How You Can Leverage AI Marketing To Improve Your Strategies
Once the stuff of science-fiction, artificial intelligence (AI) has permeated nearly every facet of life today. The technology has applications in almost all fields, including marketing. From targeting to content creation, AI is changing the way marketers work by doing much of the heavy lifting.
AI has a vast range of benefits for marketers, but they must also do their due diligence before deciding which tools to use so that they can incorporate them into their marketing strategy with clear intention. There’s no question about whether businesses should utilize AI in their marketing efforts, because no organization can afford not to. Data is the global currency, and AI is a marketer’s key to keeping their company competitive.
This article will explore how AI is used in marketing, its plethora of advantages, relevant AI programs for marketers, the future of AI marketing, and how Agile Education Marketing can help you stay ahead of the curve.
What Is AI Marketing, and Who’s Using It?
IBM describes AI as “a field which combines computer science and robust datasets to enable problem-solving.” Built In defines AI as “a wide-ranging branch of computer science concerned with building smart machines capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence.”
We can think of AI as a kind of computer program that mimics how humans learn. We feed these systems information, which it uses to generate content, make predictions, calculate sums, or carry out almost any other function imaginable.
AI creates the result its programming logic thinks is closest to answering the operator’s question. Sometimes, in the case of statistical applications and calculations, those answers are more correct than even the smartest math genius.
What does that look like in the marketing world? An AI marketing tool gathers data and helps marketers make informed decisions or create marketing collateral. These platforms effectively remove the guesswork element, as well as reduce human error in data collection and analysis. Some marketing AI can act as a creative springboard, too.
Let’s have a look at some of the ways business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) brands are leveraging AI:
B2C AI Marketing
Starbucks
According to Social Media Strategies Summit, the global coffee powerhouse gives customers a loyalty card, and they can use the Starbucks mobile app to place their orders. These two technologies collect information about the consumer’s buying behavior and preferences. The company uses this data to send personalized messaging and special offers designed to increase purchases.
Amazon
As one of the pioneers of personalizing the shopping experience, Amazon keeps finding ways to use consumers’ data to appeal to them. As Concured explains, its AI algorithm goes beyond past purchases to include other user details such as browsing history and search queries to present what it believes is the most desirable products.
Netflix
Netflix’s “Top Picks” AI gathers data about what viewers have watched to provide the best recommendations based on genres. Per Simplilearn, for each title, it also generates a thumbnail that’s likely to encourage users to click on it and watch the series or film. This personalized experience keeps you locked in.
Whole Foods
Ever wanted to buy groceries without speaking to another human, but didn’t want to pay a delivery fee? Whole Foods realized this is a consumer need that other grocery stores weren’t meeting. They introduced “Just Walk Out” stores that allow shoppers to place their orders online and collect them in person. AI tracks these purchases so it can analyze buying patterns.
B2B AI Marketing
Hubspot
The folks at Hubspot are whizzes at enhancing the customer experience by using chatbots on their site to answer user queries. According to BONDAI, the bot helps users with preliminary questions and then connects them with live agents to move the person down the sales funnel.
Epson
The printer giant has mastered the art of using automated emails as part of their digital marketing strategies. The messages appear so authentic that the company’s customer response rate rose by almost 250% which led to a 75% increase in the number of qualified leads coming from these emails.
Cisco
The digital communications multinational corporation understands the importance of an immersive online experience. As TopRank Marketing explains, this led them to produce interactive product catalogs that use augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to give potential buyers a much more holistic view of how the products work in real life.
Facebook
Facebook Ads can form a vital part of your marketing strategy. And, Meta knows that, which is why it created the “lookalike audience” feature. It allows businesses to advertise their offerings to people who the social media platform thinks might be interested based on characteristics of audiences who have proven they are.
What Are the Benefits of AI Marketing?
Let’s explore the reasons why these brands use this technology.
