10 Ways To Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy With Artificial Intelligence
There’s no doubt Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the fastest-growing industries of the decade — its possibilities surpass the figment of your imagination but rest assured they’re very real.
AI is changing the way digital marketing functions, as it allows marketers to increase incentives for businesses by improving their marketing strategy. Around 84% of businesses that use AI in operations feel it helps them gain an edge over their competitors.
While it is true that prediction engines have a difficult time anticipating the course of AI, we decided to take our chances anyway.
We did some research on digital marketing trends – and uncovered some of the groundbreaking ways – AI is transforming digital marketing.
Here are 10 ways of how AI has shifted the paradigm of digital marketing:
1. Customize Experiences
If you’re a marketer reading this, you know trying to manually personalize content for every individual customer isn’t practical. Nor is it sustainable.
Especially if your business uses customer relationship management (CRM) practices to ensure the best customer experience.
However, AI offers a way to work around that.
When coupled with CRM, AI accumulates user information from your brand’s different platforms. It identifies their wants and needs so that your team can implement the most effective strategy for purposeful interactions — and generates leads.
The key information source for AI analysis is consumer behaviour patterns.
What kind of products do your consumers buy? What time of the day is most receptive to your messages? Even marketers from brands like L’Oréal and Hello Fresh are taking personalization very seriously, and you should too.
You can leverage this real-time user data to spot micro trends and target them accordingly. With data, marketers augment their own ability to offer customized services and boost sales.
This is where AI shines! Your business can visualize the journey customers take with your brand, and ensure they make it to checkout — by making recommendations that reflect their purchasing habits more accurately.
2. Predictive Analysis
Predictive analysis uses past data, statistical algorithms, and machine learning to identify the probability of future events.
A predictive analysis model can be applied anywhere — and digital marketing is no exception.
AI improves your chances of converting a prospect into a client. And also suggests price reductions on a product if conversions aren’t happening.
This will change the approach marketers take and let AI guide them on making important decisions. 47% of business executives believe the predictive capability of AI helps make accurate forecasts, according to a study conducted by McKinsey.
One such example is lead scoring – where teams rank customers on how likely they are to make a purchase – AI can be used to perform such functions.
They need to proactively use data and focus on securing clients that are more likely to convert.
This way, marketers contribute to increasing sales and won’t lose time desperately trying to make a client out of someone who – chances are – won’t budge.
3. Automated Email Marketing
Machine Learning analyses behaviour patterns to help businesses optimize their email marketing strategy. This enables marketers to deliver relevant content to the customer’s inbox and increases the click-through rate.
An exploratory data analysis through AI integration helps marketers devise an effective email marketing campaign.
AI studies different message types, chooses the best time to make contact, and determines a frequency to elicit a response. AI sends out emails based on triggers set by the actions your consumers take.
Instead of having to A/B test different content and templates your team can ensure that your email marketing is relevant and engaging — and more importantly, converts.
4. Analytics For Better Analyses
Machine Learning analytics can help companies identify their target audiences more precisely, improving your efficiency and campaign management along the way. AI features embedded in analytics are expected to free up over one-third of data analysis jobs by 2022.
Companies can also retarget potential customers that were previously interested in a product or service.
Platform Specific Analytics
Companies can leverage natural language processing (NLP) to process and take action on all user-generated content such as reviews, pictures, posts, and stories related to your brand.
Public Relations Analytics
Measure exactly how effective your PR campaigns are in engaging prospective clients and highlight statistics on what drives engagement, traffic, and revenue.
The predictive analytics of AI have a success rate of over 75% in the healthcare sector — imagine the kind of results digital marketers and PR professionals can achieve with AI integration.
5. AI Infused Augmented/Virtual Reality
When AI technology meets new visual technologies like AR and VR, it brings a new consumption experience for your audience.
Through immersive videos and apps like that of IKEA, customers can now see what a piece of furniture looks like in their living room — all from the comfort of their home. This creates a new space for digital marketers to tap in and engage consumers.
Combining AI with AR/VR can help build a strong brand identity to induce customer loyalty.
