How an AI Marketing Agency can Accelerate Startup Growth

88% of marketers state that AI is essential to meet their customers’ expectations. AI adoption continues to trend up. 

However, many founders still do not fully understand the role of AI in marketing beyond content creation. Many others do not understand what an AI marketing agency is or the role it plays. AI offers excellent potential beyond its use in content marketing, and AI marketing agencies will be at the forefront of that. 

In this article, learn more about:

• What is an AI marketing agency?
• Benefits of using an AI marketing agency for startups
• How an AI marketing agency can fast-track your startup’s growth

What is an AI marketing agency?

Most will say an AI marketing agency is an agency that uses AI to deliver marketing solutions. That’s quite simplistic. It goes beyond that. For instance, an agency can use large language models (LLMs) or generative AI to optimize ads, create content, or do basic marketing work.

What separates AI-driven marketing agencies from traditional agencies, is the synergy between AI and deep human expertise to help businesses make better decisions and see results faster.

Kieran Flanagan, Zapier's CMO, believes AI marketing agencies are marketing experts with a deep understanding of and application of AI in marketing work. Using Kaya as a prime example, Kieran gives his view on AI marketing agencies in HubSpot's "Marketing Against the Grain" podcast:

AI digital marketing agency vs. traditional digital marketing agency

Most marketing agencies, startups, and small businesses use AI in some ways. AI marketing agencies are built like technology companies, with AI deeply ingrained in their processes. They are different from agencies that use AI to automate aspects of their work.

Benefits of using an AI marketing agency for startups

There are many reasons to choose an AI marketing agency instead of a traditional agency, but here are the most notable ones.

Efficiency and automation: Many startups may not know what tools or data they need or how to use them to improve their ad campaign performance. While a startup can gradually build a minimum viable analytics stack, AI marketing agencies offer pre-built systems that automatically track, analyze and provide actionable insights backed by experienced marketers. This streamlined process helps to improve the quality and speed of decision-making. 

Time and cost savings: AI automates marketing work, which allows you to save time and costs. For instance, using an AI model that adapts to new data streams to automatically refine your ad campaigns. This saves the cost of constant data analysis and launching new ad campaigns. AI marketing agencies may also offer lower prices compared to traditional digital marketing agencies.

Data-driven decision-making: AI marketing agencies build predictive models that can analyze large amounts of data in seconds. These models can recognize patterns in ad copies and targeting and offer insights for improvements.

Personalization at scale: AI marketing agencies understand the value of personalization in ad campaigns. They use AI tools to create hyper-personalized ads and marketing campaigns that resonate with your audience, thus improving clickthrough rates (CTR).

How an AI marketing agency fast-tracks startup growth

AI marketing agencies like Kaya build proprietary AI tools for ad management, competitor ad analysis and internal processes. These AI tools aggregate data, automate marketing tasks, and generate data-driven insights that improve ROI and lead to rapid growth for startups.

Faster ad campaign improvements

Startups have to deal with large volumes of data from multiple sources to enable them to track different ad platforms, budgets, and performance. Most times, it’s difficult to harmonize and make sense of such data. AI agencies build automated pipelines to streamline the process of aggregating and processing the data for insights, which results in less work, fewer human errors, better data management, and more accurate decisions.

AI also supports faster, smarter, and cheaper iteration. Hence, AI digital marketing agencies use it for faster and more efficient brainstorming to enhance ad copies and creatives. This cuts down the time needed to do the work and also ensures startups can apply improvements faster.

Leveling the playing field with larger companies

AI marketing agencies build tools that level the playing field and enable startup growth even with resource and budget constraints. For instance, Kaya's proprietary AI tool collects data from multiple sources from which it offers smart recommendations for ad campaign improvements.

Without AI, such marketing tasks would be time-consuming and expensive, beyond the reach of startups. That would then give larger organizations more advantages. So, agencies like Kaya deliver cost-efficient AI solutions that allow startups to level up their paid ad strategy. That way, they can compete with and outpace larger organizations.

Improving customer experience

With models built to learn from your data, AI marketing agencies enable startups to deliver hyper-personalized content. Such content improves customer engagement and CTR. AI marketing agencies also build chatbots that startups can integrate into their website to offer real-time support to their customers.

Enhancing marketing ROI

AI marketing agencies use AI tools to learn from your competitor data and suggest improvements for your marketing campaigns. Tools built by AI marketing agencies can also study customer behavior patterns, which can then inform your ad strategy and budget allocation for better ROI.

Marketing strategy development

Although there are certain arguments on this, Kieran Flanagan, the CMO at Zapier, provides some insights on how AI can support marketing strategy development.

A lot of people believe AI can’t replicate strategy. What the AI is doing — is reflecting that person’s knowledge in how they can actually create marketing strategies. So if they’re getting back an average strategy because they themselves are very average at how they create a marketing strategy. AI really reflects, in a lot of cases, the knowledge you have about the thing that you were asking the AI to do.

Kieran Flanagan

CMO, Zapier

In this instance, AI marketing agencies use AI tools as a peer, an extension of their expertise. They can recreate your business profile and feed your data to the model to generate custom marketing insights for your business.

Case study: How Kaya uses AI to help startups grow

At Kaya, we automate and integrate AI in areas where machines perform best so that our experienced marketers can focus on real marketing work like strategizing and crafting campaigns. As a result, we've observed significantly improved faster and higher marketing ROIfor our clients, as well as reduced overhead costs, which we pass on to our clients. Here's an example of how we work with AI in Kaya:

Analyzing competitors' ads, while offers great insights to craft better campaigns, is a manual and time-consuming process. Knowing it firsthand, we've built this Competitor Ad Intelligence Tool which consolidates data from major ad platforms like Google, Meta and LinkedIn, delivering actionable insights to inform our clients' ad strategy.

Coupling AI tools and experienced marketers, Kaya has been able to help startups grow 10x cheaper, better and faster than traditional agencies.

Curious how AI can help you win against your competitors?

Discover where they're are advertising with Kaya's Competitor Ad Intelligence Tool.

Get free report