The concept of artificial intelligence (AI) has been around since antiquity, originating with age-old Grecian and Chinese tales of mechanical men crafted from bronze and wood. AI has come a long way since then, having been woven into sci-fi fantasy and dystopian nightmares while simultaneously being applied by philosophers and mathematicians alike. With the arrival of cheeky personalities like Siri and Alexa, robots that can dethrone chess champions in a matter of minutes, autonomous cars and so much more, the application of AI has become commonplace. No longer intimidating, it’s now so deeply ingrained into the basis of how we operate that we use it for everything, from predicting the stock market to designing interactive toys.
And yet AI didn’t start carving a place for itself in the digital marketing world until just recently, which has online entrepreneurs wondering: “How can my business strategies benefit from employing AI?”
Social Media
To start with, consider how you maintain your social media presence. It’s likely that you direct digital marketers to create social media marketing campaigns and/or content marketing and scour your social media pages for comments to engage with in order to become familiar with the desires of your followers, plus pinpoint their concerns before they escalate. This employee will spend countless hours experimenting with different posts, trying to decide what media works best at what times. Which hashtags are the most valuable? What color scheme is aesthetically connecting your brand with your audience? These are just a fraction of the considerations brands spend months and years figuring out by trial and error and using up countless hours of precious time. Once the content has been determined and the timing is just right, they’ll put their posting schedule into effect across every single platform. They will most likely use a handful of different scheduling tools for Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter in the process.
This method quickly becomes time-consuming and complicated, but thankfully AI tools can address all of these issues and make life easier for digital marketers. Like with market campaigns, deep learning streamlines your efforts by making an efficient use of your carefully curated content, in turn giving you the freedom to focus on customer experience and their needs and wants while boosting engagement in the process. Using vast amounts of collected data, it can suggest and predict what types of content work best when and on which platform, bringing you closer to your target demographic with each new post.
Planning and Conceiving Campaigns
Like most marketers, you probably allocate a certain amount of your budget to pay-per-click ad campaigns via Google and Facebook. You either manage these using your own in-house team or an off-site agency, that spend time devising content strategies and deploying them after micro-analyzing trends and a host of other factors. But by using programs that implement AI, you can easily discover new advertising channels, optimize your targeting techniques and effectively manage your media purchasing overall, with little to no human intervention necessary.
And this can apply to giveaways as well. Imagine you and your PR crew are brainstorming ideas for your next big promotion. Having this valuable information about your demographic spending habits and what type of ads they’re responding to can give you a huge leg up in deciding what brands are best to partner with and what prizes might be the most compelling.
User Experience
The way a customer interacts with your website says everything about how intuitive you are when it comes to their needs. AI can help to personalize this connection by collecting extensive amounts of data culled from their visit. This includes their location, device, age, what they’re clicking on, how they travel between landing pages, etc. It then analyzes this information and effectively displays the most appropriate content for the user based on who and where they are. Not only does this translate to more traffic and return visits, your customers are more likely to make a purchase, driving your conversion rate up. Additionally, your satisfied shoppers are more apt to be vocal about their amazing experience, which will circle back to your social media platforms and create a positive web presence for your brand. Think of music streaming websites such as Spotify and Pandora and how they use algorithms to predict relevant track listings. You can imagine how truly subtle the process is from the user’s standpoint.
Something else to consider is the inevitable site crash. Your page might experience a wave of traffic that it cannot support, a malicious bug surfaces or an unfortunate break in code – it happens to the best of us, but unless you’re actively checking your analytics at all times, you’re not likely to realize a performance issue straight away. AI tools can, though, which saves you time and spares your visitors disappointment. On top of that, it can deliver insights into what makes your site thrive and what might be throttling it, so you can prevent mishaps from happening twice.
Customer Recognition
Have you ever been on a beauty or tech site and initiated a chat with a friendly customer service representative? It’s entirely possible that sunny and upbeat employee was a chatbot. Bots can compile data from customers and use it to spot and resolve repeating issues, discover more about their preferences and use their location to deliver a personalized and meaningful exchange. These dialogues can help marketers brainstorm fresh content relevant to their audience, steering them with actionable guidance that is more likely to result in an informed purchase and a stress-free experience.
Curating Hyper-Personalized Newsletters
It’s possible that you have a creative director and graphic designer working at breakneck speed to organize your weekly email blasts. No matter what size your subscription list is, it would be impossible to send a personalized newsletter to each individual, and it would take an unwise amount of time and manpower to even attempt it. But recent studies show that personalized content is much more impactful than one-size-fits-all messaging—so what can you do? Cue AI marketing tools that can track your subscriber’s email preferences, wishlists, open rate, the time they spend on your site and what content they view the most. They then use this valuable knowledge to tweak and create a dynamic, personal email for your unique subscribers.
Naturally, there is still an immense need for the human touch in digital marketing. An intimate connection between the personalities behind your brand and the audience you’re trying to reach is vital to a successful venture. If you can discover a clever way to leverage AI and still maintain the individuality that sets your brand apart, you’ll find it’s a surefire way to create a dynamite marketing strategy that will resonate with your customers.
