Artificial intelligence has been discussed in the news a lot these days, with people either singing its praises or sounding warnings against it. While many people don’t know what to make of this new technology, it nevertheless permeates every aspect of our lives, especially in digital commerce.
This article shines a light on the role of artificial intelligence in today’s marketing. We will discuss how AI is used, its pros and cons, how to implement AI into your marketing strategy, use cases, and where it may be heading.
But let’s begin by first defining AI in marketing, move on to how it’s used, and learn about an online AI ML bootcamp you can take to boost your skills.
What is AI Marketing?
AI marketing, or AI advertising, employs artificial intelligence methods and tools to make automated decisions based on data analysis, data collection, and other observations of audiences and economic trends that may affect marketing efforts. Artificial intelligence is often used in digital marketing efforts where speed is essential and uses algorithms, data models, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning to generate customer insights that marketers can use to customize the content, optimize spending, and personalize the customer’s journey.
In short, AI in digital marketing combines traditional artificial intelligence methods with customer and brand experience information to help businesses make good decisions and stay competitive.
How is Artificial Intelligence Used in Marketing?
Here’s a sample of ways that businesses conduct AI in marketing.
Audience segmentation and personalization
AI marketing drives omnichannel business strategies based on market segmentation, making aligning your campaigns with customers most likely to purchase your goods and services easy. AI marketers can also leverage resources like programmatic advertising to streamline choosing and setting up digital ads that yield the best return on investment (ROI). This process results in more personalized marketing tactics that nurture brand loyalty and create successful, powerful brand awareness campaigns.
Automation
AI-driven smart automation helps customer service teams and social media managers improve operational efficiency via lexical and statistical-based triggers, driving intelligent workflows. Automation helps you efficiently achieve your business goals by taking the guesswork out of tasks like categorizing incoming messages and scheduling posts that will produce the most significant impact. It also fosters a unified brand voice in customer communications and reduces response time by up to half courtesy of rules-based features.
Competitive intelligence
Artificial intelligence marketing tools can help you find new opportunities and means to improve your products and services and fill market gaps, discerning your competitors’ share of voice and finding intelligent ways to be flexible and responsive in a competitive market. You can also compare your social performance to your competitors using competitive benchmarking. Benchmarking lets you maneuver your strategy accordingly and adjust your benchmarks, maintaining your competitive edge.
Content generation
Intelligent social media management tools such as Sprout analyze the voice of customer (VoC) data in social posts and review them to let you know what content interests your audience most. AI-powered platforms can also identify keywords and triggers, helping you develop interesting posts, respond better to customer feedback, and generate more effective product descriptions for goods and services offered on your website.
AI-generated ideas can also enhance your nurture campaigns. They help you develop compelling communications to strengthen relationships with leads and prospects at every level of the sales funnel. Additionally, AI prompts help you develop email subject lines that users are more likely to respond positively to, develop personalized content that fits the buyer’s persona, encourage and sustain conversations based on intent, and engage with each prospect or client individually. All these efforts create stronger connections and loyalty, which stimulates your sales.
Data analysis for customer insights
AI and machine learning offer critical customer insights on various aspects that help you make sound strategic marketing decisions. This benefit can empower you to rapidly adapt to constantly changing market trends, prioritize marketing budgets based on what aspects require the most investment, and enrich customer relationships.
Multilingual advantage
Our world is enjoying growth in globalization, so a global presence must factor in cross-cultural elements such as language while providing prompt and efficient customer care. AI marketing tools can easily pull customer insights from multilingual data, so you know which strategy will work best in a particular geography. You can also use AI marketing to ensure your target audience engages with all your social media posts, responses, and advertisements relatable and follows their cultural standards.
Reputation management
Reputation is everything. Your company can create a great product, but people must trust you to get customers. For better or worse, social media has made brands more susceptible to scrutiny than ever. However, with AI-enabled brand reputation management, you can remedy a potential brand threat before it escalates into a big issue. You can accomplish this by monitoring negative sentiments in real time, appointing the right influencers and ambassadors, and offering proactive customer care, all of which can be seamlessly achieved using AI marketing tools.
Social media listening
AI-powered social marketing increases your marketing effort’s efficiency by raising social listening to an entirely new level. AI algorithms rely on aspect-clustering to identify and pull relevant details from social listening data spanning millions of real-time data points. These algorithms help you push past the noise and better understand the customer’s mindset via social media sentiment analysis. This process lets you anticipate your customer’s next move and plan your next moves accordingly.
