With the rise of Artificial Intelligence, you may be overlooking two things that have become very important in marketing considerations: Protection of your Intellectual Property (IP) rights and ensuring authenticity. Don’t get me wrong, these have always been important, but the level of importance is greater now than before AI became prevalent. And this can be a matter of success or failure of your program.

Back in June, I invited two top IP attorneys to join me on a webinar to help business leaders understand how AI has impacted intellectual property rights. It was a great session, and they shared some eye-opening information. The video is available if you want to check it out for yourself (and while you’re there, subscribe to my YouTube channel for more great content).

Among the insights they shared was that using AI in your content production could make it impossible to copyright. While copyrights are not commonly sought for blogs, they are great for protecting ideas that are novel, albeit on a basic level. Imagine the impact that not being able to obtain a copyright could have on your innovative blogs, white papers, or worse yet, a book. How do you protect your intellectual property if you cannot copyright or trademark it? You’ll need to watch the webinar to find out.

But protecting your Intellectual Property rights is only one of two possible issues that using AI can cause. The other, which is even more important to your bottom line, is the need to remain genuine. Authenticity sells because it helps create trust. Regardless of how technologically sophisticated we get, the three lynchpins of successful marketing are – and likely always will be – Know, Like and Trust. Without these, relationships don’t happen. And without a relationship, sales will decrease – if they happen at all.

Authenticity is a key component in generating trust and likeability, and both drive sales and growth. When you create content using AI tools, it tends to sound robotic and insincere. New tools are coming out every day that can make the content sound more authentic and genuine, but AI cannot think or reason like a human. In other words, telling an AI tool to create a blog for you will result in, well, a robotic sounding blog. Add in that AI generated content is not always accurate and may include off-topic information, and you can see the risks here. If you are going to use AI in your content marketing program, please make sure you use it in ways that create, convey, and support authenticity.

Some of the best ways to use AI in your marketing program work at a totally different level than content creation. Here are just a few of the ideas I recommend to my clients:

• Discern similarities between your best customers and prospective customers to predict and develop leads,
• Use AI enabled Marketing Technology tools to send custom content of higher interest value.
• Create an AI based post-closing follow-up program to improve your sales and delivery processes.
• Use a highly customized Chatbot on your website to pre-screen and qualify leads.

These are just a few of the ways companies are already using AI to enhance their marketing program and results. Other areas in which AI is proving to be very good for improved profitability are sales process automation, analyzing sales data, predictive maintenance, and predictive inventory management. If you’re not thinking about novel ways to use AI, you are likely falling behind the curve. Maybe we should chat?

If you are vigilant and mindful of the risks of using AI in your marketing program, you should be able to avoid or compensate for them. But you must be proactive about it. Passively waiting for something to happen (or not happen) can be the biggest mistake you can make.

On a related note, in mid-September of this year, the USPTO issued a Certificate of Trademark to Foresight Performance LLC for Marketing Medic^®. It’s an awesome system for helping clients cure their anemic marketing results. More details about this system, and the people who will be certified to use it, will be coming out soon.

Please connect with me on LinkedIn for updates and announcements. While you’re there, check out my Marketing Medic^® videos! They drop every Tuesday morning.