Artificial intelligence. From being a problem in sci-fi films about the future, to being the technology that has transformed countless industries, AI and machine learning have surely come a long way (just like predicted in Terminator!).
Thankfully, unlike the films, AI is actually being used to make processes more effective, more efficient, and less time consuming.
Even the marketing industry has been enjoying the benefits of artificial intelligence and machine learning for some years now. If you are involved in the marketing of an enterprise, chances are that you are already working with one or more AI-powered marketing tools.
Even if you are not involved in marketing an enterprise, you may already have heard about semantic search.
In 2012, Google (News - Alert) introduced the Knowledge Graph that utilises AI-powered semantic search to decipher the context behind every search query. As a result, Google’s results have become much more interactive and informative for the user, even eliminating the need to leave the SERPs (search engine result pages) in many cases.
In this article, we will discuss everything that you must know about the application of AI in digital marketing.
Whether you are a digital agency owner or a small business owner trying to market your business in the digital space, there is a good chance that AI is already influencing your marketing results. Knowing about the technology and understanding how you can utilise it to your advantage can turn out to be the differentiator you need to stay ahead of the competition.
Let’s begin by understanding why AI became such an integral part of the digital marketing landscape:
Digital Marketing Was Already Touted As A Data-Dependent Marketing Method
One of the reasons behind the great results of digital marketing, and its subsequent popularity and a marketing medium, is its dependence on data.
Be it website visitor insights or insights about keywords, data driven decisions have enabled digital marketers to make their marketing efforts more efficient than ever before.
As a result of this popularity of data-dependent decisions, a number of ways and technologies emerged that started collecting customer data.
This is when the use of artificial intelligence became relevant. Suddenly, there was so much data of billions of users that only an intelligent algorithm can analyse it at scale.
In other words, the ability of AI and ML algorithms and technologies to analyse vast sets of data collected from a variety of sources was ideal to drive better results with digital marketing.
The Age Of Customer-Centric Marketing
Unlike traditional marketing mediums, getting results with digital marketing is all about adding value. Customers on the web are more demanding than ever before and smart marketers are using customer and industry data to listen to their demands.
These days, you can’t simply sell your solution. These days, you have to build credibility in the customer's mind. The purchase decision has transformed into a purchase journey.
In this customer-centric world, artificial intelligence allows businesses, across industries and locations, to understand their audience better than ever before. Moreover, AI-enabled tools enable online businesses to deliver personalised customer experiences to consumers at a speed that was completely unimaginable until a decade ago.
The Rise Of Automation
Digital marketing is not a single thing. It involves a staggering variety of tasks to successfully market a business on the web. From designing intuitive landing pages and websites to driving engagement on social media, from ranking for the right keywords to delivering the right emails at the right times, the entire thing can be overwhelming, even for a well-equipped team.
That’s why, the ability to automate tasks is given so much importance in the digital marketing landscape. It enables fewer resources to get more done, in a relatively shorter amount of time. Not to forget, automation eliminates the chances of human errors taking place.
With the rise of AI-powered tools, it is now possible to automate some aspects of digital marketing.
Now that we know why AI is being applied to digital marketing, let’s find out how it is being applied.
How AI Is Being Applied To Digital Marketing
AI For Search Engines
As mentioned earlier, Google introduced Knowledge Graph in 2012, which was just one of the examples of how the tech giant is using AI to improve the user experience on its search engine.
From shopping ads to Google My Business listings, several aspects of Google Search are now powered by AI, helping make the customer experience better than ever before.
The amazing thing is that this application of AI is not just limited to the customer’s side of things. Google (and other search engines) analyse and rank billions of websites for billions of keywords. These websites are ranked on over 200 different ranking factors.
There’s no way human beings can keep up with those numbers. That’s why, Google and other search engines make use of AI-powered crawlers that do everything from analysing the keywords on a webpage to checking backlink profiles for broken links, in a matter of milliseconds!
The result is a more fair evaluation of websites, enabling the search engines to present users with relevant results, further improving the user’s experience.
AI-Powered Personalised Emails And Ads
While there are a lot of conversations these days, about concerns related to data collection of customers, let’s take a moment to talk about how this enables brands to deliver more personalized experiences, something customers are ironically demanding more than ever before.
Looking at the demand, the market is delivering. Let’s take the example of e commerce giant Amazon.
Amazon has a lot of data about their customers, including (but not limited to), product purchase history, product browsing history, Prime Video history, product ratings, reviews, and even old and new delivery and billing addresses.
Using this information, Amazon delivers personalised emails and ads to your browser.
Even display ad networks these days are able to deliver ads based on real time customer behaviour data, making ads extremely relevant.
How is all this possible? Because of the ability of AI technologies to assess data and make informed decisions. Better known as Smart Targeting, the technology is being widely applied in automating the process of delivering online ads and making it more efficient.
Platforms like Google and Instagram are already using AI algorithms to deliver ads to prospects that are most likely to engage with them, based on their historical behaviour on Instagram or Google.
Personalized Product Recommendations
Another great example of the use of AI in delivering personalized experiences can be seen in personalized product recommendations.
One of the best examples of this is your experience on Netflix.
The Netflix algorithm continuously tracks your usage. It tracks which genres, actors, directors, and shows you like watching. It also tracks the time of the day or the day of the week when you are more likely to log on to Netflix.
Based on these and many other parameters, the Netflix algorithm is able to provide you with show and movie recommendations that are most likely to make you spend more time on their platform.
Not to forget, Netflix may also be using similar data points to determine which new titles to add or shows to finance, so that they can keep producing content that their audience will love, and in turn, will keep paying for.
Content Produced By AI Bots
Speaking of content, many companies have already started taking AI’s help in producing content.
In 2019, Forbes published an entire article that was written by an AI. The contributors on Forbes also make use of Bertie, their AI powered content management system. Bertie has the ability to suggest headlines and topics to publishers, based on their publication history.
Phrasee, another AI-powered copywriting tool enables marketers to write more effective subject lines for their mails. It can also write other email elements like pre-headers, headers, and call to action lines better than most humans.
Phrasee can also write social media ads and the brand claims that ads written by Phrasee will bring down your CPA.
Dynamic Pricing
AI technology is also being used to present users with dynamic prices for the same products.
This has enabled businesses to ensure profits amid fluctuating demand and supply, while also enabling them to deliver personalized offers to their clients, improving the chances of a sale at every instance.
One of the best examples of the application of dynamic pricing can be seen on airline and travel websites, where the prices of flight tickets and hotel rooms fluctuate based on the popularity, availability, and time of booking.
Chatbots
One of the newest trends in the customer service space is the customer’s increasing willingness to reach out to support staff on social media like Twitter and Facebook.
While it is truly a brilliant idea to make your customer support available on these platforms, it can be expensive.
One of the reasons customer service on social media is such a great idea is because it makes it easier to customers to avail support. However, on the business side, this means an amplified amount of customer service requests to deal with every day.
In such a scenario, hiring and training enough customer support staff to satisfy this amplified need can be a bank-breaking affair.
This problem is being solved by AI-powered chatbots. These chatbots, that are widely available and affordable, can be programmed to give your customers replies to the most frequently asked questions. When the conversation continues beyond these questions, the chat is then forwarded to a human support agent that can assist the customers.
This way, you can support more customers and solve more queries with a relatively smaller team of support staff.
Conclusion
AI is already influencing countless aspects of the modern marketing landscape and this influence is expected to become more and more evident in the near future. If you aren’t already thinking about ways to use artificial intelligence to improve your marketing’s performance, you may find yourself left behind in the coming months.
