In reality, 9 out of 10 marketers use AI. If you’re not using AI as a marketing professional, you’re going to fall behind.
Need to skill up? These 10 essential AI marketing skills are going to be essential for marketers to continue to thrive in their roles. 64% of business owners believe AI can enhance customer relationships, but many marketers are still catching up. If you’re feeling a bit behind, don’t sweat it. You’re in the right place to learn all about AI.
1. Master Prompt Engineering
Prompt engineering is the art of crafting effective and detailed instructions for AI tools to generate high-quality, targeted outputs. This skill involves understanding how to tweak prompts to achieve specific goals, such as maintaining brand voice, tone, and creativity. Marketers who excel in prompt engineering can harness the full potential of AI tools, ensuring that the generated content aligns perfectly with their marketing objectives.
The good news: it’s simply your strategy. You already think through all of these important details when you kick-off a new project. Just add them to your prompt, including:
- Audience you’re trying to reach/target
- Tone of content
- Goal of content
- Style rules
- Project or content requirements – length, content specifications, required details, etc.
- Data you want analyzed – CSV export, files, etc.
- Information you want summarized – files, PDFs, links, etc.
- And more!
For example, a skilled prompt engineer might craft a prompt like:
“Create a product description for our new eco-friendly water bottle, emphasizing its durability and environmental benefits. Use a friendly, conversational tone that appeals to environmentally conscious millennials. Product specifications include (list size, materials, colors, etc.).”
This level of detail guides the AI to produce more relevant and tailored content.
Recommended Reading: 200 ChatGPT Prompts For Marketers (By Marketing Speciality)
2. Become Proficient At Using AI Tools
Proficiency in AI tools is crucial for modern marketers. This skill encompasses familiarity with AI-powered chatbots, copywriting tools, and analytics platforms. Marketers need to develop the ability to compare and choose the best tools for content creation, ad optimization, and customer engagement.
For example, knowing how to use AI-powered tools like Headline Studio to craft compelling headlines or leveraging AI-driven analytics platforms for data interpretation can significantly enhance marketing effectiveness. It’s about knowing which tool to use for specific tasks and how to maximize its potential.
Practical example: Imagine you’re tasked with improving email open rates for a B2B software company.
You could use an AI-powered subject line generator to create multiple variations, then employ an AI-driven A/B testing tool to analyze which subject lines perform best with your audience.
By combining these AI tools, you can systematically improve your email marketing performance over time.
Recommended Reading: 12 AI Marketing Tools To Elevate Your Marketing Efforts In 2025
3. Analyze Data Using AI To Develop Actionable Insights
AI is a great tool to analyze and interpret large sets of data. Marketers need to develop skills in turning AI-generated insights into actionable marketing strategies. This involves not just understanding how to analyze the data, but also knowing how to apply the findings into real-world marketing scenarios.
If you have data from analytics you want to better understand or a large amount of survey data to summarize, you can have AI assist in decoding it.
Practical example: Let’s say you’re managing an e-commerce store. You could use AI to analyze customer browsing and purchase history, identifying patterns in product combinations frequently purchased together.
With this insight, you might create a personalized product recommendation system that suggests complementary items based on what’s in a customer’s cart, potentially increasing average order value.
4. Optimize Content Using AI
AI-driven content optimization is a game-changer in digital marketing. Marketers need to learn how to leverage AI to optimize content for SEO, audience engagement, and platform-specific algorithms. This skill also involves understanding how AI tools assess content performance and suggest improvements.
For instance, AI tools can analyze top-performing content in a specific niche and provide recommendations on topics, keywords, and content structure. Marketers can use these insights to create more effective content that resonates with their target audience and ranks well in search engines.
Practical example: Suppose you’re writing a blog post about sustainable fashion. You could use an AI-powered SEO tool to analyze the top-ranking articles on this topic. The tool might suggest including specific keywords like “eco-friendly fabrics” or “ethical manufacturing processes.”
It could also recommend an optimal word count and suggest subheadings to improve readability and SEO performance.
By implementing these AI-driven suggestions, you can create content that’s more likely to rank well and engage your audience.
