*I frequently get asked questions about Data Science, so in the interest of helping as many people as possible, I’ve started this blog to answer those questions as simply as possible. This is a robust topic, and if you want a more in-depth discussion, please revisit my blog, where we will be going into greater depth at another time.
AI marketing is an emerging concept. However, the usefulness and benefits of artificial intelligence could make it the marketing industry’s future. Boost your business’s marketing efforts and enhance your customer experience. You can use these tips to get started.
AI marketing uses artificial intelligence technology to enhance your company’s marketing efforts, promotions, and customer interactions.
“AI is useful in many industries to improve overall efficiency and can also help increase the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.”
AI marketing is still an emerging concept. Many people still don’t understand what it is and isn’t. How does it work, and why do some call it the future of marketing? Here is what you need to know.
Table of Contents
#2. Content Creation and Personalization
#3. Predictions and Forecasting
#5. Chatbots and AI Assistants
Bring a Data Scientist on Board
How to Get Started with AI Marketing
#2. Determine Data Privacy Standards
#3. Determine Your Data Sources
#5. Choose a Fitting AI Platform
What is AI?
To understand how AI marketing works and how it can be valuable to your marketing efforts, it’s vital first to understand what AI is. Artificial intelligence is essentially an umbrella term that encompasses technologies that can perform tasks with a degree of intelligence similar to humans.
Computer systems using AI can perform decision-making functions, recognize speech, and gather data and information in seconds. For example, Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa are both forms of AI.
When talking about AI, two other terms are often commonly associated with artificial intelligence and are essential to know, including:
- Machine learning
- Big data
Machine learning is a subset of AI that refers to how a computer learns based on the provided data. The computer will pick up on data trends, allowing it to understand and formulate likely outcomes.
Big data is the large amount of data that fuels machine learning and other analytics. Big data helps these computer systems identify trends and patterns to deliver helpful information. In AI marketing, data is a large piece of what makes this practice worthwhile.
What is AI Marketing?
Now that you know what artificial intelligence is and what some of the terms under the AI umbrella mean, you can start looking into AI marketing.
“AI marketing can make automated marketing decisions based on data collection and analysis.”
It then uses that data to learn the best way to communicate with customers.
Information is gathered based on the consumer’s behavior. It covers everything from how they respond to content and marketing offers. AI marketing also helps companies and consumers engage in social media posts.
The AI uses the data gathered for behavioral targeting and tailors messaging to customers at the right time. Its actions are based on the consumer data collected by the algorithm. All this is done quickly and without any interference from marketing team members.
By leveraging such large amounts of data, AI can create individual profiles for each customer based on their behaviors. This allows businesses to truly get to know their consumers, provide experiences that exceed their expectations, and influence them to become repeat customers.
How to Use AI Marketing
There are various ways to implement AI marketing into your business strategy to influence consumer behaviors, increase profitability and drive more conversions. Some of the key ways to leverage data and utilize AI marketing include:
- Data analysis
- Content creation and personalization
- Predictions and forecasting
- Campaign monitoring
- Chatbots and AI assistants
#1. Data Analysis
Data analysis is the core of AI and the most significant part of what makes it a valuable tool for businesses. You can use the data you gather to perform predictive analyses to understand customer behavior better. Gather insights from the information on their engagement, click-through rates, time spent on web pages, and purchase history.
This analysis can provide actionable acumens that allow marketing teams to make data-backed decisions that they can be sure will be successful. Not only does the data gathered predict outcomes based on a consumer’s past data, but it allows marketers to act on those predictions and reap the benefits.
Using AI and data analysis can also be used to gain customer insights. Traditionally, marketers rely on surveys or assessing purchases to understand what customers want, but that’s not the most effective method. AI offers a more systematic, reliable approach by taking information from various data sources to produce insights in real-time.
#2. Content Creation and Personalization
Every group of customers is different, from their values to purchase behavior. Thus, it’s not practical to send all your customers the same messaging or marketing materials. In reality, consumers are more likely to feel compelled to buy your product or service over the competition if you offer a more personalized experience.
AI marketing can help with that. AI plus data analysis can create customer profiles based on the real-time data gathered about your various consumer segments. It can include necessary details like your customers’ age, location, behaviors, and whether they’re interacting with your content on mobile or desktop.
Once these profiles are created, you can test them in targeted marketing campaigns to determine their effectiveness. AI can also generate automated, targeted content, like emails, for fast and data-driven content creation your marketing team may not have time for.
#3. Predictions and Forecasting
By using data analysis and behavioral targeting, AI marketing is helpful in terms of predicting customer behavior. Still, it can also be used for sales forecasting.
“AI marketing software is programmed to use predictive analytics, allowing you to see how your work today will be impactful in the future.”
This can prevent you from spending a lot of time on a project or new marketing effort before you determine whether it is or isn’t worth it.
By using historical and real-time data, AI can forecast sales key performance indicators (KPIs) that are crucial to businesses like:
- Conversion rates
- Cost per acquisition
- Customer lifetime value
- Customer retention rate
- Average sales cycle length
From there, you can determine whether your efforts are meeting the bar and have insightful data to refer to when making changes.
#4. Campaign Monitoring
One of the most extensive uses for AI is to allow it to take over routine, time-consuming tasks. After launching a marketing campaign, marketers spend several hours each week monitoring it. However, this is a tedious task that can be quickly taken care of with AI, freeing up your marketing team to pursue more important matters.
“You can easily integrate your AI software with your marketing campaigns to learn your consumers’ preferences and behaviors.”
After that, you don’t have to pay it much mind unless you see a spike in the data or some other kind of unusual activity. Otherwise, the AI software will monitor the campaign and can also provide insights into its effectiveness and reach.
