Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a fast developing trend that is bringing disruptive innovations to the digital marketing industry and changing how marketers target their audiences. Social media and other communication channels give marketers extensive access to customers’ information. However, marketers do not know how to make full use of this data and tend to continue to use traditional approaches, ignore the tremendous opportunities that AI can offer.
There are three main ways Al may benefit your current digital marketing strategy.
a) Smarter Ads
AI lets marketers customise ads according to customers’ needs and interests and, therefore, show the most relevant message that can offer the customer a solution on the spot. While the questions of whom, how, where and when to show an ad are important, it might be even more critical to address the questions of “what” and “how” to show the ad. That’s where AI can play a role by studying customers’ online behaviour and giving them a sense of personalized treatment.
Programmatic advertising, which is a new type of ads programmed with key marketing aspects like keyword searches, social profiles, and other online data, has already disrupted the industry accounting for more than 67% of display ads this year globally, according to Zenith estimation. With programmatic advertising, online marketing campaigns are created and managed by demand-side software (DSP). Bob Arnold, Associate Director of Digital Strategy at Kellogg, says “depending on the brand, the digital media ROIs have increased as much as six times” through the use of programmatic advertising. Such tremendous opportunities cannot be ignored.
b) More Effective Search
While people tend to believe that AI is something that might be useful in the future, AI is actually already around us. Google has been fully utilising AI for the past few years in the form of a voice search tool called RankBrain. RankBrain is an Al system that improves search results by interpreting searches submitted by users. Based on user searches, the tool shows the most relevant pages even though the searched keywords may not actually be on the pages. This AI system searches websites looking for high-quality, relevant content rather than the keywords themselves. Therefore, the traditional approach of spending marketing budget on keywords is no longer a recipe for success. In order to rank high in organic search, marketers have to invest time into the creation of a meaningful, useful, accurate, and relevant content prior to any investment in a Google AdWords campaign.
c) Better Understanding of Customers
While no one can deny the potential of Al, its currently available features are sometimes overlooked. With a strict focus on the number of impressions and clicks, one might forget that there are people behind these statistics. The main purpose of AI is to study customers’ behaviour. As the number of social media and other communication channels is growing, it’s becoming more difficult to trace the progression of “word of mouth” advertising about a particular brand and understand the feelings of the audience. Slang and language nuances make it even more complicated.
Current Customer Experience (CX) platforms based on AI algorithms make it easier to track and analyse users’ experience in order to achieve higher customer satisfaction. Unstructured text data about the brand from around the Internet can be gathered, analysed, and interpreted in order to inform the decision making process. With an AI platform you can respond quickly to customers’ voices create accurate segmentation, more customised solutions, and customer loyalty.