How can we use AI in Digital Marketing?

87% of enterprises believe that incorporating AI into their business will give them a competitive advantage in digital marketing – but what does that look like?

As a potential innovation, AI is consistently seen as a revolutionary technology for business. More and more corporations are investing speculatively in AI solutions, hoping to secure some of the growth and efficiency that advancements in the field promise. 

So, what does this mean for the future of the marketing world? And how is AI disrupting digital marketing strategies right now? Let’s jump in and find out.

Wait, what is AI again?

To catch you up to speed, AI stands for artificial intelligence. It’s the joint pursuit of science and engineering to create intelligent machines. For most people, the end result of AI is greater convenience and innovation in their daily lives. For digital marketers and business owners, AI is an opportunity for growth and success. 

Unlike human intelligence, AI produces consistent, predictable results with minimal rates of error. Though they have their limitations, AI driven technologies have a huge capacity for learning. They are able to process large amounts of data at incredibly fast rates – much faster than any person could. With this kind of immense potential, it’s no wonder that AI is already causing a stir in the global economy. 

How is AI changing digital marketing?

With its fast learning rate and high accuracy, AI can dramatically increase the efficiency of a business. When set up correctly, AI can perform repetitive tasks without the need for any manual input, leaving business owners more time to focus on their goals. 

Since it was first brought to the commercial world, AI has evolved in leaps and bounds. The scope of tasks that it can now perform has turned it into a valuable asset for digital marketing. There’s loads of around that prove its potential, but to keep things short, we’ve taken the time to summarise some of the key ways AI is changing the digital marketing landscape.

6 AI Driven Marketing Industry Trends

With the emergence of mobile devices and the increasing presence of brands on social media, the level of interaction between companies and consumers has dramatically increased. These interactions are spread across rich media formats – video, image, text – which are difficult to objectively analyse. However, AI tools can uncover the trends hidden within this information, allowing you to make data-driven creative decisions. This means that your creative teams can produce more engaging content that is more aligned to the audiences you are courting.

As AI continues to advance, enhancing customer experiences is becoming easier. We are able to capture more data points and inputs of our customers, personalising marketing campaigns around these audience preferences. The ability of AI to process this data is letting us move away from generalised content to more specific, more converting content. Simply put – AI accurately offers the right products, to the right customer, at the right moment.

When running a marketing campaign, the more data we can use to fine-tune our strategy, the better. However, the amount and complexity of data that we have access to today is far beyond what we have the time – or ability – to analyse. That’s why AI has become a preferred solution. 

You may already have seen AI at work through Google and Meta services for campaign optimisation. These tools use AI generated, automated suggestions to improve ad performance. However, this approach is being taken even further, moving toward optimising your strategies in real-time. What this means is that your marketing efforts can stay agile with your audiences, operating at the highest levels of efficiency with virtually no manual input at all.

As AI continues to evolve, it is helping to remove the barriers between you and the customer. These days, you have the potential to be more than just a vendor to your audience. You can take on an active role in the customer journey as a teacher, a guide, or an influencer. 

Using AI, businesses are finding out which touchpoints best guide their customers down the marketing funnel. They are able to get detailed demographic data that accurately identifies what actions are needed to nudge prospects along the path toward becoming conversions. If the power of AI is utilised well, selling becomes frictionless, allowing you to reach the audiences who are in the perfect state of mind to buy. 

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  CRM and Customer Loyalty

As well as attracting new customers, AI can also help increase existing customer loyalty. By analysing consumer behaviours, AI tools can identify the triggers that send your customers to your competitors, supporting your efforts in customer relationship management. Using these insights, you can tweak your retention practices to lower your customer churn rates. Sometimes, all it takes is a minor change to make a major impact. AI is the key in finding the causal relationships between what you do, and what makes your customers happy.

Natural Language Processing (NPL) is the next big step in AI’s ability to understand human language, both verbal and written. It allows AI driven chatbots and voice programs to comprehend a wider array of dialects, accents, idioms, slang – all kinds of commonly used language. Its development is turning automated customer intervention into a positive experience, no longer making customers dread talking to a ‘robot’.

For digital marketing, this means AI chatbots that can interact organically with audiences, offering better engagement across social media and greater potential for automated lead generation.

AI and the Future of Digital Marketing

AI has helped us to live more conveniently in many ways. And, as a powerful marketing tool, it is already achieving more than we ever imagined. Developments in optimisation and automation are making their way into the marketing world, allowing AI to turn complex, time-consuming jobs into automated background tasks. 

If used well, AI tools can scale up your business with targeted marketing campaigns and personalised customer experiences. The improvements in speech and text recognition are also turning AI driven chatbots into a viable, if not preferable, option for customer interactions. While AI is still not perfect, its rapid rate of growth in these areas holds a lot of promise for the future of digital marketing. 

The Key Takeaways

For every second that it processes human input – AI is evolving. Investing in AI driven technology is quickly becoming a necessity for every market sector. It’s already providing businesses with real results, and the competitive advantage it offers within digital marketing increases every day. 

However, these technologies can’t be used blindly. AI can be a powerful marketing tool, but the extent to which you can maximise its potential depends on how they’re utilised. At this stage, AI driven solutions aren’t ‘smart’ enough to work out what to do without initial guidance. If they aren’t set up correctly, they’ll consume more time and effort than it’s worth. That’s why it is always best to consult a digital marketing agency or technical consultant who can guide you along each step of the journey. 

Want to learn more?

If you have any questions about the future of digital marketing, Spark is one of the leading digital marketing agencies in Australia, and our friendly staff will be more than happy to assist you with any enquiry.

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