The future of marketing will be revolutionized by a powerful, nonhuman force: artificial intelligence (AI). Even now, AI and marketing-powered solutions can streamline your marketing efforts and give you an edge on your competition. According to Gartner, AI technologies will be virtually pervasive in almost every new software product and service by 2020. Fear not, as AI is not expected replace you, the marketer, any time soon. It can, however, make your job easier by allowing you to focus your efforts on addressing important challenges by using AI and marketing.
How does it work? The following list outlines some of the most significant ways AI can boost campaign success and ROI.
- Deepen understanding of the consumer
Customer segmentation is one of the most substantial areas AI can make a difference in your campaigns. Automated audience analytics capture a thoroughly comprehensive look at your engaged and disengaged consumers, as well as prospective clients. By processing massive amounts of data, AI and marketing technologies offer detailed consumer profiles and extract insights to predict customer behavior patterns. You can easily segment customers to determine precisely who you want to target, what platforms they use and their preferences. A Salesforce study revealed that 76% of consumers expect companies to understand their expectations. With real-time information, determining what motivates your audience and how they feel about your brand is only a click away. Your efforts can then be focused on adjusting your messaging with more accurate predictions of what customers truly want.
- Optimize content creation and delivery
Today's consumers expect personalized experiences with only relevant content. AI has the power to help you deliver just that, and efficiently too. In a Real-Time Personalization Survey by Evergage, 61% of the marketers who used AI and marketing to deliver personalized web experiences reported improved customer experiences and 63% noted higher conversion rates.
AI tools can automate your personalization efforts on a second-by-second basis that's simply not humanly possible. Insights extracted from research data allow content marketers to focus specifically on what will get traction with their target audience. From emails and push notifications to blogs and websites, intelligent algorithms are able to analyze significant data about single users to produce tailored content and offers. A Demand Metric survey of marketers in 2016 showed that personalized content is 80% more effective than non-personalized content. What's more, with format guides and specific settings, machines are even capable of creating narratives in a human-written style. These can include location descriptions, event recaps, business reports and financial insights, just to name a few. Though long-form communication is still a human's game, AI is undoubtedly changing the content marketing landscape and creating exciting possibilities.
- Provide more efficient customer service
Intelligent chatbots offer an opportunity for more individualized customer support. These technologies can access vast data points and analyze requests specific to a customer's location. They serve as virtual assistants that offer an opportunity to build stronger relationships with your audience. Not only are chatbots an inexpensive, reliable option, they are often even more effective at addressing problems than humans. Bots simplify the identification of recurrent problems and patterns and predict causes for a user's issues, and they do it around the clock. These virtual assistants free up time and resources that can be better applied elsewhere.
If you're already employing bots in this capacity, you may consider expanding your customer chat options beyond service interactions. AI agents can also be used to advise and engage website visitors directly with surveys, recommendations and content-related chat opportunities. This provides an excellent platform for communicating on a "personal" level with each customer and consequently increases satisfaction and loyalty.
Account-based marketing solutions can result in smarter ads, but AI is capable of boosting ad performance exponentially with deeper insight. Using social profiles, searches and more, machines can provide a depth of analytics unattainable before. These tools have the capacity to produce more in a few minutes than it would take an entire team to create in a month. You may be surprised at just how much of an impact this form of AI can make. For instance, Harley Davidson has had incredible success using AI-driven marketing, including ad performance. Their automated data analysis revealed that ads with the word "call" in them performed 447% better than ads with the word "buy." The AI platform replaced "buy" wording with "call" in all their ads and produced impressive results.
The benefits of AI in ads doesn't stop there. AI technologies can also find advertising channels that aren't being used by your competitors. You can optimize your digital advertising campaigns with technologies that analyze, manage and optimize for you. Some tools target audiences, buy media and test the results, with little human input. It's clear that marketers now have unbelievable power at their fingertips. Marketing resources can be maximized by harnessing AI's ability to crunch serious numbers and identify behavior patterns across platforms and channels.As marketers, we now have the opportunity to understand and engage with customers on an individual basis beyond mere demographics, a degree of personalization previously unimaginable. AI allows us to eliminate human bias to reveal hidden insights and refine marketing campaigns.
With less guesswork, your brand can deliver the most relevant message to the right person, at exactly the right time. So, what are you waiting for?