AI Marketing: How Can You Make it Work for You?

It’s hard to find an industry that hasn’t yet been affected by artificial intelligence in some way. Digital marketing is no exception: in recent years, the adoption of various AI technologies has accelerated across the board. The experimental tools and solutions that seemed like a risky investment before are now helping businesses adjust to changing market conditions or even play first fiddle in customer acquisition.

Is marketing AI recommended for everyone? What are the capabilities of artificial intelligence in digital marketing? And what applications of the technology are most likely to yield maximum ROI? Let’s find out.

Artificial intelligence in action

Before choosing an artificial intelligence marketing solution for your company it’s important to understand that its effectiveness largely depends on the amount and quality of data you can provide. Companies that consistently preserve accurate, transparent data about their marketing activities will have an advantage, especially if the plan is to develop a custom solution.

This is not to say that if your company is smaller or not fully focused on digital marketing you should be discouraged from using AI. Ready-to-go, pre-trained artificial intelligence marketing platforms can be just what you need to improve your marketing performance!

We can denote three key capabilities, or actions, that artificial intelligence solutions facilitate when applied in the marketing domain: data analysis and forecasting, task automation, and scalable personalization.

Analyze and predict

Customer behavior

Artificial intelligence in digital marketing is widely used to collect and analyze customer behavior data. Whenever a customer browses your catalog, researches a product, makes a purchase, or uses a coupon, the system records the action and the journey that took the person to it. This information is enriched with gender, age, location, occupation, type of device, and other details to make up customer profiles and segment customers into groups.

Source: avianaglobal.com
AI-driven analysis of customer behavior

With a searchable, constantly updated database at your fingertips, you can better predict customer lifetime value, forecast sales at audience targeting stage, and increase your ROI with an optimal product offering.

Campaign efficiency

Accurately measuring the efficiency of marketing campaigns has always been a tricky task with multiple variables. Thanks to AI marketing, this time-consuming process can now be optimized.

AI marketing campaign management

Artificial intelligence solutions collect and process the responses of customers to campaign messages across all digital channels, estimate the engagement levels of individual creatives, and generate insights. Marketers use AI-driven predictive analytics to benchmark campaign performance against historical data and take budget decisions.

Online brand reputation

Online ratings and reviews play an important role in creating a positive image of your business outside of your direct marketing efforts. Customers seek out opinions of other people before buying a product or service, and that information is diffused across dozens of review platforms and social media sites.

AI is capable of monitoring the mentions of your company all across the internet, perform NLP-based sentiment analysis, forecast complications, and trigger intelligent alerts where direct involvement is necessary. By tackling emerging issues on a case-by-case basis the company can receive valuable feedback and boost customer satisfaction levels.

Automate

Customer interactions

One of the most striking features of artificial intelligence is how effective it is in automating complex tasks that were previously the domain of manual work or rudimentary automation only. Communication with customers is a high-stakes activity and until recently only the most repetitive parts of it were entrusted to machines.

Voice assistant importance as a market channel

June 2019
Source: voicebot.ai

AI-based marketing chatbots and voice-enabled platforms like Amazon Echo and Google Home
have since changed the rules of the game. Instead of using if-then statements and branching logic, these solutions leverage NLP to process incoming questions (be they text or audio) and generate a response on the fly. More than that, the systems analyze the success of each interaction and learn from experience to adjust recommendations and enhance the service.

Brand safety

Nobody wants their carefully prepared creatives to appear alongside inappropriate or harmful content, but with the nature of digital marketing today such situations start happening more often. Artificial intelligence in digital marketing helps regain control through all-encompassing, granular monitoring that employs computer vision and NLP to detect anomalies such as fraud, bots, and content tampering. The solutions quickly flag and blacklist such instances, proactively preventing threats to brand image.

Content generation

Yes, you heard it right — AI is finally catching up with humans in the business of content creation and strategy. A company’s online presence hinges on regularly updated content delivered through a variety of channels.

Text content solutions that are entering the market now are often based on natural language processing in combination with natural language generation. Both technologies are powered by AI algorithms and provide engaging, human-like writing adjusted for SEO metrics.

Artificial intelligence marketing is also being used to curate web pages, carry out media mix modeling, and generate ad creatives for social media with unprecedented speed and scale.

Personalize

Customer approach

For many marketers, email remains the tool of choice for delivering their message directly to the customer. AI-based email marketing platforms can conduct deep analysis of each newsletter link that gets clicked and adjust future newsletters to maximize conversions.

Email marketing powered by artificial intelligence

AI helpers are integrated into websites to guide the customer’s journey, offer attractive options depending on the customer’s profile and preferences, and unobtrusively collect feedback. The technology shows impressive results across different domains, including online retail, hotel bookings, and OTT streaming.

Advertising

The oversaturation of digital channels your customers use with hundreds of ads makes deep personalization the only viable option to catch their attention. Artificial intelligence in advertising makes this process affordable, fueling features like addressable TV that serves freshly-generated, relevant creatives to every household in the network.

AI enables lightning-fast bidding for ad space — or programmatic advertising — giving ad buyers more control and flexibility. By integrating AI tools, advertisers can automate business-critical workflows end-to-end, from picking the suitable platform to negotiating with the publisher to personalizing creatives on-the go. As a result, unique offers are served to motivated customers and every fraction of ad budget goes into boosting sales.

Staying competitive with AI marketing

AI tech has made huge strides in digital marketing and every company, no matter how big or small, can benefit from it. The path to harnessing innovation starts with figuring out your business needs, potential restrictions, and expectations.

Do you think your marketing initiatives are missing their targets? Does your strategy suffer from inaccurate forecasting? Are you making the most of your data? Which parts of the process are you ready to automate? What is your innovation budget and how is it allocated? How do you ensure your campaigns resonate with customers? What KPIs (conversion, CPA, retention rate) could use a boost? Research best practices and talk to a marketing AI expert to figure out if your objectives can be reached with off-the-shelf solutions or a custom approach is necessary.