Digital marketing industry is evolving at a rapid pace. Zero click searches are rising, organic reach on search engines and social media are declining and voice searches are increasing. Emerging technologies such as AI, machine learning and natural language processing are at the forefront of this change and are driving it. As a digital marketing strategist, you will have to understand how these technologies work and how it will impact digital marketing landscape to thrive in the future.
In this article, you will learn about seven ways in which conversational AI will transform digital marketing.
What is Conversational AI?
Conversational AI is a set of techniques used to send automated messages and speech-enabled applications while offering a human-computer interaction facility. Conversational AI harnesses the power of speech recognition and natural language processing and try to understand intent, decipher different languages and respond in a way that replicates human conversation.
How Conversational AI Works?
It all begins when humans give input in either written or spoken form. Voice recognition or speech recognition tries to make sense of the spoken words and converts them into machine-readable text. Next, Natural Language Understanding focuses on understanding the intention behind the text.
Once the conversational AI understands the intent, it starts to work on generating a response. This is where Dialog Management comes into play. It orchestrates responses and transforms them into human-understandable language by using Natural Language Generator. Once the response is ready, the application can either deliver the response in text or in voice format.
Conversational AI also has an additional component for learning and improving which is known as machine enforced learning. Machine enforced learning is a process machines use to learn from past experiences and constantly improve so it can deliver better results in future.
Here are seven ways in which conversational AI will impact digital marketing.
1. User Engagement
Users behavior has changed drastically in the last two decades. You cannot expect them to wait long after submitting a form or question. Users demand instant responses whether it is your website or customer support. With conversational AI-powered chatbots, you can nurture leads in real-time. Users don’t have to wait after submitting a lead form as they instantly get a call from the sales department, which will try to close the lead. Moreover, these chatbots can also deliver personalized messages, offer special deals and coupons to keep your audience hooked.
2. Customer Acquisition and Retention
Did you know that it costs more to acquire a new customer than retaining an existing customer? Not only that, but acquiring a new customer also requires more effort and time. Conversational AI can collect useful insights about customer preferences and behavior which would help you show targeted messages to both prospective and regular customers. Additionally, you can also ask the right questions from existing and new customers. This will not only help you attract more new customers and retain existing ones.
3. Social Media Marketing
More and more brands will use chatbots to offer customer support on social media channels. These chatbots can enhance the customer journey by answering customer queries, push personalized content and automate the process of customer outreach. This means that customers can get satisfactory responses to their questions on social media without leaving their favorite platforms.
Businesses will use instant messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger for one-to-one interaction with their customers. By using chatbots, brands can not only save their time, resources but can also free up their social media team, so they can focus on creating strategies and design successful campaigns while putting customer-service into autopilot.
4. Sentiment Analysis
Search engines like Google are now considering brand mention as a ranking signal. Same is the case with social media sites. That is why it is important for brands to track those brand mentions. This is where social listening comes into play. What users think about your brand and what perception they have about your brand will impact your social media reputation. The focus of brands will be on improving and preserving their brand reputation from getting damaged. As a result, they will handle negative comments more carefully. Conversational AI-powered chatbots can help you analyze social media posts of your users, comments, shares, likes and other social signals.
5. Hyper-Personalization
Research has shown that people who feel emotionally attached to a brand are more likely to purchase their products. That is why the prime focus of brands is on building an emotional connection with their customers. Moreover, brands can turn those customers into brand advocates by establishing an emotional connection with them. This helps them build trust, attract new customers and increase brand awareness.
Instead of sounding off like a machine, conversational AI gives a human touch to customer engagement. Brands will try to mimic human-like interactions when they are reaching out to customers. Conversational AI-powered chatbots can offer truly personalized experiences and recommendations just like your friend could do by analyzing data from multiple sources and from previous interactions. You will feel that you are talking to humans that know about your background, interests and your needs.
6. Email Marketing
Conversational AI-powered by natural language processing can help email marketers design and send personalized email messages depending on the behavior of user. Additionally, email marketers can automate emails and shoot them when a user takes a particular action. This also allows them to personalize the email message based on the actions the user has taken. A user who has purchased your product will get a different email as compared to users who have subscribed to your newsletter. This increases your chances for converting your email recipients into paying customers.
7. Lead Generation
Thanks to machine learning capabilities of conversational AI, it can not only analyze massive data sets quickly but can also identify key patterns and useful insights, which can help you find the right customer for your brand. It can also help businesses find the right resources by analyzing thousands of CVs. By reaching out to customers at the best times with the right questions, you can easily generate leads with conversational AI. What’s more, these conversational AI-powered chatbots continues to get better with time as they learn from past experiences and data analysis.
How will conversational AI impact digital marketing in your opinion? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.
Author bio Irfan Ak is a digital marketing strategist & a guest blogger on various websites. He is currently associated with Branex an . He has worked with various other brands and created value for them.
7 Ways Conversational AI Will Revolutionize Digital Marketing Industry was originally published in Chatbot News Daily on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.