How To Incorporate AI In Your Digital Marketing Strategy

AI is everywhere on the Internet. As it evolves, digital marketers are discovering that it’s a revolutionary tool that helps improve the way that businesses connect with customers.

In a recent report, companies using AI as part of their marketing saw their ROI improve by 22%, had click-through rates that jumped by 47% and their campaigns launched an amazing 75% faster than their manually built counterparts. Those numbers are nothing to scoff at!

When marketers use AI thoughtfully, we’ve seen at Federated Digital Solutions how it can turn a good marketing campaign into a great one.

Here’s the most important thing to understand: AI isn’t here to replace human creativity and strategic thinking. Instead, it should be used as a tool that makes your marketing efforts more efficient, more targeted, and more successful in the long run.

AI’s Role In Marketing

In CoSchedule’s 2025 State of AI Marketing Report, AI helped increase the productivity of 83% of marketers, saving more than 5 hours every week. This is a key area where AI shines, saving employees time by handling tedious tasks so they can focus on the major ones that require a human touch.

“While we always make sure that there is a human touch when creating ads and campaigns at FDS, AI can help with efficiency,” explains Megan Stinson, an account manager at Federated Digital Solutions. “AI is a tool that needs someone with experience to keep in check.”

AI should never replace a human in the workforce. A machine simply can’t replicate the thoughts and uniqueness of human creativity. Instead, think of AI as your partner who researches and comes up with ideas in the blink of an eye. Though it can help do the heavy lifting, it still needs you for inspiration. It can’t work alone. The key is to use it for efficiency and strategizing — two areas where AI is the strongest.

AI For Campaign Optimization

For a majority of marketers, AI plays an active role in their daily workflow. A whopping 88% of marketers say they now use AI in their day-to-day tasks, and 51% of them use it to optimize their campaigns. Let’s find out how you can do that.  

Make Your Ads Work Harder

Campaign optimization is one of the most useful things to use AI for in marketing. You can run Facebook ads, display campaigns, or SEM campaigns, and AI can help you refine the approach towards whatever channel you’re using. 

“AI tools are especially helpful for optimizing campaigns, including Facebook ads, display ads, and SEM campaigns,” Stinson says. “Some of my favorite ways to use AI when optimizing SEM campaigns are optimizing ad copy for responsive search ads, adding and editing keywords, and optimizing geographic targeting.”

Making Adjustments in Real Time

AI has droves of information at the ready, and it can process huge amounts of data instantly. A human might take hours upon hours to analyze campaign performance across multiple channels, but AI can identify patterns right away and suggest improvements after analyzing them. 

Using AI for help in these situations allows you to adjust the campaign while it’s still live, which maximizes the impact of your budget. 

AI’s Role In Brainstorming And Planning

When you brainstorm and plan out strategies and campaigns, think of AI as your personal assistant. 

Building Better Strategies

More and more people are using AI for strategic planning because that’s where AI shines.

“When working on outlining an overall digital marketing strategy, AI can help determine where your ad dollars can be best utilized,” Stinson points out. “Once you’re building out campaigns, AI helps get the targeting dialed in from the start to help each campaign run most efficiently.”

AI can help you point out where your marketing dollars will be most effective and how they can stretch the furthest. In fact, 85% of executives think AI is the tool that will help their business gain and sustain a competitive advantage over their competitors.

Conversational AI

Using conversational AI is a useful way to work through problems in a way that makes sense for you. Instead of using platforms like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini as search engines, use them as thought partners.

“It can be really valuable to ask AI tools to ask you questions after giving some baseline information to fill in any gaps and better help you utilize it as a tool versus a crutch,” Stinson says. “Using AI interactively in this way helps cover all your bases, especially ones you might have overlooked during a solo brainstorming session.”

AI can help you work through sticking points, test out different scenarios of a situation, and work things out in real time. Share your business goals with the platform, your target audience, and budget constraints, then ask AI to help you work through your thoughts and ideas.

Asking The Right Questions

The crux of the matter is this: the quality of AI’s output depends on the quality of your input. This means being specific about the questions you’re asking, your business goals, your audience, and your constraints.

“To maximize your chance of getting good results, you need to feed good information into AI,” Stinson emphasizes. “You can’t give AI too many details in your prompt. Don’t be afraid to tell it what industry you’re in, who your target audience is, what has worked/not worked in previous campaigns, and your budget.”

Like any new technology, AI has a learning curve and can be difficult to understand. In a recent survey, 71.7% of non-AI users said they aren’t using it as a tool simply because they don’t understand it. We don’t want that to be you! Be thorough, ask the platform if it has questions for you to help flesh out the ideas you’re feeding it. Take it one step at a time and it will become easier to use and more helpful.

Placer.ai and Location Intelligence

Successful targeting depends on understanding where your customers come from and how they behave. Placer.ai allows you to do just that. This AI tool offers insights that would be almost impossible to retrieve manually. 

“Placer.ai is a location intelligence tool to help you make informed decisions for your business based on real visitor data,” Stinson says. “Digital marketers can use that data to create or optimize campaign targeting based of existing customers that fit specific demographics or geographical locations.”

One of Placer.ai’s most useful features is its competitive analysis. 

“With Placer’s data, you can also see what competitors your customers are visiting and see how you compare in visits with your competition,” Stinson adds. “That kind of intelligence helps you position your campaigns more strategically and identify opportunities your competitors might be missing.”

Using Yext To Increase Visibility

Nowadays, search goes far beyond Google. With the increasing popularity of AI search engines and voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, the accuracy of your business listing information across all channels is more important than it has ever been.

What’s also important is your online reputation. Think about the last time you made a purchase. If you’re like 98% of people, you probably read a review online before making that purchase.

Product reviews are important on their own, but the way a business responds to customer reviews is just as crucial. An overwhelming 88% of consumers say they’d use a business that replies to both positive and negative reviews. Notably, only 47% of people say they’d use a business that doesn’t reply to reviews at all. 

Federated Digital Solutions offers a service known as Location Concierge to help businesses stay on top of reviews. Utilizing the Yext platform, we’re able to manage your business listings across dozens of platforms across the internet. This ensures your business stays consistent everywhere — from Google searches to AI-driven results to smaller directories like Cylex or HotFrog.

Using AI, Yext ensures your business information is present and accurate on these platforms, making your business easier to find and more likely to rank higher in search by providing correct information (which Google and other search engines prefer).

Yext also offers reputation management functionality. Instead of juggling reviews yourself, you can let a specialist manage them for you. It not only shows customers that you value their feedback, but also signals to new customers that you care — all without adding more to your workload. 

AI Needs You

At the end of the day, AI is a set of tools that work best when guided by the human hand. You are the one who understands your customers, your brand voice, and your business as a whole. You are irreplaceable. 

Even though 84% of marketers report that AI improved the delivery speed of their content, a human ultimately ensured the quality of that content. 

At FDS, we emphasize a future of digital marketing that spotlights human creativity and AI efficiency. By using AI for campaign optimization, location intelligence, strategic planning, and visibility management, you can achieve results that you nor the AI platform would see alone.

The question isn’t whether to use AI, it’s how to use AI effectively in your digital marketing strategy. To learn more about implementing it, reach out to one of our experts at Federated Digital Solutions today.

Learn More