#5. Chatbots and AI Assistants
Chatbots are another great tool to use to personalize the customer experience. Chatbots ensure that customers get quick answers to questions they may have without needing to call customer support.
Chatbots are also designed with human-like scripts and can help direct customers to relevant information. They even make personalized purchase recommendations before passing the interaction off to a live sales representative if necessary.
Similarly, natural language processing, or AI assistants like Siri and Alexa, can also help customers find products or information. Speech recognition allows consumers to use voice search functions to discover new products and services and even make purchases.
This is an effective and streamlined AI technology to tap into and has already been implemented by companies like Domino’s voice-activated pizza ordering system. For consumers, it’s an easy, intuitive option that provides more accessibility to those who need it.
Bring a Data Scientist on Board
AI marketing is an effective tool to implement. Still, the truth is that most marketing teams lack employees with the necessary expertise to harness the power of AI. If your business wants to get its new AI marketing project off the ground and ensure it’s maintained, it’s best to bring on a data scientist.
AI marketing is very data-driven. While a lot of the operations can be automated, you’ll likely get more out of it if you have someone experienced in the field of data science on board. A data scientist will be able to make sense of your consumer data to take the insights gathered and turn them into actions.
There are many ways that data science can boost your AI marketing. For example, AI marketing can optimize your website. Make pages more dynamic based on what your customers want to see. Then identify and nurture leads on new customers.
Data science is the key to improving the customer experience. Combining data science with AI marketing allows your business to gain a deeper understanding of each touchpoint in your consumers’ journey by analyzing real-time data gathered along the way.
“Understanding the consumer journey enables you to provide more personalization.”
Along with facilitating personalization and creating well-informed consumer journey maps, data scientists can also handle managing the data. Of course, a lot of this can be automated by AI. Still, a live data scientist can apply machine learning algorithms to the data to extract essential values and deliver live reports on the findings.
Data scientists can consolidate data, clean it up and manipulate it for your business’s specific goals. While AI marketing is practical, its abilities aren’t harnessed to their full potential without significantly incorporating data science.
How to Get Started with AI Marketing
There are some general steps to take if you’re looking to implement an effective AI marketing strategy.
- Set your goals
- Determine data privacy standards
- Determine your data sources
- Build your team
- Choose a fitting AI platform
#1. Set Your Goals
Before you start, you need to identify what you’re hoping to get from using AI marketing. Begin by determining the metrics you’ll use to measure your AI strategy’s effectiveness.
#2. Determine Data Privacy Standards
With any technological advancement, data privacy is a chief concern. You should determine your data privacy strategy from the start. Do this by programming rules into the AI software directly.
#3. Determine Your Data Sources
AI needs a lot of data to deliver meaningful results. This data can come from sources like social media or email platforms. Still, you need to determine the source before starting. Also, keep in mind that wherever your data comes from needs to be able to deliver high-quality, error-free data consistently for the AI to work.
#4. Build Your Team
Your marketing team will likely have to invest some time and effort in learning how to use the AI marketing systems. It’s also possible that it will be more advantageous for your business to hire outside talent, like a data scientist, to manage the AI.
#5. Choose a Fitting AI Platform
There are various AI platforms available to choose from, and the one you pick will greatly depend on your marketing goals and needs. Therefore, it’s crucial to determine your marketing goals to ensure you’re choosing the right platform.
The Future of Marketing
Artificial intelligence technology revolutionizes business. AI has the power to automate and streamline time-consuming tasks while simultaneously analyzing data to deliver you meaningful insights to act on.
AI marketing offers all artificial intelligence’s strengths but focuses on improving marketing efforts and customer experiences. Using AI marketing can optimize marketing campaigns and increase customer conversions and revenue. With that in mind, AI marketing is likely the future of marketing.
AI marketing also allows businesses to get to know their customer segments in ways they couldn’t before. Leveraging data to create personalized experiences and targeted advertisements for each consumer is something only AI marketing can achieve.
“It offers all these benefits to your business and consumers while freeing up your live team’s time for more critical projects.”
Artificial intelligence is already a large part of successful business strategies, and its capabilities continue improving with each advancement. AI marketing is still a new and emerging concept. However, it is a good idea for businesses looking to stay ahead and maintain a competitive edge to start considering how to implement it.
Conclusion
AI marketing uses artificial intelligence technology to enhance your company’s marketing efforts and interactions with customers. It’s also useful in many industries to improve overall efficiency and can help increase your marketing strategies’ effectiveness.
“Artificial intelligence can optimize your marketing campaigns and boost customer conversions and revenue.”
AI marketing offers all the strengths of artificial intelligence but focuses on improving marketing efforts and the customer experience. AI marketing is likely the future of marketing and the key for businesses looking to stay ahead of the game.
About the Author
Tiffany Perkins-Munn orchestrates aggressive strategies to identify objectives, expose patterns, and implement game-changing solutions with the agility that transcends traditional marketing. As the Head of Data and Analytics for the innovative CDAO organization at J.P. Morgan Chase, her knack involves unraveling complex business problems through operational enhancements, augmented financials, and intuitive recruiting. After over two decades in the industry, she consistently forges robust relationships across the corporate spectrum, becoming one of the Top 10 Finalists in the Merrill Lynch Global Markets Innovation Program.
Dr. Perkins-Munn earned her Ph.D. in Social-Personality Psychology with an interdisciplinary focus on
Advanced Quantitative Methods. Her insights are the subject of countless lectures on psychology,
statistics, and real-world applications. As a published author, coursework developer, and
Dissertation Committee Chair Tiffany still finds time for family and hobbies. Her non-linear career path
has given her an exclusive skill set that is virtually impossible to reproduce in another individual.
