While businesses will continue to use today’s digital channels for their marketing, the adoption of AI and its continued development will radically change the way that those messages are created and what is in them. From providing deeper insights and predictions about customers and market trends to finding better ways to engage and convert, marketers will be able to implement far more effective and cost-efficient marketing strategies. Here we take a detailed look at how AI will impact digital marketing.
Deeper insights
Data lies at the heart of modern marketing, with strategies built around the insights it provides. By using personal and demographic data given freely by customers, together with that gained by tracking interaction with websites, social media, emails and other messages, data analytics tools have transformed what companies know about their customers and how to engage them.
With AI, those insights can be far deeper. It has the potential to integrate with CRM systems where it can unveil previously unseen patterns in user behaviour and customer preferences. This enables businesses to rethink existing market segments and even identify new ones that are potentially more relevant and lucrative. Furthermore, it will be able to make use of real-time data and make predictions, detecting changing behaviours and trends early and giving companies time to take advantage before their competitors. Overall, it ensures marketers are far better informed about their decision-making.
Hyperpersonalisation
Hyperpersonalisation is a way to provide customers with the most relevant content based on their specific needs and intentions. To achieve this, it uses data from every touchpoint of the user’s journey with the company. This includes personal and financial information, browsing behaviour, purchase history, social media interactions, chat and telephone conversation data, email communications, email behaviour, real-time location and more. Armed with this data, AI can then create highly detailed user profiles that are used to deliver the right web content, marketing messages, offers and product recommendations, at the right times and via the right channels.
Successfully implemented, customers are given bespoke personal experiences that make them feel better valued by the companies they shop with. This, in turn, increases user engagement, boosts conversion rates and improves customer loyalty. However, to deliver hyperpersonalisation, companies will need to dismantle departmental data silos so that the AI can access all the data required – something that, for some businesses, requires changes to company culture and how they manage data.
For more information, read: How to Implement Customer Personalisation
Live engagement
Live engagement, the ability of brands to interact with users in real-time, has become increasingly important for marketing. There are numerous ways that this can be implemented, including chatbots and virtual assistants, interactive marketing techniques (e.g., webinars and live polls), gamification, live online events and real-time advertising.
AI can play various roles in assisting companies to deliver these techniques. Chatbots and virtual assistants, for example, use AI’s natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to interact with customers, answer questions about products and services and assist with the sales process. Importantly, they are available live on websites, providing immediate responses, and enabling marketers to engage customers at key moments on the sales journey. Crucially, they also collect data from user interactions, and this can be used to make tweaks and refinements that make marketing strategies more effective.
Additionally, AI has a role to play in delivering live advertising. Live advertising is the displaying of adverts in response to real-time data. This can be adverts shown because of things that are happening in the news or because of actions taken by specific users. For instance, if the Bank of England reduces interest rates, AI can identify users who might be looking for a loan or mortgage and show them ads with new, lower rates. With regard to user behaviour, if someone’s online activity shows an interest in a particular type of product, the AI can spot this and show them ads for those products. If you have ever clicked on an ad in social media and then found lots of similar ads appearing in your feed, that is live advertising in action, with AI using real-time data to deliver the most appropriate intent-related adverts.
For more, read: How Migrating To The Cloud Can Improve Customer Experience?
Programmatic advertising
Aside from delivering ads in real-time, AI-enabled programmatic advertising tools now enable marketers to buy real-time ad space using automation. By analysing huge amounts of real-time data these tools can identify the most pertinent audiences for an ad and the most effective spaces to place them. By automating the purchase of these spaces, not only can businesses target audiences with greater accuracy; but they can also make more cost-effective use of their advertising budgets. Moreover, they provide more relevant experiences for audiences and offer improved returns on investment.
Content management
Engaging customers relies on displaying compelling content. Of course, what is interesting and relevant to one customer is not always going to appeal to another. What AI offers is the ability to curate content, both content types (text, images, video, etc.) and content subject matter for the needs of different audience segments at different stages of the sales journey.
Even more importantly, AI can use data to suggest ideas for new and original content by analysing questions asked by customers and identifying where the answers are absent in the content you already have. It can also look at changing trends in the market and suggest content that can help you cover new topics as they arise. Furthermore, it can also create content calendars that help you post content at the right time to have maximum impact.
Need help with content? Read: A Guide to Effective Content Planning
Visual search
A fairly new but powerful tool for online marketers, visual search allows users to search for products using images. The AI analyses images given to it, finds similar images online and provides links to the products that have those images. This approach can remove much of the vagueness of inputting textual search terms, enabling website search tools and search engines to provide more accurate results.
For the last few years, this way of searching has been predominantly done using tools like Google Lens. However, new developments in AI mean phone users can now search for products simply by drawing a circle around or tapping an image on their screens. This makes the process easier to do and makes it available to a wider number of users with the likelihood that it will become more commonplace. For marketers, this means product images will now be of increasing value in helping get their products found online.
Intelligent foresight
Though AI can never know exactly what will happen in the future, its ability to analyse vast amounts of data makes it the ideal tool to make highly informed predictions. Able to see patterns and changes to those patterns, it can swiftly anticipate evolving market trends or changes in user behaviour.
In practice, this enables businesses to stay ahead of their competitors as they will have a better understanding of how the market might change or what products customers will be looking to buy next. With this information at their fingertips, they can adapt marketing strategies, manage their stock and adjust prices before their rivals catch up.
Conclusion
The fast-paced development of AI means it is playing an increasingly important role in digital marketing. Its ability to analyse vast amounts of data and make predictions is driving progress in personalisation, user engagement, content management, advertising placement and product search. This empowers marketers to deliver more effective strategies and, importantly, react quickly to changes.
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