Why should we care about Artificial Intelligence technology
Artificial intelligence (AI) is creating the fourth industrial revolution by shaping every single aspect in the world; taking away jobs, and revolutionizing businesses only to create new human-driven creative opportunities. AI has influenced the way we drive cars, grow vegetables, detect cancer. It can even speak, and recognize emotions in speech. AI technology is disrupting right now all industries including digital marketing.
So what is Artificial Intelligence?
Simply put, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is building machines that are intelligent to think and act in a rational way and similar to humans at much greater scale and speed.
Within AI, you will come across two terms: Machine Learning & Deep Learning.
Machine learning is a subset of AI that is fed structured data by humans to come up with an algorithm to learn and analyze massive data.
Deep learning is a subset of machine learning, in which no structured data is needed but rather it relies on various layers of neural networks to digest massive unstructured data thus learning and analyzing this data independently of human intervention.
The relationship between AI & Digital Marketing
We’ve seen the evolution of marketing in the past years and its transformation into the digital space. Companies shifted their strategies, tools and budget from traditional to digital marketing. Today, AI is pushing further the digital marketing transformation to a new level and in various aspects. So if you’re wondering how Artificial Intelligence is Disrupting Digital Marketing.
Here are 6 ways Artificial Intelligence is changing the digital marketing industry that every marketer should know:
1- Automating Content:
In the digital marketing industry, content is king. AI aids marketers in 2 roles: Automating content creation, content curation and delivery. Content creation using NLG (natural language generation), a process that generates content from data automatically. The marketer will choose the content type, topic, number of words and data to be used. Then the AI-driven NLG platform uses an algorithm to produce unique articles that simulate human-written content saving company time & money. For example, Washington Post published more than 850 articles written by Heliograf, its AI-driven robot author. Content curation is the process of collecting quality published articles and spinning the content while adding your own opinion. Not only did AI help automate the content collection process but also customized it depending on the targeted audience. AI harvests the audience’s social media activities, engagements and interactions on the web and then ensures individualized content is delivered to each target audience.
2- Mass Personalisation:
The value of personalisation lies in its ability to greatly influence the behavior of consumers. Prior to AI, marketeres used tools to segment their audience based on location, interests, preference, demographic and other attributes and then created various customized offering to each segment of this audience. Today, marketers are able to provide their million users a personalized experience specific to each and every customer, replacing general audience segmentation into personas. Powered by AI, specifically machine learning, unique offerings to each customer are created based on the ability of technology to review the digital footprints of each consumer and analyze a mix of overlapping attributes “finding patterns inside patterns” that humans are not capable of doing. These AI capabilities help companies implement digital marketing campaigns based on micro-segmentation. This technique ensures marketers know what kind of message resonates with their audience and delivering to them exactly their needs.
3- Advertising & Product offering:
In digital marketing, online ads is one of the key channels for lead generation. Platforms that offer ad services such as publishers, and social media websites are competing to offer marketers more targeted advertising which generates higher conversion rates. For example, suggested products / articles used to appear to users based on their transactional history only. While now, websites are deploying machine learning which takes the users behavior history along with their implicit and explicit intent into consideration thus delivering more relevant suggestions. Bidding is another aspect within online advertising that consumed most of our time and is manually handled. Artificial intelligence automated the process leveraging smarter bidding by combining user based info (signals) such as device, location, language and other data that can also be collected from third parties. This improves ad performance and outcome generated while saving marketers time to focus on more valuable campaign aspects like content & layout.
4- User Tracking & Data Analytics:
Another aspect of digital marketing that has been massively transformed with AI and Machine learning. A buyers journey is a funnel that includes various steps a user takes starting from brand awareness, to showing interest and interacting with a brand to purchasing. Digital marketing altered the funnel by simplifying purchase, increasing interaction channels, offering comparison and review tools which helped users move faster in the funnel. However, these digital marketing advancements missed a vital aspect which is the ability to track and analyze results. Artificial Intelligence has enabled the ability to integrate all the data collected from different sources and analyze the type of content they mostly interact with, the products they’re researching about, and their preferred marketing channel. The availability of this filtered and simplified analysis of huge data enabled marketers the ability to create data driven marketing campaigns and make intelligent decisions, reduce testing phase and eliminating speculations.
5- Customer Service & Chatbots:
AI plays an important role in leveraging customer satisfaction in multiple phases. Social listening is the process of monitoring consumer conversations on social media and online about your brand which includes feedback, experiences, reviews… Machine learning has helped brands process huge data which even includes recognizing images with your brands logo, intelligently extract relevant conversations. AI is also used for voice authentication to verify clients and expedite the support process bypassing security and password process. Deploying AI chat bot support, powered by deep learning and NLU (Natural Language Understanding). NLU is also part of AI and allows the machine to understand human language, analyzing written sentences or voice and interacting with humans. So the AI driven chat bot interacts with customers providing relevant information such as solving repetitive questions and queries which account to more than 30% of the support cases and deliver a seamless, and consistent support experience.
6- Predicting Customer Behavior:
Long time has it been since marketers developed theories of customers needs and wants based on their own understanding but rather relying on concrete data and information. AI, specifically deep learning has enabled marketers not only to analyze but also to predict future customer behaviors accurately. This has become possible due to the availability of massive data, there’s more users Facebook than the population of the United States, China and Brazil combined. Companies are now able to sort huge detailed data like customer interactions, likes and dislikes to identify various metrics that identifies a user behavior. Then transform these findings into actionable insights to connect with their consumers on a deeper level and predict their future actions. Machine Learning’s ability to provide real-time predictive analysis combined with continuous learning is impacting digital marketing immensely.
AI, machine learning and deep learning are helping marketers build data-driven digital marketing strategies. While brands can leverage AI to optimize their digital marketing, and streamline online business growth. However, brands must know that marketing is still about humans and the value of human interaction is a key to successful marketing.