We live in an age of self-driving cars, smart homes, and other technological innovations that were almost inconceivable only 20 years ago.
AI is at the core of most of these tech advancements, and its different subsets including machine learning, natural language programming, deep learning, and big data have evolved to such an extent that they’re used in various industries.
Given that currently, the main implementation of AI revolves around its capacity to analyze, process, and interpret huge amounts of data, it’s clear how digital marketing, a discipline which heavily relies on having as much customer information as possible can benefit from it.
51% of marketers from North America and 52% of their colleagues from Europe say that they mainly use this technology to analyze data.
Let’s discuss some implementations of AI that are disrupting and revolutionizing digital marketing as we speak.
Eliminating Educated Guesswork
Despite using a lot of data-driven processes and tools, marketers had to resort to educated guesswork for creating their campaigns.
Although they collected immense volumes of customer information, they could make use of only a portion of these gargantuan data sets because of their tools’ inability to process and make sense of them.
Big data analytics has changed this and now marketers can easily gather and interpret all the information on their target audiences, and integrate it into their campaigns.
In other words, instead of playing a guessing game, marketers can now create and tailor their email, social media, or content campaigns with great precision and accuracy, thus reaching out to their prospects with emails and posts that they will find relevant.
Personalizing the Entire Marketing Process
Sending out the right message at the right time to the right recipient using the right channel is something that has always been the holy grail of every marketing campaign.
But, this requires understanding characteristics, demographic differences, interests, and preferences of your target audience. This will allow you to segment your prospects in different groups and personalize your marketing process accordingly.
For example, you won’t send the same email messages to the people who have just signed up for your newsletter and to those who have already purchased something from you.
Similarly, not every person uses the same channel of communication – younger members of your audience will be more responsive if you reach out to them via
Instagram or Snapchat while you won’t have much success if you try to use Facebook.
Automating Content Creation
Did you know that the Washington Post used Heliograph, its proprietary AI-powered story-telling technology, or in layman’s terms, a robot journalist that
covered the Rio Olympics and wrote more than 850 stories during this sports event?
Heliograph has been mainly used to report some key information and come up with short updates on high-school football games in the D.C. area.
But it’s not the one of its kind –
Bloomberg has Cyborg to lend its robotic hand to the publisher’s journalists and generate thousands of articles about companies’ financial reports, while Bertie, a tool used by Forbes, creates rough drafts and story templates.
This content-generation technology is still at its infancy, but there are other, more widespread uses of AI for content generation.
Namely, smart algorithms excel in creating subject lines, Facebook Ads, social media posts, and other short messages as they can identify the best combination of compelling words that will push the right buttons and attract the audience’s attention.
Improving User Experience With Chatbots
We’ve mentioned the importance of personalization in terms of segmenting audiences for email and ad campaigns, but there’s also a way to do the same on your website.
User experience is one of the most important factors which affects customer engagement and conversions. AI allows for displaying the content and offers which are suitable for every particular visitor (or segment) based on detailed analyses of their location, preferences, age, average order value, devices they use, level of interaction with the site, and other parameters.
Besides content personalization, another factor that can dramatically improve customer engagement on your website is the implementation of chatbots.
These intelligent pieces of software backed by AI can be added to your website in order to offer your prospects and customers immediate assistance regarding your product or service questions, as well as issues they might have with it. They’re highly effective as they reduce waiting times, which means that your customers won’t angrily hang up the phone after waiting the average 11 minutes for a customer support rep to take their call – chatbots are available 24/7, night and day, and they can handle a number of queries at the same time.
Even when you successfully convert a customer, you’re still at risk of churn. Namely, many people stop using a product or service because they don’t understand how to set it up as well as how to make the most of its different features.
Pushing the Boundaries With Voice and Visual Search
Although text-based search still dominates, AI has brought us new exciting ways people will look for information and do research before making a purchasing decision.
Enter voice and visual search.
There’s no doubt that we’re currently witnessing the voice search revolution. According to Google, 41% of adults and 55% of teens use voice search on a daily basis.
No wonder this is so when our lives have become fast-paced and hectic, meaning that we need to simplify and streamline as many tasks as possible. With voice search, you don’t have to use your hands when you want to look for something on the internet – your intelligent voice assistant will find and read it for you.
This ease of use explains why
smart speakers are the world’s fastest-growing technology segment.
There’s another trend that might be labelled as the next big thing.
How many times have you seen a pair of shoes or a shirt that you liked but couldn’t find any information about it? Nowadays, you can simply take a snap of whatever catches your eye and perform a visual search with the help of Google Lens, a smart technology that allows you to use images instead of words when searching the internet.
All these examples show that digital marketing and AI go hand in hand and that match is indispensable for every company that wants to gain a competitive advantage.