Recommended Reading: Boost Your SEO Strategy With AI: A Comprehensive Guide
5. Automate Workflows
Automation adds efficiency to your marketing. Marketers need to develop skills in designing automated workflows for tasks like email marketing, lead nurturing, and campaign management. This includes knowing how to integrate AI into CRM and marketing automation platforms effectively.
Not sure how to use automation in marketing?
- Use AI to segment email lists based on user behaviors
- Automatically send personalized content via SMS, email, ads, etc. based on user engagement
- Build out automated social campaigns to fill your social media calendar for you
- Instantly create projects based on incoming project requests
- Automate recurring projects, so you never miss a newsletter, company update, report, or other marketing task
- Schedule automated reports
- And so much more!
Practical example: Consider a scenario where you’re managing a lead nurturing campaign for a SaaS product. You could set up an AI-powered workflow that automatically categorizes new leads based on their interaction with your website (e.g., pages visited, time spent, downloads). The system could then automatically send tailored email sequences to each segment. For instance, leads who visited your pricing page might receive a series of emails focusing on product value and ROI, while those who spent time on feature pages might receive more detailed product information.
This automated, personalized approach can significantly improve conversion rates while saving time on manual segmentation and email creation.
Recommended Reading: How You Can Use AI Automation To Streamline Your Marketing
6. Train AI Models For Better Output
As AI becomes more integral to marketing, the ability to train AI models will be crucial. Marketers can train AI models to master the company’s brand voice, style, and target audience. It also includes building and managing brand-specific AI profiles to ensure consistency across all AI-generated content.
For instance, a marketer might train an AI model on their brand’s past successful campaigns, customer feedback, and brand guidelines. This trained model can then generate content that’s more in line with the brand’s unique voice and style.
Practical example: Imagine you’re working for a tech startup with a quirky, informal brand voice. You could train an AI model by feeding it a large dataset of your past social media posts, blog articles, and customer service interactions. You’d also input your brand guidelines, including preferred phrases, tone, and taboo words.
Over time, the AI would learn to mimic your brand’s unique style. You could then use this trained model to generate draft social media posts or email copy that captures your brand’s voice, saving time while maintaining consistency across all channels.
Whatever AI tools you use, you’ll want to know ways to train them in order to get better results. With CoSchedule & Hire Mia, you can teach AI to learn your brand voice, style guidelines, target audience, company info, and so much more with pre-built training modules.
Recommended Tool: Train AI To Know Your Brand Like You Do – Hire Mia
7. Segment Audiences Using AI
AI-powered audience segmentation is majorly upgrading how marketers target their customers. Marketers need to develop skills in using AI to create hyper-targeted audience segments based on behavior, preferences, and demographics. This also involves implementing personalization strategies for these segments.
AI can analyze customer data to identify micro-segments with specific interests or behaviors. Marketers can then create highly targeted campaigns for these segments, potentially increasing conversion rates and customer satisfaction.
Practical example: Let’s say you’re marketing a travel app. You could use AI to analyze user data including past bookings, search history, and in-app behavior. The AI might identify segments such as “budget-conscious backpackers,” “luxury resort seekers,” and “adventure sports enthusiasts.” For the backpacker segment, you could create a campaign highlighting affordable hostels and local experiences. For luxury seekers, you might focus on high-end resorts and exclusive tours.
This AI-driven segmentation allows for much more targeted and effective marketing than broad demographic categories alone.
8. Collaborate With AI
The future of marketing involves close collaboration between humans and AI. Marketers need to develop skills in knowing when and how to use AI in brainstorming sessions for ad ideas, campaign concepts, and social media trends. This involves understanding where human creativity and AI insights intersect to produce the best results.
For example, a marketer might use AI to generate initial ideas for a campaign, then apply human creativity to refine and expand on these ideas. This collaboration can lead to more innovative and effective marketing strategies.
Practical example: Suppose you’re developing a new ad campaign for a line of eco-friendly cleaning products. You could start by asking an AI tool to generate 20 potential ad concepts based on current trends in sustainable living. The AI might suggest ideas like “Clean Home, Clean Planet” or “Sparkle Without the Guilt.” You and your team could then review these AI-generated concepts, selecting the most promising ones to develop further. You might combine elements from different AI suggestions, add your own creative twists, and refine the messaging to perfectly align with your brand.
