How AI Transformation Impacts the Digital Marketing Industry
With AI technology, marketers can identify microtrends and even predict trends, saving time and resources through automated digital marketing services.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has begun to transform all facets of our professional and personal lives. The marketing industry is not immune to this digital transformation, as prominent brands are beginning to take advantage of the opportunities it presents. One of the main benefits of AI transformation in marketing is gaining a deeper comprehension of customer behavior.
AI provides marketing professionals with an indispensable advantage in this pursuit. This rapidly evolving digital technology can analyze more data with greater precision than humans. AI and its subfields, such as machine learning (ML), also identify and predict future behavior based on extant behavioral patterns.
The expanding value of AI in marketing
A recent survey reveals that the marketing and advertising industry has the highest adoption of generative AI. 37% of the 4,500 respondents who work in marketing and advertising reported using AI in their work. Currently, more than 80% of industry professionals incorporate AI technology into their online marketing efforts. Technology (35%) and consulting (30%) are the other two industries utilizing AI more frequently.
In 2021, the AI transformation in the marketing market was projected to be worth $15.84 billion U.S. dollars. The source predicted that the value would surpass $107.5 billion by 2028. Before the end of this decade, statisticians anticipate that marketers will use AI to the value of nearly $108 million.
How does AI assist businesses in such an uncertain industry?
An enhanced user and consumer experience
AI can significantly transform the digital marketing space by enhancing the user experience. AI can provide marketers with greater insight into consumer requirements, behaviors, and journeys. It can even aid in the prediction of various behaviors and the acquisition of motivators.
Using AI, you can continuously gain access to new or enhanced insights that can enhance your marketing efforts and how you communicate with people. You can use analytics to fine-tune your marketing by learning how people prefer to be marketed to and what works best.
The more information you have, the better you will be able to customize journeys. If your product or service matches the expectations of your audience of potential customers, it can be extremely beneficial.
Increased personalization in marketing
Personalization is a popular topic among companies. Everything, from products to marketing, must incorporate personalization. People want to believe that businesses value them as unique individuals, not just as sales opportunities.
Some consumers may not be receptive to your message if they do not feel like you are directly addressing them. Using AI in digital marketing enables everything to be significantly more personalized and tailored.
With AI and machine learning, you can essentially have built-in decision-making and marketing strategy determination tools. The more data you have, the better this machine learning will function, and soon it will be able to determine the optimal method to target specific groups of people.
Save companies a ton of money and time
In addition to assisting the consumer side of the industry, AI has the potential to significantly enhance the marketer side. In the past, marketing consisted largely of guesswork, trial-and-error, and iterative adjustments. Even today, many businesses test scores of potential strategies to determine which one is effective.
Using AI, many of these technologies will be self-learning and will not require human intervention. Using historical information, they will be able to determine which methods are most likely to be successful and which are unlikely to be so. As you might expect, this frees up a significant number of employee hours to focus on more pressing matters.
While not all artificially intelligent tools and software services are inexpensive, they are more cost-effective than paying a team to test various strategies to determine which one works.
How is AI used in marketing?
1. Content generation
Intelligent social media management tools, such as Sprout, analyze voice of consumer (VoC) data in social posts and reviews to determine which content is most appealing to your target audience.
AI-powered platforms can also identify keywords and triggers to aid in the creation of compelling blog posts, a more effective response to customer feedback, and more compelling product descriptions for your website. All of these contribute to your efforts to increase brand engagement for a larger market share and higher profits.
Additionally, AI-generated concepts can increase the success of your nurturing campaigns. They assist you in developing persuasive communications to strengthen relationships with prospects at every stage of the sales funnel. AI prompts can help you create email subject lines with higher open rates, create personalized content based on consumer personas, drive conversations based on intent, and engage with each prospect/client individually. This results in stronger relationships and brand loyalty, which increases sales.
