Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a revolutionary technology, decades in the making. It’s currently transforming the digital world as we know it. AI is currently being used to power personalised shopping, assistants, content creation, voice detection, autonomous vehicles, and more.
Our focus today is going to be on how AI is transforming the digital marketing world. We’ll take a look at the numerous uses that AI has in this field. Finally, we’ll cover the benefits that come with them. Stay tuned for more.
What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
According to Techtarget, Artificial Intelligence or AI for short, refers to the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines. Most prominently, computer systems. Applications of AI include natural language procession, machine learning, speech recognition, accounting, and more.
AI will basically think about how to approach a task, respond, and then perform it. That’s usually done based on data that is being fed into it. And when you think about it, that is very much how it works with us humans too.
AI can be used for simple tasks such as handwriting prediction or housing prices prediction. But it can also be used for more technical and specialised tasks. Those tasks include robotics, image and speech recognition, and more.
In the last five years or so, the field of AI has made major progress in almost all of its sub-areas (uses). This led more and more marketing tools and software to start adopting it on a regular basis.
AI in Digital Marketing
A few years back, almost everyone in the marketing world was hesitant about applying any form of artificial intelligence to their marketing strategies. However, nowadays, more and more successful brands have (partially) adopted it within their marketing efforts. These brands include Tommy Hilfiger, Nordstrom, Starbucks, and more.
Many of these brands utilise AI to ensure that users get relevant product listings based on their previous purchases, views, and searches. Such a technique can help to incentivise users to make their first purchase on a platform or become repeat customers.
However, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Here are some of the most common uses of AI in digital marketing, in no particular order:
Better personalisation
How consumers interact and respond to marketing messages is something ever-changing. They change so much, so fast, to the point where traditional marketing channels such as media advertising and email marketing are losing effectiveness by the hour.
One of the main reasons why this is happening is the fact that numerous consumers have gotten used to personalisation to the point where any marketing that isn’t personalised simply won’t attract their attention.
When we say personalisation, we are referring to the act of tailoring your marketing messages according to the location, demographics, or interests of consumers. According to data, 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase if a brand approaches them with a personalised experience.
And this is where AI comes into play. It allows marketers to personalise their messages on an individual level rather than a generic target group. How? You might ask. Well, AI can predict customer behaviour based on data of their previous interactions with your brand.
Even though the use of personalisation is somewhat widespread these days, many brands simply fail to do it properly. And artificial intelligence can be the answer. Through it, marketers can easily and accurately analyse customer data and then deliver hyper-personalised marketing messages and experiences. According to IBM, Best Western was able to achieve great success and see an increase in traffic to their locations (48.6% incremental lift in visits to Best Western locations to be exact) thanks to AI-driven personalisation.
Customer care (chatbots)
More and more users are resorting to social media messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp to contact companies of interest. The thing is, though, ensuring that each and every inquiry made is addressed and answered requires a lot of agents.
So, in order to reduce the workload and cost of hiring a dozen agents, businesses started equipping their social media pages as well as their websites with chatbots.
Why, you ask?
So that they can deal with common customer queries, of course!
These bots are capable of instantly replying to any query made by a customer at any time of the day. Marketers can easily programme Chatbots to provide a set of replies to frequently asked questions. These chatbots can hand the conversation to a human agent if the question is too complex.
Such a service can help to significantly decrease customer service response time. That will lift any unnecessary workload off the backs of agents.
To conclude, chatbots are very cost-effective in comparison to hiring more customer care team members. They can also be more efficient, especially when dealing with common problems that customers might face. There is also the fact that machines can’t really have a “bad day”. In other words, you can expect them to always be engaging, polite, and likeable.
AI in digital marketing: Data processing
Data is a crucial part of digital marketing, and there is a lot of research out there to prove this. It’s indisputable that humans are still better than machines at doing a lot of things marketing related. However, we are more prone to making errors when it comes to data, more so than machines.
AI-powered software can easily go through large quantities of data, parse or merge it together and analyse in an efficient and almost error-free way.
Most big corporations and brands are already collecting vast amounts of data about their customers and the industry in general. However, not many brands succeed at properly implementing that data to produce actionable approaches.
And this is where (surprise, surprise!) AI comes in handy. It can process large amounts of data and analyse it in order to point out any interesting trends or patterns. This helps to provide you, the marketer, with valuable insights about your consumer base as well as your target (non-consumer) audience.
An example of this would be sentiment analysis, aka opinion mining. Sentiment analysis uses AI to categorise text based on the polarity of opinion. In other words, instead of filling your client surveys and emails with typical “Yes or No” questions, you can let users express their thoughts and opinions freely. Then, you can sit back and let AI categorise the responses so that you can understand what your users/clients feel and need.
Paid ads optimisation
Optimising marketing messages and ads has mostly been done through A/B testing (aka split testing) in the past. It’s a very effective approach; however, it requires a lot of time and resources to pull off, especially if you’re dealing with numerous variables.
AI can help with this. Through it, marketers can effectively optimise their ads in a seamless and automatic way.
Content creation
Thanks to the use of AI, you can now discover what content works best according to your target audience and their usual behaviours. You see, creating content that is creative and attention-grabbing is necessary to get results (clicks, conversions, sales, etc.).
While AI won’t be used to entirely create marketing content from scratch, it can be utilised to effectively speed up and optimise your content in several ways. For instance, modern-day marketing content software can quickly look up the trendiest topics that you can write about.
Additionally, AI can be used to create short-form and basic content such as a social media post, for example. It can also be used and is already being used as a way of correcting any mistakes that you have made within your content. Anything from grammatical mistakes to your overall tone can be analysed and tuned up with the help of AI.
And while you won’t be replacing your copywriter(s) with AI anytime soon, you can help them tremendously at their job by providing them with AI-powered content creation tools.
AI in digital marketing: Automated marketing
Marketing automation has been around for a while now. Imagine if every big business or brand just had people copying and pasting content into thousands of emails and sending them out. Sounds like a nightmare, doesn’t it? Well, there is software that can do this for you in mere seconds.
AI-powered automation software can help you speed up a lot of processes, especially ones that include repetitiveness, such as sending out emails. AI can also be used to determine which times of the day and week are optimal for sending out content to your customers.
All of these tasks, and more, can be fully automated and only need a single click to start up.
Pricing
Relying on discounts can be a great way of quickly accelerating your sales. Still, though, there are customers out there who would gladly buy a product or a service even if it features no discount at all.
But still, it can be somewhat difficult to figure out the perfect sweet spot for a price tag on any product or service on your line-up. After all, prices should depend on demand, availability, customer base, and more.
AI can help with all of these aspects by dynamically pricing items based on anything from popularity, the season, the profiles of your customers, and more.
Perhaps the easiest example of dynamic pricing in action is the price of a flight. Surely you have noticed that flights can go up a few hundred pounds after a few days for no apparent reason. Well, airlines do rely on AI-powered dynamic pricing, and you can too!
We can make AI work for your business
As you’ve seen above, Artificial Intelligence can be used for a variety of tasks in the digital marketing world. That said, it can be hard to integrate within existing processes. Fret not, as our experts can help with that. Book a discovery call today, and one of our experts will get in touch as soon as possible.
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