How AI is Changing Digital Marketing
Given that the greatest part of marketing is now digital, keeping up with all the latest technology trends has become a necessity.
One of such advancements that are profoundly transforming the digital marketing world is artificial intelligence. The effects of AI on digital marketing are so tremendous that they create a massive gap between the adopters and the companies that are still hesitating to implement it.
Read on to learn about the ways AI is changing digital marketing, and how you can use it to keep up with your competitors or stay ahead as a leader in your niche.
What Is AI in Digital Marketing?
We base every interaction with our customers on the data we have available. The more information we have, the better insight we form, and the more successful we become at delivering the message that is tailored to each one of them, and that reaches them at the perfect moment.
However, even with all the available technology, as humans, we are still limited to grasp the meaning behind large amounts of data, analyze it, and spot the hidden patterns. And this prevents us from making data-driven decisions and valuable predictions.
With AI around, we have a powerful ally that can understand and interpret a massive amount of data coming from various sources, make decisions, and act based on it. AI does all these things much faster than humans and on a much larger scale, with a capacity to create a richer customer experience, meeting and anticipating our customers’ expectations.
But what does it all mean in terms of our digital marketing practices?
Personalization
By implementing AI tools to enhance your digital marketing efforts, creating buyer personas is much easier. You will be able to identify who your prospects are, starting with their demographics, needs, interests, online habits, purchasing behavior, etc.
With enough data on your prospects, AI will also be able to create real-time messages that fit each one of your prospects individually and deliver it using the right channel, at the right moment.
Most of today’s AI tools automate outreach, basing their actions on a particular buyer persona, its position in the marketing funnel, how they respond to the campaign, and many other triggers.
It’s up to a digital marketer to define the touchpoints that are a part of a customer journey and set the parameters for describing the target customer. AI can then determine what kind of personalization has the best effects on different segments, and automate the process entirely.
With the right data input, and enough data, AI will also be able to make predictions of your customers’ needs – so it will be able to give recommendations, suggestions, or place the right ad in front of them.
Improve Your Customer Service
Its ability to make each interaction with your customers hyper-personalized and mimic human interaction has made it possible for AI to become a perfect customer service representative, at least when it comes to communication via digital channels.
Statistics show that a third of the customers are most frustrated when they have to repeat themselves to customer service representatives, while more than 19% are annoyed when they’re put on hold. AI can have all the necessary data on your customers available, right when they reach out to you so that it can respond right away.
By making conversational AI a part of your customer service, you will also be able to engage your customers regardless of where they are – no matter if it’s Facebook, Slack, or Skype, boosting their satisfaction with your service and guaranteeing their loyalty.
As it has detailed info available, AI can respond in a completely personalized way, successfully resolving the most common issues, and transferring a call to human reps only when the problem is complex.
Furthermore, thanks to the advancement of natural language programming (NLP), AI can communicate in a human-like manner. Yet, with a huge difference – it is available 24/7 and can handle many interactions simultaneously, without being tired, moody, or nervous.
Optimizing Campaigns
Using tools powered by AI, you will be able to optimize and automatically run your digital marketing campaigns with much better precision while reducing the manual effort from your human employees.
Without having to devote their time and energy to menial but time-consuming tasks, your human staff will be able to deal with the matters where they can put their expertise and creativity to good use.
One of the best examples is implementing AI-powered email tools, as 87% of companies that applied AI use it to automate and optimize their email marketing campaigns. AI can segment their target audience, personalize the messages, and adapt to the customers’ responses in real-time, thus making email marketing efforts more efficient.
Speech Recognition and Voice Search
With predictions claiming that 30% of all web-browsing sessions during 2020 will be done without a screen, voice search has become very popular.
Thanks to the rise of technology and speech recognition, Google algorithms can now understand human voice with 95% accuracy.
Even with the highest quality content, conventional SEO methods are not enough anymore for your business to find its way to your customers unless your website is optimized for voice search and AI-enabled so that it can produce accurate search results to voice commands.
AI has made a significant shift in digital marketing, bringing more personalized interaction with the customers, addressing their needs and expectations with much higher accuracy. Companies that are hesitant to adopt it risk falling behind, and never making a full recovery.