Saving Time
Many AI marketing tools that perform data analysis have filtering functions that allow a marketing team to see specific metrics within seconds. This facilitates quicker decision making and fast tracks many marketing processes.
Improving the Customer Experience
Technologies like chatbots can facilitate seamless, positive customer journeys. Rather than being put on hold for hours on end, AI can quickly answer questions and respond to complaints. If the customer still isn’t satisfied, the tool can generate a ticket and send it (along with all the necessary information and context) to an employee to handle.
Increasing Campaign ROI
Per Marketing Evolution, the statistics that marketing analytics AI produces enable marketers to make informed decisions about strategies and campaigns. Rather than going the trial-and-error route, marketers can use this information to allocate budgets and ad placements for the most effective results.
Refining Personas and Targeting
According to Zapier, smart AI technology can create the ideal customer profile and identify appropriate audiences. This precise information permits marketers to nail every last target market characteristic.
Inspiring Creativity
Most marketing collateral requires a writer, videographer, photographer, designer, or animator. Creating content can be a lengthy process when creativity is running low. Generative AI can give content marketing artists a jump start by producing creative concepts that professionals can fine tune.
Predicting Customer Behavior
AI can analyze historical data to anticipate future trends, which allows marketers to get a head start on designing the most optimal strategies and campaigns.
Getting More Accurate Data
Numbers mean nothing if you can’t turn them into actionable insights. Rather than running the risk of making (potentially costly) errors when doing manual calculations, AI can do the math and data QA for you, leaving you with precise information to work with.
Marketing Automation
AI can take much of the burden off a marketer’s shoulders by making laborious, repetitive, and time-consuming marketing activities automatic. For example, automated emails can engage potential consumers who’ve taken a specific action with no need for human intervention, leaving marketers with more time to attend to other mission-critical tasks.
Optimizing Content
Previously, a lot of content creation was about throwing marketing collateral at the wall and seeing what stuck. Now, as Metrics Watch explains, AI can tell marketers very specifically what their audiences are interested in, allowing them to tailor collateral and messaging to appeal to and satisfy consumers.
How Can Marketers Use AI Marketing?
Here’s a short (and by no means exhaustive) list of some AI applications in marketing, as well as a few of the best AI marketing tools.
Ad Optimization
Most advertising platforms already have an analytics dashboard that gives you insight into metrics that measure a campaign’s performance as well as strategy suggestions. Notable examples include Google Ads for pay-per-click (PPC) marketing and Facebook Ads for social media advertising.
Content Inspiration
ChatGPT is the name on everyone’s lips when it comes to AI-written content. However, Jasper.ai is another great resource for writers, and DALL-E is fantastic for producing images that graphic designers can work with.
SEO
Optimizing content can be an exercise in futility if marketers aren’t using AI. Platforms like MarketMuse and Surfer SEO help them discover which keywords their target audience is searching for so that they can capitalize on them. These tools also show users how optimized your written content is so that they can include new keywords and restructure web and blog copy structures as necessary.
A/B Testing
Also known as split testing, this is a research method marketers use to see which of two or more ads (or other pieces of similar marketing collateral) is performing better. As you might expect, AI like Optimove can run the experiments and capture data for you.
Reporting and Analytics
Statistics are a marketer’s best friend. But, combing through and analyzing numbers to display in presentations can also often be the bane of marketers’ existence. Fortunately, platforms such as Seventh Sense do the work for you and even provide predictive analytics.
Sentiment Analysis
No one has time to check every social media mention about their brand. AI platforms like Brand24, Brandwatch, and Flick can perform social listening analytics for you so that you can have a firm idea of what people think about your business.
Automated Chatbots
We already mentioned the ability chatbots have to enhance the customer experience and improve customer service. Fortunately, you don’t have to program your own. ChatFuel, ManyChat, and Customers.Ai are ready to go.
