Today, the world is experiencing some path-breaking advancements in science and technology. Out of all recent developments, Artificial Intelligence has been one of the most trending topics, and it is undoubtedly a great feat. It is believed that AI itself would drive the next industrial revolution.
AI remains influential as it expands its tentacles in almost every sphere of our lives. Whether it is a smart device or a self-driving car, chatbots or voice recognition technology, AI is everywhere today.
When it comes to marketing, everything that AI does is to understand the customer needs better and offer a customized experience based on individual preferences. While science often describes AI as robots with human-like traits, AI keeps on revolutionizing all kinds of industries. It is still in its’ evolving phase, and yet we have achieved the milestones like Google’s AI-based RankBrain search algorithm, IBM’s Watson, and some unexplained phenomenon like Facebook’s AI bots creating their own language.
AI and Digital Marketing started progressing together very recently. Marketers found that AI and Machine Learning in digital marketing can improve customer experiences exponentially, and can save their time and money at the same time. Let us discuss in brief about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to comprehend the roots.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
In simple words, Artificial Intelligence is intelligence exhibited by machines. It empowers machines to think, respond, and perform tasks like humans. It enables the machines to learn from their experiences and improvise outputs for new kinds of inputs.
We can say AI is a way of training computers so that they can do things that humans execute better in the present scenario. More like making the machines self-sufficient with the humans-like decision-making capabilities.
What is Machine Learning?
Machine Learning is the study of computer algorithms that enable machines to learn on their own and perform functions without explicit programming. It is an application and subset of AI that deals with training the systems to learn and perfecting their outputs autonomously based on previous experiences.
How AI can provide a competitive edge to your digital marketing efforts?
According to emarsys, AI can enrich a brand’s overall value by fulfilling customer expectations more seamlessly. Brands can strengthen their revenue streams by investing in the right kind of AI. The impact of AI has enhanced every factor in digital marketing. Let us have a look at some of them below-
- Improve user experience
- Helps in decision making
- Easier search sessions
- Data-based Sales forecast
- Minimized human errors
- Easier analysis of huge data
- Analysis of customer persona
- Calculated and predicted ROI
AI helps businesses to understand their audiences better. It can analyze a huge mass of data in no time and predict the buying behaviors to influence decisions of the target customers. Besides improved user experience, AI and ML can help businesses devise effective marketing strategies determined by data analysis of individual business cases. With these AI Algorithms, it is easier to increase productivity by automating repetitive tasks.
AI allows swifter decision-making and helps to create better-performing content on websites. With AI-led digital marketing strategies, one can reach out to the right audience with the right kind of value. Ultimately, driving the sales and revenue streams on a positive altitude.
How AI and ML are transforming the face of Digital Marketing?
From Google’s RankBrain to personalized recommendations of Amazon, from Google’s voice search to Apple’s Siri assistant, AI is drastically influencing the face of the current digital landscape.
Due to the data complexity and growing size of businesses, AI maintains a positive ascends in digital marketing. Effective data analysis and the ability to adapt to the inputs, it is something that humans have been doing. However, today, the AI is replacing humans and new marketing trends are entering the sphere. AI-based digital marketing is the new cool and practical way to invest time and resources strategically.
Personalization: You can use AI technology to translate your customers’ needs, requirements, and preferences into personalized experiences. Putting the customers first can be a crucial element for success for any business. If the content marketing strategy and Artificial Intelligence work in sync, it would become so easy to conduct personalized campaigns based on data such as buying behavior, intent, and online searches.
Personalized product recommendations: Many online retail stores and brands use AI technology to track their customers’ preferences, habits, and buying behavior. This helps them to know about their customers’ interests and use the same while promoting the precise products that they actually might want to purchase. With AI-led personalized user experience, it is easier to engage customers in productive activities that increase sales.
For example, Amazon uses AI-powered recommendation engines to personalize product suggestions to its users. It helps the eCommerce giant to scale up sales and boost the overall revenue.
Chatbots: Chatbots can make your website stand apart from the rest. They can chat with your visitors 24×7 without failing. These AI-based virtual assistants can reply to queries, fetch data form CRM, suggest products, make payments, and update order status like humans. In fact, AI bots can respond to the data-driven queries more promptly than humans can.