6. Chatbots
Recent developments in AI semantic recognition technology makes customer service a simple pleasure for marketing teams, and research approves!
It is psychologically proven that people prefer simplicity. AI chatbots have innumerable advantages over customer service provided by humans.
They enable businesses to go above and beyond what customers expect from support teams. Customer service departments struggle to meet the demands of every customer, while chatbots can deal with multiple customers at the same time.
Chatbots don’t need to rest as humans do, and they can offer real-time solutions to user problems. Your employees will thank you for it!
Chatbots can work outside office hours too. Gartner predicts that 15% of all customer service will be handled with AI by 2021 — which is a 400% spike against the numbers from 2017.
Additionally, customers have the ability to change their language preferences so businesses can provide solutions to diverse consumers, without having to hire additional help.
Statistically speaking, 72% of customers expect to keep track of their purchase history regardless of the platform where they buy a product. This is consequential for businesses trying to implement a digital marketing campaign through messaging apps like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger.
7. Advanced Voice Search
Written speech is more formal but spoken interactions tend to be more casual. That’s why most consumers prefer voice interactions on a platform — it just seems more natural.
According to a Google blog post, more than 50% of teenagers said they use voice-search daily. On the other hand, 56% of adults admitted to using a voice-search feature but found the experience to be too tech savvy.
It is about the experience, isn’t it?
More and more customers are growing accustomed to voice-based interactions with technology. It’s going to be an everyday thing. It already is:
“Alexa, what is the weather going to be like today?”
“Siri, I need a ride for me and my mate.”
According to the IHS Market, four billion devices will soon carry AI-powered assistants.
We know that major businesses are investing in voice search; virtual assistants have taken over customer service. And they’re only going to go up from here on.
This reiterates the necessity of digital marketing initiatives to become more conversational and user-friendly.
8. Digital Advertising
Artificial Intelligence is improving digital marketing, as it is probably the most diverse niche to adopt machine-learning capabilities.
Google ad platforms, for example, have already implemented machine-learning tactics to send ads to people who are more prone to responding to a CTA.
They analyse the user’s information and other demographics to identify the most responsive audience for an ad. You can customize your ads based on age, gender, and region — and maximize your lead generation efforts.
Because of this, advertisers now have more control than ever before. They can strategically plan their campaign features and how to run them over various platforms. As a result, they reduce wasted efforts on digital marketing initiatives and improve their returns.
Google Adwords is already doing this with its automated auction system. Digital marketers can target audiences to get the exact response they want for their campaigns.
9. Content Creation
Chances are your consumers are already reading AI-generated content without realizing it.
Even Forbes uses intelligent tools like Wordsmith to create news and generate clicks on its website. They’re using fill-in-the-blank template among others to enter data and keywords.
This is only one of the many ways AI influences content creation.
In video games, AI is used for more human-like opponents. It can even adjust the difficulty by analyzing the player’s skill level.
When it comes to music, AI-generated content may not be everyone’s cup of tea. However, it does excel at personalizing music apps like Spotify and Soundcloud to create playlists that match your mood.
Marketers need to ensure timely delivery, and AI can be trained to help create quality content that converts.
10. AI Complements Human Efforts
Let’s not forget: AI isn’t here to compete with humans but to help them.
While implementing AI changes does mean some jobs are going to fall through, rest assured it’s going to create a million more.
We will be expected to live and work alongside AI. But we already do so now, with Alexa and other digital assistants.
To make the most of this change, marketers will need to prepare for some reskilling. The capacity for success with this technology is only as good as your own capability to use it productively.
The Wrap Up
Artificial intelligence is a blessing for all industries. It enables marketers to gain a deeper understanding of their consumers and deliver personalized content in real-time.
AI is slowly cementing its presence in the digital marketing space, and it’s consequential that businesses take the time to prepare. Changes will need to be implemented to reap the benefits of AI. When productively combined with AI, digital marketing will enable better consumer experiences and give your business the boost it needs to succeed in today’s competitive mar
What is AI?
Artificial intelligence or sometimes called machine intelligence, is intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans and animals. The ability for a computer to without direct human input identify and incoming request and produce an appropriate response.
