Doing marketing prior to the commercialization of AI involved using complex tracking methods, measuring every possible metric and extensively number-crunching these metrics, analytics and KPIs in an effort to evaluate the effectiveness of each activity, channel and partner. Being a digital marketer had become synonymous with being a data nerd. The creative aspect of marketing had become less important, and the technical side of it had been prevailing. Then AI came along and changed the game.
We could say that the relationship between AI and digital marketing resembles that of an old wizard and his young and willing apprentice. The old wizard can reiterate the rules and principles, but the young apprentice can put them into practice, test them and see if they work.
Here are some of the ways in which AI is revolutionizing digital marketing.
Deeper customer insights
Thanks to social media outreach and big data, brands now know their customers better than they ever did. AI is helping collect and interpret consumer insights from all platforms and points of interaction: websites, e-commerce purchases, support and contact forms, chatbots, email newsletters, social media engagement (shares, follows, likes, comments), forum comments, customer reviews, and more. The data footprints of internet users today are substantial and continue to grow, as people go about their lives online.
Personalized user experiences
The volumes of data generated online make it easy for corporations to build sophisticated profiles on who we are, what our beliefs, tastes and preferences are. As we have recently seen, data scientists can even guess and influence our political convictions based on data willingly provided on social platforms. Whether this is a positive development is up for debate, though, one thing is for sure – users will no longer need to be subjected to generic ads of little relevance or interest to them.
Image recognition for ROI maximization
The early days of AI saw mostly textual and numerical data being processed and analysed. Today’s machine-learning algorithms are becoming smarter and more sophisticated, however, to the point where they can determine what’s in an image and which types of images are most engaging to a specific user.
They do this by recognising image patterns and gradually learning about the emotions and reactions certain images invoke in people by measuring their social engagement.
Simpler decision-making with predictive marketing
The entire premise of collecting terabytes of user data from all possible channels is to use it for smart decision-making. Future user behaviour can be predicted more reliably by analysing historical data and drawing patterns – something machine-learning algorithms are adept at doing. This allows organizations to carefully plan their marketing and advertising budgets and to invest only in channels, campaigns and messaging that produces the desired results. Marketers no longer need to wait for months to gather and analyse data on consumer behaviour – AI does this for them quickly, efficiently and inexpensively.
Future-proof skills
With the proliferation of AI technology and the companies offering it as a service, many digital marketers are becoming fearful of losing their jobs, which is not dissimilar to what numerous other sectors and professions are experiencing.
What are humans to do in a world where machines are capable of making smart decisions more accurately, rapidly and efficiently? The good news is that marketing has the potential of going back to its roots and becoming more creative again. Once the focus is no longer on analyzing data, marketing will have the space and time to become its true self again, where creating the most engaging and sticky experiences for consumers is the priority.
5 Essential Benefits of AI for Digital Marketers
IMPROVED PERSONALIZATION
Personalization was definitely the buzzword in the world of marketing in 2018 and we’re going to see this trend become even more important over the next 12 months and beyond.
The way that consumers respond to and interact with marketing messages is changing. Traditional marketing methods like media advertising and direct mail are no longer as effective as they once were.
One of the reasons for this is, today’s consumers expect brands to tailor messages to their location, demographics, or interests. Many will not engage with or even may ignore non-personalized marketing.
A report by management consulting firm Accenture found that over 40% of consumers switched brands due to a lack of trust and poor personalization in 2017. 43% are more likely to make purchases from companies that personalize the customer experience.
At the same time, Gartner predicts that while 90% of brands will use some form of marketing personalization by 2020, most will fail to produce optimally personalized content.
The answer to both improving personalization and producing more and better content is in AI. By analyzing customer data, machine-learning algorithms enable marketers to offer a hyper-personalized customer experience and optimize the content production process, as we’ll expand on in the next point.
EFFICIENT SCALING OF CONTENT CREATION AND CURATION
Content marketing offers an impressive return on investment. But it can also be resource intensive. As mentioned in the Gartner predictions, most brands struggle, not with collecting sufficient data, but with producing enough content to ensure a personalized experience for everyone.
AI can help to speed up and optimize your content marketing in several ways.
AI-powered content strategy tools like Concured enable marketers to quickly and easily identify their best performing content, efficiently plan future content, repurpose existing content, and distribute it on several channels, with everything scheduled for optimal visibility.
You may not be thinking about replacing your copywriter with AI software just yet but we may be closer to this than you think. Several global brands, including Forbes, are now publishing content that’s at least partly generated by AI.
This use of AI makes content production much faster and more efficient and enables marketers to scale up their content marketing – something that 47% of marketers say is their biggest challenge.
