5 Things You Need to Know About AI In marketing
By Carrie Cousins
Thank you to Valley Business FRONT for featuring our Vice President, Carrie Cousins, in their November 2025 issue.
Unpopular opinion: AI can enhance creativity. Let me explain. When used as a tool to help brainstorm, see what ideas are already out there, or quickly sketch a concept, AI can be a great tool to help you think creatively faster. Think of it as a virtual brainstorming assistant that can help you walk through ideas or concepts.
The caution is that it should not be the end of the process. It’s just an early step in the iteration. With that concept in mind, here are 5 things you need to know about AI in marketing (and tips for effective usage).
- AI can be a fantastic copyeditor. Tools such as Grammarly incorporate smart syntax suggestions to help you improve writing and even serve as a second set of eyes when you don’t have a proofer to look over your work. Just make sure to read all the suggestions to ensure you don’t lose brand voice or context.
- Jazz up a boring PowerPoint with suggested layouts that still fit your design style. Turn on this option using the Home or Design Tab and using “Design Ideas.” Pair this with the 5-5-5 rule for great slides every time: No more than five words per line, no more than 5 lines per slide, and no more than 5 text-heavy slides in a row.
- Optimize advertising with native AI tools in Google and Meta. Most of the major advertising platforms use propriety AI tools that are designed to help you reach more users with less budget. It is important to use these tools only with a strong working knowledge of your advertising needs and goals; remember the platforms do not understand your goals as well as you do.
- Map out your strategy with an AI-powered calendar. Many popular tools, such as Notion AI, Trello, and Chat GPT, can help you turn your marketing strategy into a calendar format that helps you turn your ideas into action items. This can save you a lot of time when mapping out a plan and then you can replicate it. Just make sure your prompts include a plan that you don’t mind sharing publicly and a timeline for your plan. Start with something simple like ideas for planning a week’s worth of social posts, but you can map out months of strategy with the right prompts.
- Ownership is murky when it comes to using AI, particularly for generated content. The thing that is important to consider with all uses of AI, is terms of the service you are using. Ownership of content generated by AI isn’t necessarily yours, and you can’t claim copyright or trademark for generated materials. There are also questions about public sharing or disclosure when using public, open-source, and free tools. Don’t put any sensitive information into an AI engine that is not owned by you or your company, because you don’t always know who could access it later or if the generative engine will share it in a result later.
I don’t subscribe to the gloom and doom AI scenarios when it comes to AI in marketing. Do I trust it to do the things I want a person to do? No way. But it is a great tool to help you find, distill, and plan with a lot of information with more speed and agility.
AI might just be the best virtual assistant you ever had, giving you more time to think creatively and more strategically.
Carrie Cousins is the Vice President at LeadPoint Digital in Roanoke. For 15+ years, she has helped businesses tell their stories and get better results online with practical digital marketing strategies. She is also an active leader in AAF, serving on the local and district boards, and is an adjunct professor at Virginia Tech.
