Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the latest technology to explode in the digital marketing space–and with unprecedented enthusiasm. Generative AI has experienced one of the fastest tech adoption rates in history - with ChatGPT accumulating over 100 million users in just 2 months. For scale, it took TikTok 9 months and Instagram 2.5 years to reach the same number of users.
If you’re a digital agency owner, odds are your social and news feeds have been flooded with talk about AI. As your clients hop on the AI bandwagon, the value of the agency is at stake. How can you demonstrate the value of your services in an increasingly AI-enabled world?
Fortunately, I don’t believe that AI will replace agencies. While AI is indeed reshaping how SMBs run their businesses, the value of the agency is here to stay. However, agencies will need to restrategize the way they support their clients and create value. In this article I will discuss how your agency should be approaching AI today and into the future to ensure that you stay relevant and generate value for your clients.
Every day, a new AI-powered tool or application emerges, promising to generate instant results and accomplish tasks that once took weeks or months. These digital "magic wands" are flooding the market, igniting dramatic headlines questioning the future and relevance of digital agencies.
Based on the market activity we’re seeing today, we believe we're currently in the thick of
Gartner’s “hype cycle,” which starts with a surge of excitement and inflated expectations, followed by disillusionment, and finally, a stable plateau of productivity.
The AI hype cycle first kicked into gear with the advent of
OpenAI's GPT-2 and GPT-3 back in 2019. What sparked the recent hype is that these revolutionary language models were made available to the general public in the form of ChatGPT, a credible and accessible user interface that, for the first time, offered users a remarkably human-like conversation experience.
The frenzied interest in GPT and similar technologies spiked in Google searches at the beginning of the year, before leveling off in April/May. Now, as the initial excitement stabilizes, we are reaching the “slope of enlightenment” on Gartner's hype cycle.
While AI can handle a variety of different tasks that once consumed large amounts of an agency’s time, the technology falls short in a crucial area: formulating and executing a comprehensive marketing strategy. This is where digital agencies continue to provide unmatched value.
The reality is that while AI can be an incredibly powerful tool, it’s just that: a tool. Meanwhile, the digital landscape is becoming more complex than ever and what is required from SMBs to succeed in the world today is more than what any one tool or set of tools can provide.
What SMBs need to succeed is a comprehensive digital marketing strategy based on a deep understanding of the unique business needs and opportunities facing the business. This strategy must then be executed, using the right tools together to drive business results.
AI is just one tool agencies can (and should) be using to deliver this value to their clients, and it allows agencies to do this at speed and scale—and at a lower cost.
Today, with the power of AI, agencies no longer need to look at scaling as a costly investment or a quantity vs. quality trade-off. AI integrated across the website build process empowers agencies with the tools they need to offer both quantity and quality at scale.
At Duda, we believe there are 3 primary ways agencies can future-proof their businesses and achieve scale with AI:
Before AI, asset creation was extremely time-consuming. As a result, creating personalized messaging and experiences was often out of the question for a growing agency. Today, AI enables agencies to scale up asset creation while getting super granular to increase personalization and drive more conversions—without the time commitment and costs.
AI tools integrated into your favorite tools, like Duda’s web building platform, make it possible for agencies to dramatically speed up website building and content generation workflows for their clients. For example, with Duda’s new AI Content Assistant, agencies can now generate relevant copy for their client websites within the Duda platform at a click of a button.
Leveraging built-in AI tools saves a significant amount of time that was once spent writing placeholder copy and waiting for clients to populate content—or more recently, engineering prompts and copying-and-pasting from external AI tools like ChatGPT.
That time can now be reinvested in higher value work like acquiring more clients, building more websites, and expanding your revenue streams, which leads us to the last pillar:
AI is a powerful tool that enables agencies to establish new service offerings, increase customer stickiness, and drive cross- and up-sell opportunities. We see this as a 2x2 matrix where AI enables you to expand your existing services with new and existing customers, as well as offer new services to both new and existing customers.
AI offers agencies like yours the power to increase efficiency, speed, quality, and even the variety of services you’re able to provide, all while driving your costs down. The following are key areas where you should be experimenting with AI today to stay ahead of the curve:
From a strategic standpoint, the best time to invest in emerging technologies like AI is after the initial hype, when the technology reaches a steady state. This phase is when the true winners of the hype cycle emerge, with long-term viability and value, while the overhyped technologies start to fade away.
This doesn’t mean agencies should hold off on AI adoption. Quite the contrary. There’s a saying that “AI won’t replace you. Someone using AI will.” And that rings as true for agencies, as it does for any individual graphic designer or content writer. Agencies already need to be learning, experimenting, and leveraging AI in their workflows now to stay ahead of the curve.
To get the most out of their time and money, agencies should use this period to learn about AI and explore different tools. Spend your time experimenting and identifying the front-runner AI tools that really move the needle on your productivity and efficiency. Then, once the hype has subsided, you will be prepared to commit to the technologies that pass the hype test.
Although tools like generative AI are making it easier to perform specific tasks, the overall digital landscape is becoming more complex. What an SMB needs today to succeed is a holistic digital marketing strategy. This can only be provided by a professional–by an agency–that understands their business and is able to tie together the right tools behind a cohesive strategy that will give a small business the best chance to achieve success.