With the great power that AI marketing tools afford comes great responsibility. There are several factors you should consider before you select your AI marketing solutions and embark on your AI marketing journey:
Ethics and Legality
The data that many AI marketing platforms use can only be gathered from consumers and users. As Digital Resource explains, you must ensure you collect customer data ethically and comply with any applicable legislation. You also need to make certain that you’re in line with privacy and data security best practices.
Marketing Campaign Objectives
Some AI tools require subscriptions and payments to access premium features. It’s critical that you check whether the platforms you want to pay for will actually help you achieve your marketing goals, or else you risk wasting money.
Data Hygiene
It’s no good having AI to run statistical analysis if the data you give it is incomplete, outdated, duplicated, or otherwise unusable. Take the time to regularly perform data cleansing to guarantee you have solid material to work with.
Limitations and Integrations
Many AI platforms can perform multiple functions, but you should still be aware of what each can’t do. Then, you must make sure you have a cohesive technology stack that covers all your bases. Some tools can even directly integrate with each other, like Google Ads and Google Analytics.
Technical Expertise
Most of these tools don’t require a ton of training, and they usually have “How To” guides for novices. That said, platforms like Adobe will require a fair amount of industry knowledge, so bear in mind that you may have to get some additional education to get the most out of AI programs.
How Will AI Influence the Future of Marketing?
In days gone by, businesses would suffer terribly if they were missing a crucial marketing component like good collateral, analytics, and strategy, or social media presence. Now, AI is set to level the playing field by giving everyone an equal opportunity to excel in areas that would otherwise be weaknesses.
However, in doing so, it’s almost guaranteed that just having data and content won’t be enough to put a company ahead of its competition. What sets organizations apart is how they use the information that AI produces. Instead, marketers will have to reconsider the kinds of questions they want their marketing tools to answer and the kind of content or data they want AI to generate.
In this age of information and AI, simply getting information and using tools at a basic level won’t be revolutionary. Instead, it’s how strategically these platforms are used that will make the most significant difference. But this will require no small degree of ingenuity, creativity, and unconventional thinking.
As SAS explains, “marketers must be ready to disrupt what they know and how they measure success. They need open and curious minds to challenge conventions and assumptions to perform against evolving standards.”
With that in mind, what kind of trends and developments can marketers expect in the future?
Hyper-Personalization
Very soon, customers won’t be satisfied with generalized messaging and lackadaisical targeting. According to AI experts like Chandan Thakur, they’ll expect marketing tailored specifically to them, which entails extremely engaging and relevant experiences.
So, businesses will have to perform laser-focused consumer analysis and offer deals and products that meet any given customer’s very individual needs. Nothing can be broad or left to chance.
Voice Searching
Technologies like Apple’s Siri voice assistant have revolutionized how people search on the internet. It’s becoming an increasingly popular tool, so much so that it’s anticipated that over half of all searches will be done via voice by 2025.
Consequently, organizations must ensure their content is optimized for voice search if they want their site to rank on result pages.
VR Shopping
We mentioned earlier how Cisco is changing the game through VR catalogs. Soon, they won’t be the exception but rather the rule. Per Ortto, VR will become an e-commerce staple. Brands will have to keep pace by using AI that can enhance the customer experience by making it much more realistic through tools such as digital twins.
Dynamic Pricing
Most for-profit organizations are accustomed to doing costing and setting standard prices accordingly. However, this won’t suffice in the coming years. As Hubspot explains, businesses must use AI to instantly adjust prices based on varying demand.
We’ve seen that take place with companies like Uber, but it will have to extend to businesses across all industries and sectors.
Agile Marketing Education: Future-Forward Marketing
AI is driven by data. Similarly, facts and figures also power the best marketing efforts. Agile Education Marketing knows data mining and analytics strategy isn’t everyone’s strong suit. That’s why we help education vendors with all things education.
Between our ranges of data products and services, we can assist education suppliers reach their marketing potential. Contact us today to find out more, and don’t forget to sign up to our newsletter.