2. Social media spying
AI-powered social marketing increases efficiency by elevating social listening to an entirely new level. Sprout’s upcoming Queries by AI Assist feature, for instance, will use OpenAI’s GPT model to provide a vast array of suggested terms to include in your tracking, enabling marketers to discover essential audience insights more quickly.
AI algorithms employ aspect-clustering to identify and derive pertinent details from social listening data that can span millions of data points in real time. Through social media sentiment analysis, they help you cut through the noise and obtain a thorough understanding of the customer’s thoughts. This enables you to anticipate the next move of your customers and take strategic actions to achieve the desired results.
3. Automation
Through lexical and statistical triggers that drive intelligent workflows, AI-driven intelligent automation enables social media administrators and customer service teams to increase operational efficiency.
It facilitates the achievement of business objectives by removing the element of chance from tasks such as scheduling posts at optimal times for maximum impact and categorizing incoming messages. Through rules-based features, it also facilitates a unified brand voice in customer communications and halves response times.
4. Analysis of data for customer insights
AI and machine learning provide crucial consumer insights on a variety of dimensions, enabling you to make strategic marketing decisions. Obtain a comprehensive audit of your customer care team’s performance and social media engagement metrics, as well as in-depth insights into the audience’s perception of your brand.
This can enable you to swiftly respond to shifting market trends, prioritize budgets based on which areas require the most investment, and strengthen customer relationships.
5. Reputation management
Let’s be honest: Some aspects of your brand’s reputation are within your control, while others are not. Social media has made brands more susceptible than ever before to scrutiny. However, with AI-enabled brand reputation management, you can prevent a prospective brand threat from becoming a major problem.
Using AI marketing tools, it is possible to monitor negative sentiments in real-time, select the most appropriate influencers and brand ambassadors, and provide proactive customer service.
6. Multilingual advantage
In addition to providing prompt and effective customer service, a global presence must consider cross-cultural elements. AI marketing tools can effortlessly extract consumer insights from multilingual data, allowing you to determine which strategy is likely to be the most successful in a specific region. You can also ensure that your social posts, responses, and advertisements are relatable and adhere to your target audience’s cultural norms.
What is the future of AI in marketing?
AI chatbots
Conversational AI in the form of virtual agents and intelligent chatbots will transform conventional marketing. With targeted messaging, AI chatbot marketing can send brand visibility into hyperdrive. They can increase engagement with existing consumers and prospects to generate leads, as well as analyze their data to offer you granular insights for predictive and prescriptive marketing.
In addition to streamlining customer requests, ensuring 24/7 customer support, and routing conversations to the appropriate team for optimal results, virtual agents contribute to an increase in customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Responsible AI
AI marketing also takes into consideration the imperfection of existing AI models. AI in business must be fair, secure, dependable, inclusive, and transparent in order to achieve genuine advantages and accuracy in deriving business insights. This necessitates more deliberative AI tool development and training with diverse data in order to eliminate bias.
In order to be equitable to humans and AI software development companies, data privacy, copyright, and governance regulations are also being developed to ensure that ethical and societal implications are considered. This necessitates that social networks and social marketing teams be cognizant of how they employ AI tools to collect consumer data, create content, display personalized advertisements to influence purchase behavior, or for any other purpose.
Computer vision
Computer vision enables AI marketing tools to extract insights from non-text digital data stored as unprocessed images. From optical character recognition (OCR) to analyze information and signatures on checks and the recognition of brand logos in videos to the extraction of text from images for accessibility, computer vision contributes daily to the resolution of critical business challenges.
In retail, computer vision can be used to detect flaws in products on an assembly line and to ensure that shelves are always stocked. In addition, it aids in enhancing biometric authentication with enhanced facial recognition to identify shoplifters, customers or employees in distress, as well as many other situations.
Final thoughts
While AI has the potential to transform the marketing industry almost beyond recognition, it will not supplant human marketers in the near future. Instead, AI and ML can expedite and optimize current marketing strategies.
Both technologies can also handle repetitive duties, allowing human team members to focus on what they do best and develop more customer-engaging campaigns than ever before.
