When thinking of artificial intelligence, the image of the Terminator or other Sci-Fi creations of the 90s isn’t the first thing to come into mind anymore. Especially in the digital marketing domain, artificial intelligence is different in many ways. Meaning you shouldn’t expect to use a robot that will take care of all your marketing tasks in the near future. Instead, you can use AI as a bridge between the analytics you have and how to come up with strategies and execute them for excellent results.
If you’re interested in finding out how artificial intelligence will change the future of marketing, we’ve put together some of the main ideas. Don’t expect to find a fixed book on how exactly AI will change marketing practices as artificial intelligence is very versatile, and every marketeer can use it to improve their process.
What Exactly is Artificial Intelligence in Marketing?
As you may already know, artificial intelligence can be used for a lot of purposes. When it comes to marketing, it’s the part where you use the customer data and analytics together with computational concepts and machine learning to try and predict behavior.
Unlike a human brain, artificial intelligence for business can absorb plenty of data at once and come up with customized strategies depending on what your goal is for a given audience. You can get much more from your analytics, being able to truly go through a large portion of data instead of having to devise a pattern that fits most of the time.
Furthermore, artificial intelligence algorithms can help digital marketers find the proper channel and content for each audience.
Why You Should Use AI Marketing?
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are concepts that will shape the future of how businesses work.
Already, more than half of the companies are considering or using AI for marketing and other domains. Also, as stated above, leaving the data analysis to AI means you will be able to go through huge amounts of data from multiple channels like emails, social media, or forums.
Not only that this operation is faster when using AI, but you can also be sure the results aren’t biased in anyways by a preconception of the marketeer analyzing the data. Furthermore, since this time-consuming task is taken over by AI, marketing professionals in your company have more time to focus on other tasks that require the human touch.
Explicit Examples of Artificial Intelligence Examples in Digital Marketing
After going through some of the artificial intelligence basics when it comes to marketing, it’s time to jump straight to the fun part.
More exactly, we’re going to explore some of the ways artificial intelligence technology can be applied to the field of marketing. From sales forecasting and all the way to chatbots, there are plenty of uses.
Sales Forecasting
AI can’t only help your marketing department plan for the future, but it can also look at past campaigns and thoroughly analyze the data and outcome of those efforts to predict the efficiency of future campaigns.
After all, machine learning and artificial intelligence programming need to be fed with lots of data on how you used to do things to be able to return accurate results. Also, it’s one of the easiest implementations of artificial intelligence marketing for your company.
Understand Your Customers
As a business, you don’t necessarily have to speak the artificial intelligence language. However, you need to speak the customers’ language if you hope to get any results. After all, it’s all about supply and demand. If you have no clue what your customers want or need, chances are you won’t be able to supply that certain something.
Here’s where AI comes into play by helping you understand what the customers’ needs are according to the data you gathered. You can also use this technology to try and create multiple customer profiles and see what works best for each category.
Stay On Top of Trends
Using artificial intelligence online in real-time conversations in groups or events is a great way to pick up future trends before they happen. There’s no straightforward way of doing this, so you’ll have to try a few different approaches.
Automate the Ad Targeting Process in the Gaming Industry
It’s no surprise for anyone that AI is great in automation. And since the gaming industry is booming with the help of AI, why not use it for marketing as well? Nobody wants to lose hours and hours on buying ads and tweaking PPC campaigns, you can use artificial intelligence to automate this process. It can automatically collect data from cookies and then target specific customers based on game preferences, other games they played, or genres they enjoy.
Actually, if you’re using Facebook ads, you’re already familiar with such use of AI in marketing. How many times did you talk with a friend about a game just to find it as sponsored ads in your feed a few days later?
Chatbots
Customer support is extremely important for any business. The customers want to know they can reach you and ask questions whenever they need. That builds confidence and can increase the sales results as well. However, putting together a 24/7 customer support team is no easy task. Especially if you’re running a startup with limited resources.
This is one more example where AI can dramatically change things. Just like they use artificial intelligence in games to generate new scripts and levels based on the previous ones designed by a human, a chatbot can learn from dozens of chats your team already had with customers.
For now, AI and machine learning are not advanced enough, so a chatbot can handle free conversations on its own as customers’ questions can come in many shapes and forms. However, you can already set up pre-determined answers to the questions that you identify are the most frequent. You can use AI so that when the technology identifies a certain keyword or a sequence of keywords, it will automatically choose the answer that is the best fit for the question.
Before going live with a chatbot, make sure you spend enough time thoroughly testing it. You don’t want to scare your customers with bizarre answers or all sorts of mishaps.
Speech Recognition
It is estimated that voice commands will continue to increase over the next few years since the speech recognition software in current smartphones and other gadgets in the house are getting a lot better. So, you can include speech recognition in your selling process or at least use it to take some load off your contact team.
Through speech recognition and a carefully planned set of questions, you can put together a small questionnaire so that when the customer gets to speak with the support agent, he or she will already have a pretty good idea of what that customer needs.
Content Generation
You probably already noticed how tedious and expensive content generation can become. Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a website or a Facebook page that generates content for itself? With no intention of getting your hopes up too soon, such a situation isn’t yet possible with the current technology.
However, the very essence of artificial intelligence meaning points to a moment in time when machine learning will enable content creation from scratch. You’ve probably already heard about Sunspring, the experimental science fiction film that was written entirely by AI. While the achievement is noteworthy, anyone who sees this film can tell that something’s not quite right. Even the hardcore Sci-Fi fans will probably have a hard time keeping up with the action in this one.
However, Sunspring was just a wild dream and deemed as “impossible” just 10 years ago. So, there’s no telling what could happen in the field of automated content generation in the next years.
Dynamic Pricing
The strategy of dynamic pricing isn’t a new one. Some big companies are already using it, and it implies a fluctuating price for a certain product or service depending on the demand/supply ratio. If you’ve ever gone on an Uber ride, you surely know what dynamic pricing is all about.
Notice how the same trip you’ve done yesterday is a lot more expensive now because it’s raining and the demand for cars is a lot higher? That’s exactly how dynamic pricing through AI can function in many other businesses as well. For example, hotel rooms or plane tickets can benefit from AI-powered dynamic pricing so that the companies sell those rooms/plane tickets at a lower price to encourage buyers.
Conclusion
There are many ways in which AI is already influencing the way digital marketing works in 2020. While the technology is still far from showing us its full potential, it’s clear that it is a very powerful tool that will make the difference between successful companies and startups that just don’t make it.
Are there any uses of AI in marketing that you thought of? It may sound a bit Sci-Fi know, but we encourage you to share all your thoughts in the comments section. Who knows what the future will bring?
Author’s Bio
Alex Norwood is an experienced traveler and an online entrepreneur. He runs a successful eCommerce business and is always on the lookout for new lucrative ways to make money online. Traveling is Alex’s passion, and he has visited over 20 countries in the last 5 years.