Now, let’s take a look at the pros and cons of AI in digital marketing.
Advantages of Using AI in Marketing
AI in marketing offers the following benefits:
- It enhances customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities
- It results in faster, more thoughtful decision-making
- It improves your return on investment (ROI) in marketing initiatives
- It offers a more accurate measurement of your marketing key performance indicators (KPI)
- It draws more meaningful insights from customer data
Disadvantages of Using AI in Marketing
However, AI in digital marketing has its downsides and challenges, including:
- AI requires significant training to be taught how to perform a new task
- AI solutions are only as good as the data used for their training
- Privacy laws are a legal minefield that must be carefully navigated.
How to Implement AI into Marketing Strategy
So, you’re sold on the idea of incorporating artificial intelligence into your digital marketing strategy. Great! Now, how do you achieve that? Just follow these five steps:
- Establish your marketing goals. Outline your goals and expectations and align these with your stakeholders. Analyze what worked in the past and consider how AI could improve those performances.
- Assemble the appropriate talent. This step means you must consider adding data scientists or engineers with a background in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning to your marketing teams.
- Be mindful of privacy laws. Different nations and states have different laws regulating privacy. Familiarize yourself with them and remember them when creating your marketing campaigns.
- Test data quality. Artificial intelligence is only as good as the data used to train it. You need accurate, relevant data to train your AI.
- Pick the AI solution that fits you best. There is a plethora of AI marketing platforms and capabilities to pick from. If you have followed the first four steps carefully, the choices will become apparent.
AI in Marketing: Use Cases
Here’s a sample of how organizations today are using AI in marketing.
- Audience segmentation. AI helps businesses intelligently and efficiently categorize customers by different interests, traits, and behaviors. It results in enhanced targeting and effective marketing campaigns, creating more robust customer engagement and a significant ROI.
- Customer service chatbots. Organizations are increasingly turning to AI chatbots to enhance specific customer service areas. Once the chatbots are correctly trained, they interact with customers at any point in their journey, help resolve tickets, and increase customer satisfaction quickly.
- Ecommerce. AI helps businesses improve their ecommerce programs and digital marketing capabilities by providing a more nuanced understanding of customer needs and buying habits, automating tedious, redundant tasks, and simplifying workflows.
- Generating targeted content. The ChatGPT AI platform has created a flood of new AI use cases. Artificial intelligence in content generation saves marketing teams time and money by generating copywriting materials, blogs, marketing messages, e-mails, subject lines, video subtitles, videos, website copy, and other types of content.
- Programmatic advertising. Programmatic advertising automates the purchasing and placing of ads on websites and applications. Artificial intelligence has significantly boosted organizations’ abilities to run programmatic advertising that uses customer histories, preferences, and context to create more relevant ads that result in higher conversion rates.
- Search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is a super-critical aspect of digital marketing. Deploying an artificial intelligence solution to enrich search engine optimization (SEO) helps digital marketers increase page rankings and create more sound marketing strategies. AI helps digital marketers create and optimize content to meet ever-changing standards.
What is the Future of Artificial Intelligence in Online Digital Marketing?
Here’s a brief rundown of what to expect from AI in the foreseeable future.
- AI-powered chatbots. Although AI chatbots already exist, they will be taken to the next level as virtual agents and more intelligent chatbots.
- Artificial intelligence that’s more responsible. Business-related AI must be fair, reliable, secure, inclusive, and transparent. Thus, there will be a more splendid future demand for artificial intelligence tools that are created more thoughtfully and employ diverse data that mitigates bias.
- Computer vision. Computer vision lets AI marketing tools produce insights from non-text digital data (e.g., raw images). Computer vision can power optical character recognition (OCR) to analyze information, recognize brand logos in videos, and extract text from images for easy accessibility.
- Predictive and prescriptive artificial intelligence. Predictive analytics let marketers go further, anticipating outcomes and developing business strategies based on past voice of customer data. Prescription analytics files social listening data into different categories based on consumer mindsets, motivations, and intentions, enabling marketers to develop highly targeted posts, advertisements, and e-mails that produce optimal results.
Do You Want to Learn More About Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning?
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