There’s no denying that the latest buzzword in technology these days is Artificial Intelligence (AI). Since the release of ChatGPT, AI has revolutionized a number of industries. There is a fundamental shift happening in the way we work, and the realm of marketing is no exception.
This article will explore the transformative power of AI in marketing, offering insights into why the adoption of AI-powered tools in marketing is essential. It will also look at the current applications of AI in marketing to help businesses develop their own successful AI strategy.
Why Using AI in Marketing Matters
At the core of AI are machine learning programs that mimic human intelligence, allowing machines to perform tasks that otherwise require human intervention. The idea behind the creation of this technology was to make digital processes easier and more efficient.
There are two primary categories of AI that broadly capture how these systems work today:
- Reactive machines: Respond to input with specific outputs without relying on past memory. In other words, these AI-powered machines respond or act based on training data they have been programmed with.
- Limited memory: Machines that learn from historical data to make decisions. These machines take action or make predictions based on what they have learned from data analyzed from past events. However, the “memory” of these machines is short-lived.
These kinds of systems can be powerful tools for marketers because they can drive initiatives and help companies achieve their goals with a higher degree of precision. Both reactive machines and machines that utilize historical data can enable marketers to create hyper-personalized content that is more relevant to customers based on consumer behaviour data. This will enable marketers to leverage higher amounts of customer data to predict and anticipate customer behaviours going forward to significantly improve the customer journey.
Staying abreast of this technology is critical to sustainable business growth. As AI advances, marketing will become even more competitive than it already is. Utilizing AI tools will eventually become an absolute must if companies want to remain relevant and deliver high-quality customer experiences to continue driving profits.
The Benefits of AI
Whether a company is adopting AI strategies for marketing or other purposes, there are a wealth of benefits that can come from using artificial intelligence for business, including:
- Improved efficiency and productivity
- Enhanced decision making
- Improved customer service
- Cost reduction due to automation
- Enhanced research and development
AI can even help companies be more sustainable and accessible. By automating tasks with AI and improving efficiencies, it can help businesses cut back on the use of resources, which is crucial when trying to meet sustainability goals. AI can also help companies better accommodate customers with disabilities by enabling the use of more advanced tools that assist with things like predictive text, voice-to-text, and image recognition software.
Applications of AI in Marketing
There is already a wide range of applications for AI that are changing the world of marketing. With the release of language generators like ChatGPT, creating more optimized content has become particularly popular among marketers across various industries.
Below are some of the many uses we are already seeing completely transform modern marketing strategies:
Tailored Messaging
If there is one centralized goal at the core of most marketing efforts, it would be delivering more personalized, targeted content to improve customer experiences. To truly reach your customers, you must better understand their needs and pain points, and AI does an exceptional job of enabling marketing teams to do this.
Because AI can collect, read, and analyze significant amounts of data in a short amount of time — more than a human ever could — it can offer fast and smarter insights for creating more personalized messaging. AI-powered tools can recognize patterns in behaviour data that many humans can’t, and those patterns are what enable marketers to better understand how their customers think and act.
Smart Content Curation
AI can help ease the content creation process, enabling marketers to not only generate more content, but content that is of higher value and quality to the reader. With how quickly content trends come and go and with how much content brands need to produce to stay at the top of search results and always on customers’ minds, marketers must be creating content nonstop.
Unfortunately, this can get exhausting and lead to lazy content that just isn’t hitting the mark. However, with AI, content curation can also be automated. AI tools can analyze data to help marketers create higher-value personalized content and some systems can even generate the content for you. It’s important that humans still remain involved in the content creation process, but AI can ease the curation process, preventing marketers from getting burnt out when they are struggling to generate new ideas.
Optimized Ad Targeting
Using consumer data, AI can also help show more relevant ads to the right customers. Ad targeting has been around for some time but with machine learning, the targeting gets even smarter. AI systems can analyze online behaviour to better determine the right ad to deliver at the right time to the right customer, which can significantly improve click-through rates and lead generation.
Targeted Email Delivery
Though social media has become one of the most popular places for marketing, email still remains a powerful tool and asset for businesses. However, what often drives the effectiveness of emails down, is the inability to create personalized emails that target the right subscribers at the right time.
Similar to ad targeting, AI can also analyze data to help improve email targeting. It can provide insights to help marketers create emails with more personalized messaging, and it can also help determine the best times to deliver those emails to increase open rates.
Conclusion
AI is rapidly changing the landscape of marketing, and as such, it is imperative that marketing teams stay up-to-date on the latest tools and systems available to optimize their strategies. The future holds significant changes where marketing AI is concerned, and understanding how to best use these technologies now is vital to sustainable business growth.