This human-AI collaboration can result in campaigns that are both data-driven and creatively compelling.
9. Ethically Use AI
As AI becomes more prevalent in marketing, ethical considerations become increasingly important. Marketers need to develop skills in recognizing and addressing potential ethical concerns, including bias in AI outputs, privacy issues, and responsible data usage. This also involves ensuring compliance with data protection regulations and AI-related policies.
Marketers need to be aware of potential biases in AI-generated content and take steps to mitigate these biases. They also need to ensure that AI-driven marketing practices respect user privacy and comply with regulations like GDPR.
Practical example: Let’s say you’re using an AI tool to personalize product recommendations on your e-commerce site. You notice that the AI is disproportionately recommending certain products to specific demographic groups, potentially reinforcing stereotypes. To address this, you could implement a system of regular audits to check for bias in the AI’s recommendations. You might also adjust the AI’s training data to ensure more diverse representation. Additionally, you could add a feature that explains to users why they’re seeing certain recommendations, providing transparency about the AI’s decision-making process.
This ethical approach not only complies with regulations but also builds trust with your customers.
10. Follow And Understand AI Trends In Marketing
The AI landscape is rapidly evolving, and marketers need to stay updated on emerging AI technologies and trends shaping the marketing landscape. This skill involves anticipating how new AI innovations can provide competitive advantages and integrating these innovations into marketing strategies.
Practical example: Imagine you’re a marketing manager for a retail chain. You’ve been following AI trends and notice the growing popularity of visual search technology. Recognizing its potential, you decide to implement a visual search feature in your mobile app. This allows customers to take a photo of an item they like and find similar products in your inventory. By staying on top of AI trends, you’ve introduced a feature that enhances the shopping experience, potentially increasing sales and customer satisfaction.
To stay on top of trends, make sure you continue learning, sign up for news alerts or AI marketing newsletters, and seek out opportunities to try new tools.
This proactive approach to adopting new AI technologies can give you a significant edge over competitors who are slower to adapt.
Mastering AI Marketing Skills With CoSchedule
Marketers who master these skills will be well-prepared to harness the potential of AI, streamline workflows, and create more impactful campaigns in 2025 and beyond.
Fortunately, CoSchedule Calendars help marketers master these critical skills. CoSchedule offers features that directly align with and support the development of these AI marketing competencies:
Master Prompt Engineering With 1,600+ Marketer-Tested Prompt Templates
CoSchedule Calendars include a robust prompt library with prompts to help create content, generate ideas, analyze data, and more.
There are prompts for specific industries – like nonprofits, ecommerce, and more. Plus hundreds of prompts for marketing tasks like social media marketing, and content marketing. You can take the guesswork out of crafting prompts that actually give you content you can use.
Instantly Create Projects With AI
Find a prompt you want to use? With the AI Create Menu, you can create an entire project from a prompt in seconds.
All you have to do is choose your template, customize the prompt, and let AI work its magic.
Your new project will get added to your calendar complete with first-draft content, deadlines, and more. You can review the project, make adjustments, and set your campaign in motion.
Automate Your Project Management With Task Rules And Recurring Projects
CoSchedule features tons of workflow automation to streamline your project management process.
You can set up recurring projects for newsletters, automated task workflows, and more to keep projects on track and moving forward – without manually task management.
Generate Images And Social Campaigns
You can instantly draft social messages using the built-in AI Assistant. Best of all, the messages meet best practices for each social network.
You can also generate images for all your social messages using AI, too.
Then when it’s time to schedule them, you can use built-in Best Time Scheduling to publish your social messages at the perfect time for optimal engagement.
By leveraging CoSchedule’s AI features, marketers can not only streamline their workflows but also actively develop and apply these essential AI marketing skills in their daily work. As the marketing world continues to evolve, staying ahead of the curve with AI skills and powerful tools like CoSchedule will be key to achieving marketing success and driving meaningful results for businesses.
By embracing these skills and utilizing the right tools, you’re not just preparing for the future – you’re setting yourself up for success. Start your journey in AI marketing mastery today with CoSchedule and stay ahead in the ever-evolving world of digital marketing.
Discover How To Develop Your AI Marketing Skills Today
For more information about using AI in marketing, check out:
