. It can browse Bing, meaning it’s able to present the most up-to-date information — although fact-checking is still recommended.

ChatGPT for digital marketing

ChatGPT can:

• Answer questions
• Generate creative content - for emails, blogs, web copy, meta tags… you name it
• Assist in structuring content or generating content ideas
• Help with coding
• Simplify customer personalisation tasks 
• Offer general SEO recommendations or SEO recommendations for a specific text
• Draft custom ad scripts for paid media campaigns - although this can take many iterations to fine-tune
• Serve as an integrated customer service chatbot on your website
• Generate images from text via DALL-E

What is Microsoft Copilot?

Microsoft Copilot is an AI chatbot developed by Microsoft. It functions as an AI search companion with access to the internet for up-to-date information retrieval.

Like ChatGPT, Copilot can provide detailed responses akin to human interactions and perform various tasks such as writing, solving coding problems, and generating images from text.

It offers three chat modes:

• Balanced
• Precise
• Creative

Balanced uses GPT-3.5, whereas Precise and Creative chat modes use GPT-4. This means Copilot gives you access to a more accurate and coherent AI blueprint for free.

Copilot is integrated into the Bing interface and is also available as a dedicated domain like ChatGPT. It is celebrated for its enhanced speed and ability to provide sources for responses - simplifying the fact-checking process.

Integrated into both Microsoft 365 and the Microsoft Graph, it can incorporate data from your calendar, emails, meetings, documents, etc in its responses. This makes it a powerful driver of productivity for digital marketers who use Microsoft’s ecosystem.

Microsoft Copilot for digital marketing

Microsoft Copilot can:

• Provide coding assistance and generate code snippets for various programming languages.
• Make SEO recommendations
• Carry out complex data analysis
• Access real-time information through Bing for up-to-date data and trends
• Enhance productivity within the Microsoft ecosystem
• Generate images from text using advanced AI capabilities (based on OpenAI’s DALL-E)
• Assist in various tasks related to writing
• Speed up search for complex information

Which should you use and when?

As you can access versions of both Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT for free, we recommend using both for a while and seeing how they stack up against one another for various tasks. This is the best way to get a feel for their abilities.

However, generally speaking, ChatGPT is the better option for creative tasks that require a back and forth about ideas and generating fresh content. Its diverse integrations also make it the AI marketing tool of choice for those who want to put it to work across various channels, e.g., as a customer service chatbot on your website.

Bing, with its local Microsoft integrations, web browsing capabilities, and verifiable sources, is the better option for market research, solving coding issues, and working with internal data.

It’s also worth noting that Copilot is more capable of understanding the context of your prompts than the free version of ChatGPT. As such, Copilot is often a sensible choice if your query is quite complex or you don’t have much prompting experience.

There’s an art to prompts, especially where ChatGPT is concerned – but we’ll cover this topic in detail in a future post.

Amazon Q

Amazon Q is a generative AI assistant accessible via the AWS Management console or a third-party app. Yes, another chatbot — but Amazon Q brings something special to the table… private cloud AI.

What does private cloud for AI mean?

Put simply, private cloud AI means that your business has its own dedicated AI assistant. It can be linked to and trained on proprietary data banks, code and systems — making it a specialist in all matters relating to your business operations.

Private cloud AI can help you make informed decisions efficiently and provide insights based on your organisation’s data that human analysts might not be able to piece together. 

Private cloud for AI is also a secure technology…

Although ChatGPT boasts excellent integrations, it’s never really a closed loop, and sensitive data could be leaked.

This is because ChatGPT and similar chatbot-style AIs rely on public servers, meaning there’s always going to be an element of vulnerability in terms of privacy. Amazon Q, on the other hand, uses a completely private server, so data is under lock and key at all times.

With privacy legislation evolving almost as rapidly as AI, this is a welcome development, that marks a necessary advancement in the relationship between digital marketing and artificial intelligence.

Private AI allows brands to safely introduce AI-powered productivity solutions to their operations whilst remaining compliant.

One caveat, though, is that full Amazon Q integration requires strong tech skills — so isn’t for everyone.

Amazon Q for digital marketing

As a chatbot-style AI, Amazon Q can process your complex inquiries in the form of conversational language, and deliver a precise response based on your enterprise data, which can support digital marketing efforts in several ways:

• Customer segmentation
• Personalised product recommendations
• Predictive analytics
• Campaign performance analysis & automated campaign optimisations
• Content generation & optimisation
• Social media monitoring and engagement

Perplexity AI

Developed using OpenAI’s GPT-4 blueprint, Perplexity is another highly impressive LLM AI making waves at the moment.

