Artificial intelligence has the local marketing world buzzing.
It can create marketing copy. It can crank out emails. And it can even generate images for your marketing assets.
It’s all about AI’s ability to speed up and automate marketing activities to drive more revenue.
Who doesn’t want to market faster and more effectively with less effort?
But AI has also left some workers nervous about their jobs. If generative AI can execute local marketing campaigns, where does that leave affiliates?
The answer: writing great prompts and editing generative text.
It’s called AI prompt engineering.
What Is Generative AI?
Generative AI is technology that creates content quickly and easily from inputted prompts.
For marketers, generative AI can write:
- Blog posts
- Emails and replies
- Optimized email subject lines
- Review responses
- Internal announcements
- Social media posts
- Testimonials
- Press releases
- Local flyers
- Video scripts
Plus: AI can help you overcome writer’s block. When you’re struggling to get writing (and caffeine isn’t working) AI starts the process for you. Just feed the machine with a prompt and your first draft will be written in a matter of seconds.
Generative AI Starts With Prompts
AI prompts are instructions that you input into the machine to shape the AI output.
To prompt AI to create local marketing material, marketers must learn what phrases and optimized terms to enter in order to improve what comes out. The quality of the content is only as good as the prompts you write.
The act of crafting an input to deliver a desired result is called prompt design or prompt engineering.
Which means that prompt design and prompt engineering are increasingly desirable skills for local marketers to learn.
What Is an AI Prompt Engineer?
An AI prompt engineer is a professional who writes, refines, and optimizes the input fed into AI generators to produce the best results.
A prompt engineer translates concepts and objectives into terms that the AI generator can understand.
Prompts can be code, a few specific words, or a longer statement. Over time, prompt engineers teach the AI model to produce high-quality results from the prompts the engineers feed it.
They also teach themselves to write the kind of prompt that produces the output they want.
How to Design the Best AI Prompts
To write the best AI prompts, you must:
- Determine specific goals
- Perform A/B tests
- Be as specific and descriptive as possible
- Prepare to edit the result
At BrandMuscle, we’ve worked diligently to understand the inputs necessary to get the exact output our clients are looking for.
Take food service for example.
Every bar and restaurant wants their advertising to be unique. They don’t want to look or sound like the bar down the street. So right now, in a beta pilot program, BrandMuscle’s creative design team generates custom designs and advertising images for a few clients. We input specific, strategic prompts to reach the target audience, use the brand voice. Then we make sure they’re compliant with the many city and state regulations and use of trademarked items — like not using the trademarked name Taco Tuesday, for instance, even though a taco-loving restaurant may want to.
These optimizations are especially important in local marketing, where legal and brand compliance issues play a crucial role in success.
Prompt Engineers Protect Compliance in Local Marketing
Being compliant is often easier said than done.
Federal regulations govern different industries. Different cities and states may have their own rules and regulations.
Marketers who work in highly regulated industries such as finance, insurance, beverage-alcohol, and manufacturing must comply with state and federal guidelines, as well as corporate guidelines.
But corporate and local affiliates don’t always align on messaging. Affiliates’ customized (aka rouge) assets can fall out of compliance. And it can be challenging to enforce branding standards at scale across thousands of affiliates.
When it comes to compliance, marketers must always ask questions about compliance issues. BrandMuscle makes compliance easy because compliance is built directly into our AI solution.
Why Your AI Needs Compliance
When you create marketing assets, you have to understand the compliance regulations in your industry in order to assure your assets are legal and brand compliant. But (as previously mentioned) compliance gets complicated.
AI makes generating content easy, but right now, AI is a bit like the Wild West. There are plenty of AI solutions out there that can help you produce marketing content. But if you’re leaning on an AI solution that does not lead with compliance, you’re putting your brand at risk.
To mitigate that risk, you need to use an AI solution that leads with compliance.
BrandMuscle simplifies compliance with our AI solution designed with compliance in mind. AI’s value is saving both corporate and affiliates time and resources, but compliance has to stay front and center.
BrandMuscle.ai evaluates its own output to make sure it’s brand and legal compliant, ideally suited to your target audience and product, and speaking in your unique brand voice. Don’t let AI run rogue marketing campaigns. Let AI generate content while also reigning in the Wild West.
This is where AI becomes your helpful assistant, not another risk to the business. You still need trained marketers to engineer effective prompts.
Local Marketing Prompt Engineers Wanted
AI has created a need for prompt-writing experts and editors. In fact, you can search for job titles like “prompt engineer” and “prompt experts” on LinkedIn now.
Generative AI is a proven way to improve local marketing efficiency.
Thankfully, AI prompt engineering isn’t a technical skill you need certification for — yet. It’s a skill you can learn, through trial and error.
As generative AI continues to improve local marketing, and AI models advance, prompting skills will become a crucial part of content creation.
In other words, we will evolve together.
Add AI to Your Local Marketing Strategy
At BrandMuscle we’ve built AI-powered solutions for local marketing teams that are easy input-based and are up to speed on compliance.
You can learn more about infusing AI into your local marketing by watching our webinar AI is Revolutionizing Local Marketing: Here’s What You Need to Know.
Get in touch with us to hear about the exciting things that BrandMuscle.ai can do for you.
