Stop Wasting Time: Use AI to Optimise Your Marketing Workflow and Reclaim 9 Hours a Week
We’ve all heard the hype—AI can transform your workflow and save you hours every week. But if you’re still scratching your head wondering how to make that happen, you’re not alone.
Only about 7% of employees are fully using AI to its potential*. That means many marketing teams are missing out on significant time-saving opportunities, while those who have mastered AI in their workflows are saving on average 9 hours a week*.
So, how can you do the same?
Step 1: Identify Your Key Workflows
First, it’s essential to understand where your time is going. Mapping out your regular workflows will help you see where AI can add value. Common tasks for marketing teams might include:
Brief development
Audience research
Competitive analysis
Content creation and review
Channel strategy
These tasks are often packed with repetitive or time-consuming elements, making them prime candidates for automation or AI-driven assistance.
Step 2: Apply AI to Your Workflows
Once you’ve identified your key workflows, it’s time to match them with AI tools. AI is especially good at creating, analysing, synthesising, and processing data—streamlining tasks that would otherwise take hours.
Here’s an example of how AI can assist with content development, one of the most common workflows in marketing.
| Task | AI Function | AI Tools to Help |
|---|---|---|
| Industry research to identify trends and stats | Analyse | Perplexity AI or Google Gemini for up-to-date data from reliable sources |
| Drafting interview questions | Create | ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or Microsoft Copilot to generate relevant questions |
| Transcribing interviews with thought leaders | Process | Otter.ai or Microsoft Teams Transcribe for automatic transcription |
| Extracting key quotes and themes | Synthesise | ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or Claude AI to summarise key points. You should make sure you are GDPR compliant if using a tool for this. |
| Creating an outline based on research and brief | Create | ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, or Microsoft Copilot can help you write an outline. |
| Writing the blog post | Create | Work with your AI tool of choice to create the blog post from the outline. Share the relevant context documents to help it create a decent first draft. |
| SEO optimisation | Analyse and Revise | Simply input your target keywords into ChatGPT or AI tool of your choice asking it to revise your content with those keywords in mind. |
Step 3: Build Custom AI Chatbots
Once you’re comfortable using AI for basic tasks, you might consider building custom AI tools to further streamline your work. For example, if your team regularly produces reports or social media content, creating a custom chatbot that automates parts of the process could save even more time.
I’ve built these using ChatGPT’s “Custom GPT” functionality and Google Gemini’s “Gems” functionality for my own workflows, and the results have been impressive. You can see an example of a chatbot I built to analyse the effectiveness of a website’s messaging here.
Step 4: Upskill Your Team
While AI tools are becoming increasingly user-friendly, your team still needs to be comfortable to unlock their full potential. Interestingly, 57% of employees are still relatively new to it – meaning that they’ve dabbled in tools like ChatGPT but haven’t integrated them into their daily work.
Investing in training sessions focused on prompt engineering and workflow optimisation can turn AI from a novelty into an essential part of your team’s toolkit . As I’ve seen in my own workshops, a well-trained team can quickly increase their productivity and creativity with AI.
Interested in seeing how AI can give you back those 9 hours a week? Book a free consultation or explore available AI training sessions to get started.
*Source: Section School’s AI Proficiency Report, August 2024