What helps this AI stand out is the depth of its resource analysis. As well as the usual haunts, Perplexity explores academic papers, YouTube videos and even social media to find a response.

If need be, you can pick and choose the sources Perplexity can use, giving more control over the parameters of the search and the context of responses. For example, if you want Perplexity to build and answer based solely on information from Reddit, it will.

Unlike ChatGPT, Perplexity AI delivers almost all information alongside citations, ensuring full transparency — saving valuable time that would otherwise be spent fact-checking manually.

Even Copilot’s source attribution seems limited when compared to Perplexity AI’s, making it one of the best research and content production tools for applications that require airtight verifiability.

Perplexity AI for digital marketing

• Create more factual accurate original content, although it’s worth specifying that you need original content when assembling your prompt
• Facilitate further research and understanding of topics
• Offer insights, suggestions, and solutions that support strategic decision-making
• Analyse customer interactions to offer personalised recommendations, driving engagement and conversions
• Make SEO recommendations based on general questions or specific texts

Synthesia

Video content is becoming increasingly popular among users.

With Synthesia, you can turn text into a video featuring one of 160 available AI avatars. Alternatively, you can turn yourself into an avatar and upload a sample of your voice, so it both looks and sounds like you.

You can produce scripts yourself and feed them to Synthesia or use an integrated AI writing assistant to help you along.

You don’t need cameras or a brave employee to serve as the face and voice of your organisation; you just need some text.

Synthesia for digital marketing

Synthesia is a popular choice for creating internal training videos and summarising complex documents in an engaging format, but when it comes to digital marketing, video blog or page content is the best use-case.

All you have to do is copy the page URL, paste it into Synthesia, and then press ‘Generate’. The tool will first create a video script and will subsequently produce a high-quality video that you can add to your page.

This means you can take advantage of the SEO benefits of video content with none of the challenges associated with producing video manually.

That said, Synthesia videos will never appear quite as natural as a self-produced video. So, if you have the means, it’s best not to cut corners.

Open AI - Text to Speech

If you do have the resources to produce video content but don’t want to provide a voiceover yourself, Text to Speech from OpenAI gives you access to 6 AI voices, each able to verbalise your text like a voice-over professional.

Like Synthesia, all you need are some words, and Text to Speak will take it from there.

Text to Speech for digital marketing

Text to Speech is an excellent way to give a voice to video product or service overviews for your landing pages, encouraging deeper engagement from your audiences. It can also be used to narrate more adventurous videos that are shot rather than animated, which can then be used to give your blog post a winning edge.

However, Text to Speech isn't limited to video applications. It can also be deployed to vocalise website content or blog articles, improving accessibility and indirectly boosting SEO performance.

Quillbot

The developers of Quillbot opted for a simple, focused AI tool that does one thing exceedingly well… paraphrasing.

All changes made by the AI are highlighted, so no need to flit back and forth between the source text and the generated text to spot the differences. If you’re unhappy with one of the changes, Quillbot gives you a long list of synonyms to rephrase the output.

ChatGPT can also paraphrase, but, without detailed prompts, the changes made can be quite basic or broad. By contrast, Quillbot offers a more nuanced iteration of your text and provides a simple way to change very specific elements to suit your needs.

Quillbot for digital marketing

Quillbot is an excellent way to create plagiarism-free textual content for your website. It can also help to avoid self-plagiarism and duplicate content across your site, which can harm SEO efforts.

For example, let’s say that you have a UK and a US site, both of which promote the same services. Instead of creating unique product descriptions for each site from scratch, you can write them once and then use Quillbot to create fresh copy that covers all the same points.

A note on AI assisted content creation

When it comes to content, it's crucial not to become overly reliant on automation.

Google's March 2024 core algorithm update, as well as recent changes to their spam policies, aims to significantly reduce low-quality - often AI-produced - content from their SERPs.

You don't have to stop using artificial intelligence to support content creation altogether, but it's important to find a balance between AI assistance and your own input - and to keep the end user in mind during the creation process.

Final thoughts

With technology moving so fast, we anticipate more creative applications of AI for digital marketing during 2024. But despite the considerable buzz around artificial intelligence, it’s not suitable for every organisation or application.

At TDMP, AI is part of our toolkit, but we use it selectively. We feel there’s value in having an AI arrow in your quiver where it makes sense, but an arrow it is – not a silver bullet.

Contact us today to discuss this matter in greater detail or for expert digital marketing support.