Artificial intelligence has exploded in popularity in recent years. As AI is able to do more and more—often for free—you might be wondering if hiring a digital marketing agency is worth it. Anything a marketing agency can do, AI can do just as well, right?
Not exactly.
Using AI tools isn’t the same as having a complete marketing strategy. A digital marketing agency combines technology with strategic planning, industry knowledge, performance analysis, and ongoing optimization. For some businesses, AI tools may be enough to handle basic marketing tasks. Others benefit from an experienced team that can connect those tasks to larger business goals.
The right choice for your business depends on factors such as your budget, time, and growth goals. Here we’ll explore how AI compares to a digital marketing agency and what questions to ask yourself when deciding which approach is right for you.
AI is a tool, not a strategy. It is just one piece of any good digital marketing campaign. It can create content for you, but you still have to tell it what to create. It can analyze your data, but you need to know why that data is important. AI is only as helpful as the information you give it.
On the other hand, a good digital marketing team understands your goals, the marketing landscape, and audience nuances in ways that AI cannot. An agency knows how to use AI as just one of many tactics that make up a greater playbook. AI can write a blog post using the keyword you give it, but a marketing team can tell you why a different keyword might perform better. There is a human understanding and creativity there that a machine doesn’t always nail down.
To stand out online, your brand needs to have its own voice and personality. AI writing tends to have a generic sound to it, and AI images especially have a distinct look to them. As AI-generated text and images continue to improve, having that option can be convenient when you have a specific idea in mind that you want to create quickly. But as more people are using AI and social media is flooded with generated images, they all start to feel the same.
Your ideas might be rainbow sprinkle ice cream sundaes, but AI often makes things feel more like vanilla soft serve. The pizzazz just isn’t there.
If you want quick content that you can make on your own for free in a short amount of time, then AI is a good option for you. But if your goal is to build a consistent brand voice that resonates with the right customers, AI might not be the best choice.
A skilled marketing team recognizes what makes your brand distinctly you and protects that personality. They keep your metaphorical kitchen stocked with all the rainbow sprinkles you could want, bringing in the rainbow sprinkle customers. They keep your brand feeling vibrant, alive, and authentic.
If you run a local business, that business exists in the real world. You have real life neighbors and competitors and work out of a real building. There is history and nuance to your location. Local market knowledge from a digital marketing team can be invaluable for local SEO, understanding seasonal rhythms and other human idiosyncrasies better than AI.
AI has access to a world of information online, but it doesn’t always have the local context to interpret those results in a meaningful way. It isn’t walking the streets and living in your community.
If your business doesn’t depend heavily on local markets and trends, then AI might have all the information it needs to help you reach your goals. But if you want a marketing strategy that is more grounded in your specific location, then you would most likely benefit from hiring a local marketing agency who knows the area.
In some ways, AI is like your weird, eccentric neighbor: often incredibly smart but occasionally off-putting and prone to hallucinations. In other words, AI gets things wrong, sometimes badly enough to damage your brand’s reputation.
When AI doesn’t know the answer to a question, it tends to confidently make something up. If you don’t have a human evaluating AI’s answers, you could be spreading misinformation and making yourself appear unintelligent or ill-informed. You want to come across as an expert in your field, not an amateur.
If you have the time and knowledge to verify AI content yourself for accuracy, then this isn’t a problem. You can be your own editor and proofreader for your AI-generated content. But if you’re creating content that’s beyond your expertise, or if you don’t have time to review the generated content, you may want to consider hiring a marketing agency instead.
AI is great at compiling and analyzing data. But you can give it all the marketing data in the world to analyze, and still not understand why something worked or what you should do next if you don’t have the expertise to interpret that data. If you have a background in marketing or understand the analytics well, then AI can be a great tool for organizing that data and planning ahead. But if you don’t know what the data means, then AI is less helpful.
On the contrary, an experienced digital marketing team has the skills and knowledge to help you understand the analytics and reach your goals. They can rely on their personal history and insights to draw conclusions about what works and what doesn’t and what could do even better. They may even use AI themselves to sort through the data and make adjustments to your marketing strategy.
Working with a digital marketing team is a partnership and a conversation. Working with AI is more like yelling into a canyon and seeing what echoes back. If you know what you’re yelling and what to expect back, then that can be a valid strategy. But if you want to build ideas that feed off of each other, then a marketing agency is the way to go.
There’s also an accountability and adaptability that you get from a marketing agency when something doesn’t work that you don’t get from AI. Real people can figure out what went wrong and change their approach, trying something new. They can pivot in a new direction at your request. AI will often give you the same kind of results over and over, even if you change your prompt or ask for something completely different.
When you build a relationship with a marketing agency, they want to see you succeed as much as you do. Both sides benefit when your marketing goes well. But AI doesn’t care either way if your marketing strategy succeeds. It has no stakes in the matter, and it has not built a relationship with you. It has no motivation to succeed because it cannot feel motivated. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and it’s not needed for every marketing strategy, but it is something to consider when choosing a strategy for your business.
Algorithms, platforms, and best practices are constantly shifting and changing. What works well one day may flop the next. A dedicated marketing team will stay current with all of these changes so you don’t have to.
When you rely solely on AI, you’re the one responsible for knowing what to create, target, and prioritize. If you’re unaware of an algorithm update or policy change, you may waste your time and effort on content that is destined to underperform. Whether you’re willing to stay on top of these changes yourself should be a deciding factor when you’re looking at AI vs. a marketing agency.
There’s something to be said for human creativity. The marketing content that does best online is interesting, thought-provoking, and memorable. It can fit in with trends, but it has to be unique enough to catch customers’ attention. That’s why human creativity is imperative.
AI isn’t able to give campaigns that same creative nudge to take them from good to great. When it comes to following trends and creating material based off of past data and patterns, AI does fine. But it isn’t going to come up with the next big idea that will take off.
If you want to stick to past trends or keep up with trends yourself, then AI might be the right solution for you. But if you want to blaze a new trail in marketing, you’ll most likely need a team of real humans to get there.
AI can create content, analyze data, and answer your questions, but there are plenty of things it can’t do. Someone still needs to write the prompts, review the answers, schedule the content, and more. And if you don’t have a marketing team, that job falls to you.
The time you spend working on your marketing campaign is time not spent in other areas of your business. That’s time you could be making products or chatting with customers or doing any of the other things that made you want to start your business in the first place. It’s time you could be spending away from work with your family. Sure, it’s not as much work as it would be if you were doing it all yourself without AI, but it’s still work.
A digital marketing agency can manage all these tasks for you. You’re not just paying for the team’s creativity or expertise, you’re paying for their time. And the more time they spend on your campaign, the more time you have to focus on the things you enjoy. When deciding on a marketing strategy, be sure to consider how much time you’re willing to spend on marketing tasks.
Ultimately, that’s your decision to make. AI is free, but it’s often an instance where you get what you pay for. If you’re wanting to manage your own digital marketing and just use AI as a tool, that’s a valid strategy that can save you money up front. It will just take more time and effort from you to get results.
A digital marketing agency can produce better results than AI alone, and those results often mean more business for your company. More business means more money, and more money means a greater return on investment. If your marketing agency does well, they may even bring in more money for you than you spend hiring them. If you want to free up your own time and hand your marketing over to the experts, then hiring a digital marketing agency is likely the right choice for you.
If you want to take your business to the next level, Team WTI is ready to help. Our digital marketing team has the skills and knowledge to get results. We know how to use AI as just one tool in a more complex marketing campaign. We work with you as partners on your online journey.
Let us take your business online and upward. Contact us today to see what Team WTI can do for you!