5 ways marketers use Artificial Intelligence

Focusing on the marketing industry, AI marketing utilizes technologies to make automated decisions and produces tailored strategies based on data analysis, data collection, and economic trends. 

There are 5 east ways marketers can use leverage Artificial Intelligence technology to their advantage:

1. The power of chatbots

Chatbots are the fastest growing brand communication channel, with an increase in usage of a whopping 92%, between 2019 and 2020. 67% of global consumers have had an interaction with a chatbot over the last 12 months.

A case study to highlight the power and growth of chatbots would be Sephora; a brand that is considered an early adopter of AI in 2017, who utilized the power of chatbots to provide beauty advice on the app “Kik”. The chatbots are provided to aid consumers to help decide their product preferences through a quiz, since consumers are overwhelmed with the variety of choices, providing them a quiz to narrow down their choices without testing the products in person. 

Even though there was a successful conversion rate, what was more important was all the information that the company was able to collect. It provided Sephora with immense insight, significant data collection to perform data analysis, and a genuine understanding of customer behavior in-depth, which would trigger more conversion rates in the future.

The success of the experiment, and soaring engagement rates with the use of the Chatbot, influenced Sephora to implement it on Facebook Messenger and other platforms. It hence indicates that chatbot technology not only builds better customer service but by leveraging AI technology such as this, it produces perfectly tailored content for each consumer, which contributes to hitting target conversion rates through proactive advertising.

2. Content Creation Machine

AI-powered marketing tools have the potential to transform content creators entirely due to the AI machine producing content designed to sound and read exactly as if written by humans. AI can morph into various writing styles using data collection of the businesses’ methods, rules, and formats of writing. Overall, it doesn’t only replicate the writing effortlessly but transforms it to be more cohesive and concise, directly appealing to audiences that the specific business aims to target. Using the content created and written by AI and linking it with the AI technology software to post on all social media platforms will increase productivity as the Artificial Intelligence technology is responsible for creating content as well as publishing it. 

3. AI Email Targeting

It is well established now that personalized content is 80% more effective than impersonalized content, and the Sephora case study is prime evidence of this. 

With the power of AI, algorithms can list and map a subscriber’s website experience and email browsing data to comprehend the user’s interactions with the businesses’ content sent to them. Such data collection and analysis include: 

• Previous website interaction
• Previously read blog articles 
• Content and time spent on a page
• Wish list
• Most popular content at the time 
• The interest of similar visitors 
• Previous interactions with branded emails

By analyzing all of these, forming customers’ reading patterns and topics of interest, AI can then recommend specific content most relevant to increase engagement rates within every customer. 

Hence AI allows the algorithm to find hyper-contextual content to produce personalized emails. A key tip for marketers is to use AI-backed systems capable of learning from user feedback and hence implement more effective implementations.

By harnessing the power that AI has to offer, marketers can target potential consumers through emails and exponentially increase conversion rates.

4. Automated image recognition 

Using AI-powered image recognition to identify people and objects from videos and images. From a marketer’s perspective, image recognition could indicate a better sync between store visits and online content. Many stores utilize facial recognition software to trace customers’ in-store visits and connect these videos to their customers’ profiles. The intent to use facial recognition technology is to make payments, this has specifically been attempted to be put in motion in Australia, with the hope that through this AI technology, it will reach a point where predictive algorithms in people’s data will ultimately show the retailers what to buy to satisfy its target market. While consumers are in store they can be targeted to welcome messages and real-time discounts.

Overall, this means that marketers can use facial recognition technology to their advantage by customizing the ideal experience for in-store customers by analyzing each customer’s buyer behavior. Marketers can thus produce and deliver more targeted one-on-one messaging and can leverage measurement tools to track the offline rate of returns (ROI) of online campaigns.

5. PPC advertising

Pay-per-click ad campaigns are usually manually managed by either individuals, in-house marketing teams, or a marketing agency. Such advertising requires a calculation of budgets and reading of reports regarding which platforms and strategies to use. In other words, hard, manual labor requires long hours of extensive research. However, with the help of AI technology, you can uncover new advertising channels that may not be used by your competition, giving you a competitive advantage. You can gain an upper hand over your competition through AI-powered systems that can aid advertisers trial more ad platforms and optimizing targeting. This approach could be implemented within ad delivery optimization and omnichannel PPC campaigns data utilizing AI tools within the company internally or externally through third parties. 

Marketers should therefore use AI marketing platforms to boost efficiency, as the process to perform it manually requires an unnecessary amount of time, costs, and energy that can be allocated elsewhere. An example, allowing AI to analyze, manage and optimize paid ad campaigns or come up with effective strategies that ensure that 100% of the time is saved and that there is a 0% chance of error. 

It should be recognized by all marketers the power AI has when it comes to content creation in terms of writing, email targeting as well as publishing. Artificial Intelligence technology is a catalyst in digital transformation and is extremely advantageous for marketers in clearly more ways than one.

Image Credit: Barbara Zandoval