Founder of Prosh Marketinga fractional marketing and marketing agency that helps startups and SMEs develop their marketing practices and go-to-market.
Almost everyone today is talking about how to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into their strategies and roadmaps. AI has manifested itself in the form of powerful tools that enable businesses to improve their overall impact, even in the world of marketing.
As a marketing leader and fractional marketing manager, part of my job is to stay on top of the latest technologies and evaluate which ones to integrate into my and my clients’ marketing stacks. By now we’re all familiar with ChatGPT, but AI offers much more than content generation. I discovered many innovative AI applications that can help marketers find their audience and target better, improve efficiency from a budget and resource perspective, and ultimately take smarter decisions.
Here are four categories of tools I suggest marketers explore to reap some of these benefits:
Predictive AI: driving strategic marketing decisions
Predictive AI can be used to make strategic marketing decisions by analyzing existing data to predict customer behavior and needs. Specifically, systematic analyzes and examinations of data patterns can help marketers predict which tactics and messages for which audience segments might be more successful.
Predictive AI can also help suggest optimal models for lead acquisition and scoring, increasing close rates by identifying the most valuable channels while saving resources by omitting the least feasible ones.
At Prosh Marketing, we have leveraged AI in our SEO optimization, optimizing keyword parameters based on website crawling and traffic analysis. This helped us drive more quality traffic and focus our efforts on keywords that drive the most desirable results.
Generative AI: amplifying brand communications
Generative AI has been a game changer, especially for content teams, by increasing the quantity and quality of brand communications. By leveraging generative AI, marketers can transform their abstract imagination or brief ideas into usable content (text and images) quite seamlessly.
Not only can content be created faster with these tools, but they can also help with idea generation or brainstorming, aligning tone of voice with a brand’s personality and its target audience, and quickly check grammar and readability. Additionally, generative AI can enable marketers to create inclusive content that meets particular needs and fosters a more inclusive brand by facilitating things like closed captioning, text-to-speech, and generative photo descriptions for visually impaired people.
While generative AI facilitates brainstorming and increases the efficiency of content creation, we should not overlook the need for human intervention to refine the generated results. For example, marketers should be sure to check facts, confirm context, and add personalized and branded elements, in addition to reviewing tone of voice to ensure results are relevant and “human” enough to connect with the public.
Conversational AI: Building Stronger Customer Relationships
Have you ever been frustrated by a hilarious or confusing response from a chatbot or automated text message? Conversational bots have been around for a while for nurturing customer relationships, but with advances in AI technology, these tools have become much better at understanding what you say and imitating natural language.
Brands can now install AI-powered virtual assistant tools on websites or messaging platforms that provide more accurate responses, resolve queries faster, and reduce customer turnover through better follow-ups. AI analyzes the dialogue flow in more detail and can provide personalized responses in addition to product recommendations, gradually building better and closer customer relationships and potentially increasing sales.
On the B2B side, conversational AI can also be used to educate customers and even warm up prospects. These tools increase customer loyalty and brand trust with content that resembles a real human being, leveraging natural language processing (NLP) that helps better understand and engage with customers.
AI Automation: Streamlining Marketing Implementation
AI automation tools can streamline many repetitive marketing activities such as email marketing, collecting customer data from multiple touchpoints, and managing content calendars. For example, AI-driven CRM automation can power intelligent lead generation and management, suggesting optimal methods to collect customer data and send messages to the right place and time based on customer behaviors. your customers. Previously, email automation had to be hard-coded, but AI can now make data-driven decisions based on various factors to help improve open rates, engagement, and ultimately , purchases.
AI automation tools can also be used to ensure consistency in service delivery or customer experience, as well as to reduce errors. Ultimately, these tools can save marketing teams and agencies a lot of time and elevate junior roles to add more creativity and value.
Conclusion
The multitude of emerging technologies and AI tools require marketers to stay current consistently and consistently to gain a competitive advantage, whether you are an established leader or an up-and-coming junior. We must also recognize that the quality of AI output is directly linked to the quality of the input data and that adequate knowledge is essential to effectively teaching the tools.
Overall, no matter how powerful AI tools are, we should always view them as assistants and not replacements for marketers. Overall, marketers should not fear AI, but rather embrace it with a critical eye. Since this technology is still relatively new to the market, it is important to work with companies that have strict ethical guidelines on how they obtain and use data, to thoroughly test the tools in a smaller environment before deploy them as part of larger initiatives to mitigate risk and build flexibility into your projects to adapt as necessary.
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