Curated content is yet another way to scale up without using your own resources. AI is highly efficient at finding and selecting the right content for your audience, enabling you to automate the curation process.
AUTOMATED MARKETING PROCESSES SAVE TIME AND MONEY
Marketing automation has been around for quite some time. You don’t copy and paste content into thousands of emails, manually changing the name each time – email marketing software can do this for you in seconds.
AI-powered automation software enables you to ramp things up a notch and takes away some of the burden of decision making.
You can use AI-powered software to help you to decide not only what content to create, but also when and how to publish and distribute it. The whole process can be automated with a single click.
By turning over these repetitive tasks to marketing software, you can increase your productivity and focus your efforts on strategic marketing planning, talking face to face with customers, and other areas where humans excel over computers.
REDUCED DATA ERRORS
Humans are better than machines at doing many things but they are also prone to making errors. This is particularly true when it comes to using data, especially large quantities of data.
Intelligent machine algorithms can process vast quantities of data without ever getting tired or making a single mistake. They’ll never call your customer the wrong name (unless you’ve made a mistake in instructing them!) because they’re looking at the wrong record in the database.
You can also use AI to reduce errors due to duplicated or out-of-date data. Software can parse and merge several databases, combining intelligence from many different sources without resulting in duplicate data.
AI is also effective at analyzing data, spotting patterns, and making accurate predictions. Human predictions and analysis tend to be biased and based on limited past experience or arbitrary decisions. Machines process data and calculate results based on statistics and prediction analysis rather than intuition.
PREDICTING CUSTOMER BEHAVIOR IMPROVES ROI
Because machines are so good at spotting patterns in data, they can often tell what a customer is going to do before he’s even decided himself.
AI-software uses data and statistical models to predict future behavior based on past behavior and characteristics. It does this with startling accuracy.
When you can anticipate the actions and buying behavior of a particular customer, you can send them highly targeted marketing messages and nurture them through a unique buying funnel that’s constructed to optimize sales.
This sounds complicated but artificial intelligence does all the hard work for you. With the help of intelligent software, you can not only gain new insights about your customers but also automatically deliver marketing messages at exactly the right time for the best chance of a sale.
AI helps to identify your most valuable leads so your sales team can concentrate on them, rather than wasting time on leads that aren’t ready to buy.
This streamlines your whole marketing strategy and helps to increase sales while reducing the time and resources you spend on tasks like manual lead scoring, sales page optimization, and retargeting leads.
We could say that the relationship between AI and digital marketing resembles that of an old wizard and his young and willing apprentice. The old wizard can reiterate the rules and principles, but the young apprentice can put them into practice, test them and see if they work.
Here are some of the ways in which AI is revolutionizing digital marketing.
Deeper customer insights
Thanks to social media outreach and big data, brands now know their customers better than they ever did. AI is helping collect and interpret consumer insights from all platforms and points of interaction: websites, e-commerce purchases, support and contact forms, chatbots, email newsletters, social media engagement (shares, follows, likes, comments), forum comments, customer reviews, and more. The data footprints of internet users today are substantial and continue to grow, as people go about their lives online.
Personalized user experiences
The volumes of data generated online make it easy for corporations to build sophisticated profiles on who we are, what our beliefs, tastes and preferences are. As we have recently seen, data scientists can even guess and influence our political convictions based on data willingly provided on social platforms. Whether this is a positive development is up for debate, though, one thing is for sure – users will no longer need to be subjected to generic ads of little relevance or interest to them.
Image recognition for ROI maximization
The early days of AI saw mostly textual and numerical data being processed and analysed. Today’s machine-learning algorithms are becoming smarter and more sophisticated, however, to the point where they can determine what’s in an image and which types of images are most engaging to a specific user.
They do this by recognising image patterns and gradually learning about the emotions and reactions certain images invoke in people by measuring their social engagement.
Simpler decision-making with predictive marketing
The entire premise of collecting terabytes of user data from all possible channels is to use it for smart decision-making. Future user behaviour can be predicted more reliably by analysing historical data and drawing patterns – something machine-learning algorithms are adept at doing. This allows organizations to carefully plan their marketing and advertising budgets and to invest only in channels, campaigns and messaging that produces the desired results. Marketers no longer need to wait for months to gather and analyse data on consumer behaviour – AI does this for them quickly, efficiently and inexpensively.
Future-proof skills
With the proliferation of AI technology and the companies offering it as a service, many digital marketers are becoming fearful of losing their jobs, which is not dissimilar to what numerous other sectors and professions are experiencing.
