Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the marketing landscape in recent years, providing marketers with robust tools to understand, engage with, convert and retain customers. Using AI and machine learning, large amounts of data can be collected and analyzed, providing unprecedented insights into consumer behavior, preferences and trends that were inaccessible before digitalization.
It can also enable marketers to anticipate customer needs through predictive analytics, personalize customer experiences, and optimize strategies in real-time. Just as importantly, AI-driven automation allows marketers to streamline mundane, routine tasks and processes, freeing up more time to be strategic. A new generation of generative AI tools opens up even more possibilities.
Here are some ways marketers can already benefit from AI:
1. Digital Advertising
Marketers have leveraged predictive modeling, machine learning, and automated targeting capabilities in programmatic platforms like Google and Meta for many years. These features allow you to use real-time data to identify audience segments with a higher propensity to convert, target prospects and customers with highly relevant messages and creative executions, and test different combinations of content. creative assets.
The ability to personalize customer engagements at scale is extremely powerful. But to harness this capability, marketers must ensure these systems are powered by accurate, up-to-the-second data. You also need to be able to produce a variety of creative assets to allow the AI to test different ad combinations. If these conditions are met, automated targeting and bidding tactics can free up more time to be creative and strategic.
2. SEO Optimization
AI can automate a range of search engine optimization (SEO) tasks, including improving titles, meta descriptions, and keyword choices to improve page rankings. It can also automatically generate SEO-rich articles, perform keyword research, and provide real-time analysis of search engine results pages (SERPs). Additionally, AI can simplify website audits by automatically optimizing content and fixing duplicate content.
3. Customer relationship management (CRM)
In CRM, AI automates tasks and reduces human errors. AI can be used to analyze behavioral data such as login frequency to predict when a customer is about to leave. Businesses can take action to address the concerns of at-risk customers and improve customer retention. AI can also create personalized email subject lines and personalized articles for each subscriber. AI-enriched analytics can be used for leads and predict customer lifetime value.
4. Content creation and design
With the rapid advancement of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, DALL·E, and Midjourney, marketing teams are using AI to support creative strategy and execution. Gen AI content creation tools can help time-strapped agencies and brands increase content production and automate repetitive tasks, allowing them to generate high-quality text, graphics, and even videos in record time.
Such tools work best when used to complement human creativity rather than attempting to replace it. They can help you produce content and test audience responses quickly and at scale. Such tools are useful for automating certain aspects of content creation such as background removal, object recognition, image enhancement, and adjusting colors and layouts.
You can provide an AI tool with your overall creative concept and visual identity for a campaign, then allow it to quickly run through millions of different design options. The power of this technology is growing at an almost frightening rate, with the latest visual effects and AI deepfake technology capable of generating polished visuals and videos with a prompt.
Using Gen AI for content production has many pitfalls; human supervision therefore remains essential. You’ll want to make sure, for example, that your tools don’t use copyrighted material to produce your assets. Additionally, it is important to be attentive to issues such as stereotypical depictions of human figures in creative assets, as well as quality control issues, such as AI’s well-documented difficulties in representing people with the correct number of fingers.
5. Marketing strategy and ideation
An effective way for almost all teams to use AI is to support brainstorming and ideation. Gen AI-based chatbots like ChatGPT or a custom GPT can help you generate new ideas and consider problems and opportunities from different perspectives. You can, for example, ask the AI to provide ideas for how you could refine a piece of content, new uses for a product, or new ways to reach your audience.
There are a range of custom GPTs designed to support marketing tasks such as search, social media and content creation. These tools can provide better and more personalized results than a broader tool like Bard or Chat GPT. If you’re really ambitious, you can even create your own personalized GPT and train yourself on the skills, information and behaviors that make it more useful, effective and efficient for your own needs.
For example, you can create a custom GPT preloaded with industry knowledge, branding guidelines, content templates, and analytics to help you generate high-quality marketing copy. By continually updating and refining the knowledge of your personalized GPT, you can continue to improve its relevance and effectiveness. The concept of creating a custom GPT can be applied to various industries, not just marketing.
6. Consumer and customer research
Brands, agencies and market researchers have been using AI for some time to analyze large amounts of data about customers, their purchasing behavior, preferences and spending habits, and accurately predict actions future. To get accurate predictions, you need to have the right data and capabilities to train the AI tool. This requires investment in data collection, data processing and analytical skills. Gen AI can complement your quantitative research with qualitative insights into consumer motivations and problems.
7. Customer Service Chatbots
Businesses have already been experimenting with chatbots for some time. Chatbots are quick and easy to deploy, are always on duty, and can respond to queries faster than a contact center. They can also provide multilingual support and use conversation history to provide a more personalized experience. But they had to deal with more complex queries and nuances of human emotion and expression. Gen AI can be expected to help businesses deploy chatbots that can handle more complex tasks and respond to customers with more personalization and empathy.
Use AI with care and responsibility
As the examples above illustrate, AI has become an essential part of every marketer’s toolbox. But it also brings new challenges to the fore. To get the most out of AI, your systems need to be trained on huge amounts of data. This data must be current, consistent, accurate and representative to generate reliable answers and positive results. It must be collected with the consumer’s consent and in compliance with data privacy laws.
If your data quality isn’t up to par, you could run into issues like unfair discrimination against certain customers or poorly targeted and ineffective advertising. Most organizations will need to invest in technology and data science skills to achieve the best results. Transparency is another challenge. You must be able to explain how your systems make a decision to ensure accountability.
