Artificial Intelligence is bringing some disruptive changes in the world of marketing. It has already influenced every segment of our customers’ cyber lives – the way they browse the internet, shop online, choose the content they want to consume and evaluate customer service.
Due to these changes, customers’ expectations are now much higher. And again, AI has positioned itself as one of the crucial technologies capable of helping marketers meet these ever-growing demands.
In order to better understand why AI is becoming essential and what are its benefits for marketing campaigns, we will demonstrate some of the most important roles AI plays in marketing.
Understand Your Customers
One of the important roles AI plays in marketing is helping you learn more about your customers, and understand them better.
AI is capable of gathering data from many different sources and taking into account each and every interaction your prospects have with your business. It’s practically impossible for humans to handle such large amounts of data, as it would be pretty expensive and time-consuming, not to mention that they would most probably miss many important insights.
AI provides much better insight into customers’ demographics, as well as into their habits, interests, and motives, and also spots patterns in their behavior.
This makes it possible for marketers to create their customer profiles with greater precision, and tailor the approach to each segment of their audience accordingly.
Generate Leads
One of the great ways to use AI in digital marketing is for generating high-quality, relevant leads.
Some AI-powered tools can find new leads, by looking into connections between people, companies, places on the web or physical locations and products.
They can also integrate with your marketing automation software, and mine new relevant leads from emails, such as the new contact email addresses or phone numbers from out of office replies.
Create a Content Strategy
AI still can’t be of much help when it comes to content generation, as by now it’s only capable of handling simple stories, such as financial reports, stocks or sports news.
For example, in 2017, the Washington Post broadened its use of the robot reporter Heliograf, to report on the results of all high-school football games in the area of D.C. Washingon, thus addressing the demand of their readers for hyperlocal content.
However, AI can be very beneficial when it comes to creating your content marketing strategy. As it is capable of handling large amounts of data, it can help you determine with more precision what topics to write about, what keywords you can rank well for, where, when and how often to publish your content, at the same time taking into account the needs and the behavior patterns of your target audience.
Personalized Content and Ads
Internet users are overwhelmed with all sorts of content and ads that are nowhere near their interests, and it’s truly no wonder that 77% would choose to pay more only to get the user experience that is more personalized to their needs.
With all the data about prospects it can collect and analyze, AI can choose and display only the content or the ads based on relevant criteria, such as their prospects’ age, location, time, previous purchases, etc. The right kind of ads can now be displayed to the right audience, thus saving businesses money spent on advertising.
The best example of how this personalization works are product recommendations that Amazon gives to their customers or movie and show recommendations viewers get on Netflix.
This kind of personalization is not only applicable to the content you publish on your website or in your blog posts, but also on other channels, such as email. AI-based email automation tools can personalize both the subject line and the copy of your email, and schedule sending the email for the best determined time for both individual and larger segments.
As more customers are looking for exactly this kind of relevant and personalized user experience, it’s becoming the expectation, and will soon be the norm.
Improve Customer Service
Quite a big improvement has been made when it comes to improving customer service by using AI-powered solutions.
Implementing this technology advancement, businesses are now better equipped to address the demands of their customers’ in a timely manner and solve their issues efficiently.
You can understand all the benefits better on the example of conversational chatbots, which are now able to:
- Be available every day and at every time.
- Handle multiple queries simultaneously.
- Successfully answer up to 80% of the most common user questions.
- Make the interaction with customers hyper-personalized, as they have an insight into their previous touchpoints with the business.
- Thanks to natural language programming, they can converse in a human-like, polite and friendly manner.
By using AI-powered chatbots businesses can significantly reduce the waiting times, and always be there to help customers out when they are in need of any information regarding the business itself, its services or products.
Predictive Analytics
With its capability to gather, keep track of and generate insights from large amounts of data, AI can now also be used to predict future outcomes and give sales forecasts.
AI can be used to score leads in order to determine their position in the sales funnel, and provide them with relevant content and offers. It uses data on customers’ behavior and their previous history to determine what they are looking for and what their search intent is. This can also offer an insight into the sales department in which prospects are the most likely to make a purchase so that this department can focus on the leads that will bring value to the business.
Predictive lead scoring, in some cases, can shorten the sales cycle from 180 to 100 days, as well as increase average deal size by 20%.
AI is also capable of determining which one of your customers is the most likely to churn, with the accuracy of prediction, in the case of FedEx being from 60 to 90%.
Unless you start implementing some of the AI applications in your marketing efforts, you’ll hardly remain competitive. Your rivals are already using it and reaping all the benefits of this technology, so make sure you do, too.
Michael
Michael has been working in marketing for almost a decade and has worked with a huge range of clients, which has made him knowledgeable on many different subjects. He has recently rediscovered a passion for writing and hopes to make it a daily habit. You can read more of Michael's work at Qeedle.