For digital marketers to maintain a truly competitive edge in 2022 and beyond, the time is now to begin embracing and deploying AI technology.
There’s no denying that digital marketing technology is evolving rapidly. AI is one such technology taking the digital marketing world by storm. According to McKinsey, AI can generate between $1.4 trillion to $2.6 trillion in marketing and sales value worldwide.
For digital marketers to maintain a truly competitive edge in 2022 and beyond, the time is now to begin embracing and deploying AI technology.
In this article, we discuss what AI is, how it can be used in digital marketing, and five of the top use cases for AI in digital marketing.
Artificial intelligence — or AI for short — utilizes advanced computing systems to complete a variety of tasks that would normally require manual, human work. This is done through key technologies such as intelligent speech recognition, visual perception, and advanced data processing.
AI can be used for many different purposes, including:
Some of the most popular examples of AI include smart voice products such as Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri. These AI programs are often built into electronic products — like mobile phones and speakers — and use voice recognition technology to listen to and respond to user requests.
For instance, if a person is shopping for shoes and wants to know what department stores are nearby, all they need to do is simply ask their Alexa or Siri-enabled product where the nearest shoe store is. From here, the AI program quickly searches through web results for nearby stores and read these results back.
However, smart voice products are far from the only application of AI.
With the powerful technology used to program AI models and programs, AI is capable of a wide array of tasks including digital marketing, fraud prevention, personalized shopping, and even powering autonomous self-driving vehicles!
Keeping this in mind, let’s dive into how AI can be employed in digital marketing.
The expectations and demands of customers evolve every day and can vary significantly depending on what industry a business or brand operates in.
As digital channels — such as social media platforms and mobile apps — become a more widely popular way for customers to shop and discover brands, marketers must work to embrace digital innovation.
Digital marketing refers to marketing strategies focused specifically on these digital channels, including:
In terms of how AI is applied in digital marketing, the technology presents many key advantages that help digital marketers make the most of their online efforts.
Let’s discuss some of these key advantages:
As discussed, AI has many advantages to offer to digital marketers. These advantages are spread out across a wide range of use cases, many of which can be combined in different ways to create a more robust AI-powered digital marketing strategy.
Here are 5 of the best use cases for AI in digital marketing:
Content marketing is a discipline of digital marketing centered around the creation of different types of content that can be shared online via a variety of digital channels. Websites and social media platforms tend to be the biggest hubs for content marketing strategies.
AI can greatly improve and enhance the content marketing and creation process by:
AI and machine learning have the powerful capability to enable advanced digital marketing automation.
This can include the automation of traditionally manual marketing tasks and workflows. For example, a multi-step ad campaign can be automated via AI and machine learning to carry out certain tasks when specific parameters are met.
Think of it like this — a customer visits a website and signs up for a newsletter. The first newsletter they receive is a welcome email that offers a coupon code for a product available on the website, which compels them to return to the website and add the product to their shopping cart.
The next step can go one of two ways — either the customer purchases the product or abandons their shopping cart. If the latter occurs, an automated parameter can be set to have the AI-powered ad campaign send a reminder email to the customer to return to their cart.
Due to the automation provided by the AI, all of these emails are sent instantly based on the customer’s actions without any human intervention required.
As a result, the only thing digital marketers need to worry about is setting the proper automation parameters, while the other essential tasks are handled by the AI-powered campaign.
AI presents digital marketers with the key opportunity to create personalized marketing campaigns that speak to the exact wants and needs of individual customers.
Not only this but AI and machine learning algorithms can assess the online behavior of customers to assist digital marketers in separating these customers into specific segments.
According to a Deloitte analysis, 62% of customers are open to the use of AI to improve personalized processes offered to them by companies. A further 70% of customers state that for them to trust a brand, they want to experience trouble-free transfers between different marketing channels and the ability of marketers to adapt actions based on the customer’s previous actions.
These customer preferences require actions that can easily be carried out by AI. Using smart segmentation technology and multi-step marketing campaigns, AI-powered marketing strategies can service customers based on their current and previous behaviors.
Plus, AI-enabled data analytics make it possible for digital marketers to create more nuanced and holistic customer profiles. In turn, the ads and content these customers receive are tailored specifically to them.
Great customer service is a massive component in maintaining high customer retention numbers.
AI-enabled chatbots and customer relationship management (CRM) are, thus, crucial for maintaining a truly successful customer service model. With AI technology, digital marketers can utilize chatbots and online customer help desks that can provide customers with personalized advice and services.
Moreover, AI technology also helps to increase operational efficiencies that reduce the time marketing staff members need to spend on data entry and other administrative tasks.
As a result, more time can be spent focused on the needs and demands of customers. AI can be deployed to handle the initial interactions with customers, using smart routing technology to send these customers through the proper channels needed to resolve an issue or query — including sending customers through to real-life staff members as needed.
While organic efforts like SEO and content marketing have reduced expenses for digital marketers, pay-per-click (PPC) ads remain a go-to tactic. Luckily, AI can drastically improve the cost-effectiveness of PPC campaigns by:
Though there are many advantages of AI for digital marketers, several challenges exist as well.
For starters, when it comes to SEO and content marketing, digital marketers must be wary of how Google and other search engines assess their content. Google can often detect AI-generated content, which can lead to negative consequences for how well a piece of content ranks on the search engine.
As such, digital marketers must be cognizant of the potential pitfalls of AI and how to meet these challenges.
Here are 3 key tips for meeting the challenge of AI as a digital marketer:
With that said AI is incredibly powerful and is well worth the investment for digital marketers. The key to working with AI is to never forget the value of human touch points — AI should be treated as a support tool for a digital marketing team, not a replacement for one.