Likewise, businesses can also enhance their overall process using AI-driven programs in different communication formats. You can add chatbots to your websites, emails, mobile apps, and even text messages. According to an econsultancy report, 57% of customers prefer to live chat to get their queries resolved. Think of the value they might bring by automating your live chat system.
Not just that, the chatbots can reach out to your customers and follow them up like humans. For example, Starbucks is using an AI-based digital marketing strategy to supplement its human employees. The Chabot assistant named Barista helps the customers to order their favorite coffee with minimal human interaction.
Unlike human beings, the bots never lose patience or become tired of working long hours. Subsequently, devising a more enjoyable customer experience. Moreover, the bots can handle multiple customers simultaneously, which turns out to offer higher returns on the investments.
Google AdWords In-market Audiences:
Google In-market audiences use AI and Machine Learning to understand the purchase intent of its users. This process involves analyzing trillions of search activities across millions of websites. According to Google, you can add audience targeting to the Ad groups and reach out to the people based on their interests, habits, behaviors, and interactions with your business.
AI-driven SEO:
Have you ever thought about how some web pages rank better than the others do? This is due to Google’s machine learning algorithm RankBrain. It ranks the websites among millions of others on the internet. Its ranking factors use AI-driven SEO to find valuable and useful content based on a user’s search intent.
AI-driven content:
The machines can write the content effectively as the content creation with AI technology will be faster. For example, there are AI tools that use machine learning to analyze social media insights and recommend actionable posts to make.
Some tools in the market use natural language creation to transforms all your data into readable narratives. You can use the same to customize real-time content updates or adopt flexible content publication.
Brands like Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, Nestle, Caterpillar, etc. use similar AI tools to create great enterprise content. Such unique AI technologies drive real-time industry trends and offer on-demand content assistance.
Naturally, they are not as perfect as humans are so far, but you never know the stuff future might have in its trunk for you.
AI-driven email marketing:
With machine learning, marketers can automate send times and frequency of emails. The same can effectively maximize the engagement and conversions stats for your email campaigns.
With AI, you can gather all actionable insights from different user behaviors and predict the right kind of content to drive conversions. AI will suggest the best time of day and the frequency for engaging the individuals. Ultimately, sending emails more precisely and achieving scalable ROIs.
AI-driven website design and optimization:
As we know, Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a powerful aspect of digital marketing. It also helps in driving revenue. AI-based tools can test a large number of page elements and page variations simultaneously far better than the traditional A/B testing tools. The machines will do all the diagnosis and present the final insights. AI provides a more accurate and data-driven optimization for CRO.
AI-driven voice search:
Due to the intense application of AI-powered virtual assistants, voice search is becoming the ultimate phenomenon. It is a convenient option for mobile users indeed. According to TheeDesign, out of the 3.5 billion searches performed on Google every day, almost one-third is voice searches.
The digital marketers need to understand the fact and maneuvering the voice searches along with text-based optimizations.
According to Google, around 70% of the queries that Google Assistant receives consists of natural, conversational language. You need to optimize for voice search queries for your website. It is different from typed keywords requires necessary optimizations to offer direct answers to questions asked by searchers. Create the pages and optimize them accordingly as the questions normally start with who, how, what, where, when, why, etc.
Image Recognition:
The image and video analysis tool of Amazon known as Amazon Rekognition allows users to identify objects, recognize, and analyze the image. You just provide an image or video to the Rekognition API, it will identify the objects, people, text, scenes, and activities, as well as to detect any inappropriate content.
For example, financial institutions and Airports can leverage AI-enabled technology to simplify the payments and facilitate faster check-ins with a higher level of security.
Conclusion:
AI, being an active technology on the rise, can create wonders in different fields. The speed with which AI is growing across industries would surely trigger a revolution. AI and ML can help in marketing by managing data and retrieving information cost-effectively. Marketers can also make data-driven decisions for better campaign results. Besides that, they can also leverage the predictive analysis to identify their potential customers easily and leverage the purchasing behaviors to acquire higher sales and customer satisfaction.