What is AI in Marketing: Growing Trends in Coming Years
From traditional marketing to the current age of digital marketing, a lot has changed in the last two decades in terms of adopting customer-focused marketing strategies and bringing in technologies. In addition, technological advancements with the help of AI have further accelerated the process of how industries are looking to market.
The businesses adopting AI within the marketing industry have grown tremendously in the last few years and are expected to surpass $48.8 billion by 2030.
Earlier, the marketing tech was limited to suggesting recommendations based on fixed inputs, outputs, and assumptions. However, with the growing AI trends and machine learning, marketers can extend macro insights for a deeper understanding of the audience's mannerisms to build effective advertising and marketing campaigns. Since AI can process large amounts of customer data it helps establish deeper connections with consumers at a massive scale.
Basic Understanding of AI Marketing
AI marketing uses models and concepts developed using artificial intelligence to attain marketing goals. From AI tools to automate daily tasks to developing algorithms to analyze large databases, the utility of AI can vary for various digital marketing tasks.
To understand AI's role, it's important to understand the basics of artificial intelligence and how it can help marketers. A machine is known to be artificially intelligent if it can perform any task that a normal human can do.
Machine learning steps in when the machine can get the ability to learn and improve the performance of the tasks without human intervention.
Benefits of AI in marketing
While AI will continue to create a huge impression in the world of technology, here are some known benefits of AI marketing.
- Using past data to analyze user behavior and make predictions for marketing campaigns
- Using sentiment analysis to observe a brand's image and user needs
- Uncover trends using big data analysis to optimize strategies and ad campaigns
- Automating repetitive mechanical tasks such as scheduling emails, meetings, social media postings
- Improve the user experience on the website, and other marketing platforms
Automated Digital Communication
In recent years, we have seen most technology-based companies introduce voice assistants on different platforms, from websites and apps to customer service portals. AI assistants and Chatbots help engage customers without involving humans simply by understanding your intent to connect and analyzing your actions on your device or internet.
The AI assistants help the user find exactly what they are looking for and prevent abandoning the site by offering quick guidance to the user.
Additionally, using automated assisting tools in marketing help gather, manage and analyze the customer data that can be studied at a deeper level to understand consumer behavior better. It can help understand both business and customer's pain points to optimize the marketing strategies, thereby saving money and time.
Some of the tools that are currently being used for customer engagements are Drift and Conversica, for AI assistance for authentic conversions.
Voice & Visual Search
Often underestimated, a user's search experience can lead to a positive or negative impact on a brand and its website if they are not able to search due to any lacking. That's where cognitive search (also known as AI-powered search) plays an important role in both voice and visual form.
The idea is to quickly deliver the relevant contextual results even if a user makes an error or types a query differently. AI used past search data search keywords and their semantic connection to give relevant results for that given search.
Brands have started to implement both image and voice search options on their apps and websites. We will see more of these AI-powered search options implemented as consumers become more driven to voice and visual media consumption.
Google, Pinterest, eBay, and other big tech companies are famously known to use image recognition technology to identify objects.
Predictive Analytics and Forecasting
Predictive analytics is another important section that will impact the marketing industry's future with the help of artificial intelligence. Companies can develop effective products, solutions, and strategies to work in their favor by equipping marketers to analyze and determine consumer behavior in the future.
For example, integrating AI into an online course can help the business understand what students are doing and use that information to improve engagement and their courses. This will create a positive image in the marketplace for a well-established educational asset available for students to pursue.
The best of AI technologies will be used towards optimizing specific objectives to drive marketing results in different ways as:
- Enhancing the lead process to find truly potential customers for your business
- AI in webinars will be able to understand and predict the disengagement of the audience
- Find out what's right and wrong on the website or other marketing tools (including all tech issues)
- Insights on your competitors to help you upscale your strategies and actions
- Customer behavior prediction to find exact likings and things your audience is interested in
To conclude, the main ways AI will be used in predictive analytics would be to discover data insights and predictions and unify all the data to improve processes for effective results.
Some of the AI tools in Predictive analytics are Crayon for tracking and data analysis, Google cloud AI for data labeling, data science, predictions, and Pattern89 for predictive AI marketing on Google ads, Facebook, etc.
Personalized Dynamic Advertising
Digital advertising has taken over the marketing industry, and the AI influence so far has been massive. Marketers use a dedicated budget for advertising purposes without knowing the exact conversion result that has worked for them. With growing digital media activation, AI significantly allows businesses to create hyper-relevant and personalized ads to target consumers for higher returns.
Instead of covering a wider audience, marketers are narrowing their reach to smaller and niche groups, which will continue rising with AI-powered marketing processes.
The way AI marketing segments users into different groups, and based on the collected data on users' online actions and behavior; brands can target only the ones that fit the business. And brands take away qualified leads and more sales and improve their advertising campaigns' cost efficiency.
Leading businesses like Meta, Google, Linkedin, and Apple are already working on hyper-targeted advertisements, and as the data grows, their AI algorithms get more effective. In the coming years, more emphasis will be put on analyzing user behavior patterns and psychographics to understand the intent so that brands can enable targeted messages for a more direct approach. Some AI-based advertising use cases are as follows:
- Use of AI tools on a range of platforms to target audience, optimize budget, and ad delivery
- Uncover new ad channels that are not in place or used by competitors
- Autonomous media buying, use of algorithms for targeting, copywriting, and campaign layouts.
AI powered Content Marketing
Content is still the king of the marketing world. Users are still drawn to more personalized, intentional, and high-quality content on a daily basis, and it has been quite visible in the last few years how brands have improved to meet the needs of users with more diverse and engaging content platforms.
By 2025 online content will double in volume, and to cater to the demand, brands have already started to use machine learning to boost content marketing. AI algorithms are getting more efficient in recognizing the type of content users are engaging in and, in return, delivering them more recommendations for the same. Social media is one of the common examples that follow this fundamental principle.
In addition to content distribution, AI is now being used in content creation as well. Although it will still take time for machines to learn human nuances, there are plenty of other tasks that AI can handle--for example, turning long forms into short and crisp pieces to easily share them across, auto-adjusting sizes across different media types.
Some of the AI tools in Content Marketing are Bramework, AI content for blog building, Cortex for optimizing digital content on social media platforms, and Atomic Reach for content editing.
The Future is AI Marketing
Artificial Intelligence is changing the marketing industry rapidly, and it's not just developments of the products but also the trends in different marketing sectors. The power of machine learning adds new opportunities to experiment and develop in the marketing space. But that's just not it. There is a plethora of tactics, techniques, and productivity under AI for better decisions that can reflect on how well a business knows its audience, ranging from thousands to millions, that is impossible for a business to cater to on an individual level.
These AI marketing trends will greatly help analyze information, gather data, and understand the niche-specific requirements from social interactions, campaigns, and engagements. As we move beyond, AI in marketing will become more efficient and robust in curating accurate personalization and predictions - something that was not accessible to businesses before.
This guest post was written by Donna Maurer.
