Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that artificial intelligence (AI) has been making its way into the digital marketing mainstream, taking the reins for many monotonous tasks and helping shift the focus on revenue-generating strategies on a more granular level.
The effect of AI on the digital marketing world is mind-blowing. According to a Narrative Science report, 80% of business leaders say AI already boosts productivity. And a Smart Insights study indicated that out of 100 senior marketers from various industries, 55% of companies are employing or already considering utilizing AI in their marketing efforts.
So, what’s the appeal of AI for marketers?
Implementing AI helps businesses consolidate vast amounts of marketing-related analytics from disparate sources – think email, calls, social media and the web – in a faster, more efficient manner. The insights gathered through this process can then be used to augment campaign performance and drive conversions while diminishing marketers’ workload to focus on more critical tasks.
In the all-important personalization arena, marketers are using AI in their campaigns because an estimated 76% of customers expect today’s brands to understand their expectations and needs. With AI, marketers can better understand their target audience, and as a result, create a much more personal experience for customers.
Use AI to Power Your Marketing Efforts
Wondering how to get started using AI in your marketing campaigns?
There are a number of ways to use AI to your advantage. Here are five ways marketers are using AI today:
- Granular, real-time personalization. Today’s consumers expect a highly granular level of personalization. As such, marketing campaigns must be informed by a user’s location, interests, purchase history and various additional data points. AI helps deliver personalized messages to customers at appropriate stages throughout the consumer lifecycle. It can also help marketers pinpoint uncertain customers and target them with communications that can lead them to re-engage with their brand.
- Predictive marketing analytics. With what seems like endless amounts of data, marketers often find it challenging to derive insights. AI helps companies make the most of their mountains of data using predictive analytics. Not familiar with the term? Predictive analytics helps marketers leverage an assortment of machine learning, algorithms, models and datasets to predict future consumer behavior. Ultimately, this helps brands better understand the types of products a customer will likely be searching for and when, helping them to position campaigns more precisely.
- Chatbots. Customers with more basic questions or requests can refer to chatbots, which give immediate, accurate answers. This technology leverages past queries and historical data to deliver personalized results. As a result, this method gives valuable time back to actual customer service agents to work on more complex requests that need a more human “touch.”
- Dynamic pricing. AI technology can help make businesses more competitive by enabling dynamic pricing. How does dynamic pricing work? AI tools can recommend optimal prices for products in real-time by analyzing massive amounts of historical and competitive data. For example, this strategy is incredibly successful in the retail space, allowing retailers to tweak price tags to reflect demand for specific products and stay ahead of the competition. Other use cases can be seen in the hotel industry. Let’s say a popular hotel’s rooms go unsold – to help decrease complete vacancy, dynamic pricing can help provide competitive pricing to lure customers.
- Voice technology and speech recognition. Think Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant – some of the most popular chatbots that use speech recognition. This type of AI can recognize spoken words and convert them into text to execute a command. Successful voice marketing means understanding how consumers prefer to use voice recognition technology and tailoring strategies to these habits. Consumers can then use their devices in ways they desire, and brands can deliver convenience in supportive, personalized ways.
The Bottom Line
AI is growing at a rapid rate. Gartner predicts that AI will replace approximately 33% of data analysts in marketing by next year.
While there can be a learning curve to leveraging AI and all that it has to offer, many marketing departments are starting to implement the technology, quickly realizing the powerful and positive impact it has on their digital marketing efforts.
Those marketers that take advantage of AI in 2021 will likely accomplish much more with less effort – and in a shorter amount of time. Even better, they will be able to use customer data for more intelligent targeting, allowing them to focus more of their time and energy on polishing marketing strategies and concentrating on the big picture.