What are humans to do in a world where machines are capable of making smart decisions more accurately, rapidly and efficiently? The good news is that marketing has the potential of going back to its roots and becoming more creative again. Once the focus is no longer on analyzing data, marketing will have the space and time to become its true self again, where creating the most engaging and sticky experiences for consumers is the priority.
5 Essential Benefits of AI for Digital Marketers
IMPROVED PERSONALIZATION
Personalization was definitely the buzzword in the world of marketing in 2018 and we’re going to see this trend become even more important over the next 12 months and beyond.
The way that consumers respond to and interact with marketing messages is changing. Traditional marketing methods like media advertising and direct mail are no longer as effective as they once were.
One of the reasons for this is, today’s consumers expect brands to tailor messages to their location, demographics, or interests. Many will not engage with or even may ignore non-personalized marketing.
A report by management consulting firm Accenture found that over 40% of consumers switched brands due to a lack of trust and poor personalization in 2017. 43% are more likely to make purchases from companies that personalize the customer experience.
At the same time, Gartner predicts that while 90% of brands will use some form of marketing personalization by 2020, most will fail to produce optimally personalized content.
The answer to both improving personalization and producing more and better content is in AI. By analyzing customer data, machine-learning algorithms enable marketers to offer a hyper-personalized customer experience and optimize the content production process, as we’ll expand on in the next point.
EFFICIENT SCALING OF CONTENT CREATION AND CURATION
Content marketing offers an impressive return on investment. But it can also be resource intensive. As mentioned in the Gartner predictions, most brands struggle, not with collecting sufficient data, but with producing enough content to ensure a personalized experience for everyone.
AI can help to speed up and optimize your content marketing in several ways.
AI-powered content strategy tools like Concured enable marketers to quickly and easily identify their best performing content, efficiently plan future content, repurpose existing content, and distribute it on several channels, with everything scheduled for optimal visibility.
You may not be thinking about replacing your copywriter with AI software just yet but we may be closer to this than you think. Several global brands, including Forbes, are now publishing content that’s at least partly generated by AI.
This use of AI makes content production much faster and more efficient and enables marketers to scale up their content marketing – something that 47% of marketers say is their biggest challenge.
Curated content is yet another way to scale up without using your own resources. AI is highly efficient at finding and selecting the right content for your audience, enabling you to automate the curation process.
AUTOMATED MARKETING PROCESSES SAVE TIME AND MONEY
Marketing automation has been around for quite some time. You don’t copy and paste content into thousands of emails, manually changing the name each time – email marketing software can do this for you in seconds.
AI-powered automation software enables you to ramp things up a notch and takes away some of the burden of decision making.
You can use AI-powered software to help you to decide not only what content to create, but also when and how to publish and distribute it. The whole process can be automated with a single click.
By turning over these repetitive tasks to marketing software, you can increase your productivity and focus your efforts on strategic marketing planning, talking face to face with customers, and other areas where humans excel over computers.
REDUCED DATA ERRORS
Humans are better than machines at doing many things but they are also prone to making errors. This is particularly true when it comes to using data, especially large quantities of data.
Intelligent machine algorithms can process vast quantities of data without ever getting tired or making a single mistake. They’ll never call your customer the wrong name (unless you’ve made a mistake in instructing them!) because they’re looking at the wrong record in the database.
You can also use AI to reduce errors due to duplicated or out-of-date data. Software can parse and merge several databases, combining intelligence from many different sources without resulting in duplicate data.
AI is also effective at analyzing data, spotting patterns, and making accurate predictions. Human predictions and analysis tend to be biased and based on limited past experience or arbitrary decisions. Machines process data and calculate results based on statistics and prediction analysis rather than intuition.
PREDICTING CUSTOMER BEHAVIOR IMPROVES ROI
Because machines are so good at spotting patterns in data, they can often tell what a customer is going to do before he’s even decided himself.
AI-software uses data and statistical models to predict future behavior based on past behavior and characteristics. It does this with startling accuracy.
When you can anticipate the actions and buying behavior of a particular customer, you can send them highly targeted marketing messages and nurture them through a unique buying funnel that’s constructed to optimize sales.
This sounds complicated but artificial intelligence does all the hard work for you. With the help of intelligent software, you can not only gain new insights about your customers but also automatically deliver marketing messages at exactly the right time for the best chance of a sale.
AI helps to identify your most valuable leads so your sales team can concentrate on them, rather than wasting time on leads that aren’t ready to buy.
This streamlines your whole marketing strategy and helps to increase sales while reducing the time and resources you spend on tasks like manual lead scoring, sales page optimization, and retargeting leads.
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