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or better or for worse (and there’s definitely some of both), AI is insinuating itself into almost every aspect of life and work. It’s altering the travel industry and informing the best marketing practices. It can save time on mundane tasks, provide customer support 24/7 without getting sleepy or irritable, and offer never-ending ideas for content.
At the same time, AI tools and LLMs still need a lot of babysitting — prompts, double-checking, and plenty of editing. Keeping those parameters in mind, here’s how to use AI for marketing your business, without sacrificing originality, accuracy, and the human touch.
1. Communication & Customer Support
Providing customer support is one of the most useful ways to put chatbots to work, to help potential guests get the answers they need and book their stay quickly and smoothly. Multiple AI tools and platforms provide these basic but essential services that not too long ago were driven entirely by human labor. Talking with a bot is often the first interaction a customer has with your business, so they qualify as marketing tools and should be trained as such.
- Customer text chats: Hospitality-trained AI chatbots on your website can give visitors instant, natural-language replies to specific questions, like “Do you have kayaks available for guests?” or “Can I get a shuttle to the airport?” To make sure the chatbot has all the right answers, you’ll need to cover the details on FAQ pages or elsewhere on your site. Chatbots should also know when to say, “I’m not sure about that — I’ll have someone get back to you as soon as possible.”
- Bookings: Booking bots can integrate directly with your booking engine or reservation system to pull live rates, show images, collect payment details, and complete the booking securely. If a cart is abandoned at any point, the bot will save the details so you can nudge the customer to complete the booking or retarget them with a special offer or other incentive.
- Onsite AI assistance: For hotels and resorts, employing a chatbot concierge once guests are onsite allows them to easily access what they need, whether it’s extra towels and pillows, room service, or recommendations for sightseeing. Be sure to include this type of AI in your marketing promotions — featuring it on your site and in social media will appeal to guests who are seeking a seamless, hyper-modern experience once they arrive.
2. Creative & Content
- Optimizing for Search and Chatbots: AI can help you optimize for itself — in other words, you can use AI tools to fine-tune content to appeal to LLMs, which gravitate toward clear, factual information divided into digestible sections. Tools like SurferSEO can help you gamify the process by showing you exactly how well your blog posts and webpages score for both AEO (answer engine optimization) and traditional SEO.
- Drafting Outlines: Prompting LLMs to create outlines for blog posts, social media campaigns, or email drip campaigns is one of the best ways to use AI for marketing without letting it take control. Give it the precise context — for example, “I want to create an email campaign that takes engaged couples through the marketing funnel, starting with education and ending with bookings” — and allow it to crawl your site for the details it needs.
- Sparking Inspiration: Feeling stuck? AI has endless ideas that can help you get through a creative block, whether you’re writing ad copy, brainstorming a social media post, designing a new logo, or fleshing out an editorial lineup for your in-house print magazine. The caution here is to make sure you take the LLM’s ideas as inspo and not a finished product (more on this in the “what not to do” section at the end of this post).
3. Data Collection & Analysis
Another effective way to use AI for marketing your business is to have it pull and consolidate data, and then draw insights that might not be visible at a (human) glance. Here are some ways AI tools and bots can support data collection and analysis for marketing teams.
- Multi-touch attribution: AI algorithms can analyze complex customer journeys across social media, search, and email marketing to determine exactly which touchpoint ultimately earned the booking. You can use that data to prioritize campaigns and platforms that are doing the most work for you, and uplevel or jettison those that aren’t.
- Customer profiling: AI tools can zero in on your top customer personas by analyzing their booking history, preferences, and how much they spend. Using this information, it can segment guests into targetable clusters, such as “bleisure” travelers who engage in both work and play, or travelers seeking spiritual or wellness experiences.
- Testing New Initiatives: AI can serve as your own cost-free focus group. Once you build personas, you can give the bot the data and prompt it to act as a particular target demographic, so it can give you feedback on new marketing concepts and copy.
3 Don’ts When Using AI for Marketing Your Business
There are some areas in which you should proceed with caution when using AI for marketing. Here are three don’ts to be aware of:
- Don’t give AI free rein on visuals and long-form content: LLMs are getting better at producing articles and images, but creatives should avoid overusing it — not only because the final product will lack the human touch but also because you might get flagged for it. For example, Anthropic’s Claude AI is now “watermarking” the text and images it generates using invisible codes embedded in the output, and others may follow suit.
- Don’t rely on AI-generated responses to reply to comments and complaints: AI doesn’t pick up on sarcasm or emotional intensity, so it can make a bad PR situation worse or derail a sensitive interaction. Repetitive bot responses on your social media feed also degrade authenticity. Draft the response yourself, and if you need to, run it by a bot for proofreading or other suggestions.
- Never substitute an AI “reviewer” for the real thing: It may seem tempting to post aggregated reviews on your site or social media that represent real feedback — but the moment you veer away from content generated by real users is the moment you lose integrity and, ultimately, viewers’ trust. Never use AI imagery or text that misleads people to think it’s something it’s not.
As with all powerful tools, the key is to use AI responsibly, and to remember that it can never replace the human eye and human empathy. For support from real people to build fresh, thoughtful marketing strategies and campaigns, set up a chat with us.