How AI in Digital Marketing Is Changing the Game

December 22, 2021 by Christine

If someone asked you a couple of decades ago to define artificial intelligence (AI), you probably would have used terms like “robot” or “sci-fi movie” to support your answer. But so much has changed since then. Today, you might be more likely to suggest products like Alexa, Siri, or Tesla’s self-driving cars. 

AI is no longer the stuff of Hollywood fiction. It is the future. The truth is that AI technology is entering every home and business, and we will all benefit and become increasingly dependent on AI in the future.

While AI in marketing has been growing for some time, it has become essential for driving performance. Marketers have been enjoying significant returns as a result. But the tools involved are no longer just doing repetitive tasks. With AI, they are thinking and making decisions for us too.

The Challenge of Embracing AI in Digital Marketing

Self-teaching and correcting software that makes its own decisions may instill fear in many marketers. Some are concerned about how to control AI’s outcomes, how to incorporate it in their marketing efforts, and whether it could make them redundant.

Daniel Kniknik, co-founder and CEO of Quartile, says that concerns and skepticism about AI are overblown. He predicts that AI will continue to extend human intelligence rather than replace it. 

“There simply aren’t enough human beings on the face of the Earth to conduct all the tasks being done by AI to connect marketers with the consumers who are most likely to buy,” Daniel Kniknik wrote.

How AI Is Shaping Digital Marketing

So, just how significant is AI in marketing today? According to AI statistics compiled by Semrush in 2021, the consensus among business leaders is that AI is very significant.

• The world AI market is expected to reach $191 billion in 2025 and create $2.9 trillion of business in 2021.
• AI will grow at an average yearly rate of 33% until 2027.
• 80% of retail executives expect to be using AI-powered automation by 2027. 
• 86% of CEOs say AI is already a mainstream technology in their office in 2021. 
• 75% of executives worry that if they fail to scale AI within 5 years, they’ll be on the way out of business.

The takeaway from these numbers is that business leaders must fully embrace AI or risk becoming uncompetitive. Or, to put it another way, marketers must make AI an integral part of their marketing to improve sales, competitiveness, customer experience, and productivity. 

Powerful AI Starts with Data

We talk a lot about personalization in marketing and improving the user experience. And if you have been reading our blog, you will notice a common theme: data. 

At Viral Solutions, we are crazy about data. Why? Because it delivers. Honestly, we don’t know how a business can run without it… 

The role of AI in digital marketing is more than just automation and data collection. AI not only gathers data but also extracts insights into your customers’ behaviors and characteristics in real-time. AI combines the power of data with machine learning to predict customers’ actions. 

It doesn’t stop there. AI drives returns even higher by learning, adapting, becoming smarter, and improving recommendations without additional programming. 

Using AI to analyze data also forces you to abandon personal biases to target prospects with marksman-like precision.

“Unlike human beings, AI considers, analyzes and evaluates all information and data free of judgment, fueled solely by facts and evidence, and fully remembers all successes and failures,” and does not make the same mistake twice,” wrote Daniel Kniknik. 

Here’s an example…

You may have used A/B testing to determine which campaign your audience responds to. However, marketers are prone to biases when creating variables for A/B tests, whether they realize it or not. AI obliterates the bias when studying your consumers’ actions to predict how they’ll react to your campaigns. 

Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of AI in digital marketing. 

Benefits of AI in Marketing: More Growth for Less Investment

Using AI to process data and automate marketing increases conversions while reducing time and resources spent on marketing. 

Here’s how…

1) Close More Deals with AI-Powered Sales Predictions

Imagine how much time you would save if you had a magic crystal ball to tell you which deals would result in sales before talking to a prospect. 

AI is that crystal ball, and marketing software has been using it to empower businesses to gain better insights into what is driving their sales. 

In a Keap article about using AI to increase marketing effectiveness, the author noted that “AI’s capability to handle a large volume of data and find reasons and patterns among them has given marketers unprecedented ability to make data-driven predictions and decisions.”

This is just one application of many leveraging AI to predict wins and save business owners resources they would have spent on losing tactics.

2) Get Higher Engagement with Personalized Marketing

Your customers perform many actions on your website, providing data that reveals their desires, wants, and goals. This is marketing gold you can use to personalize your marketing and increase conversions. 

And your customers are demanding it.

A Marketo, Inc. poll of 2,200 consumers in the US, UK, Germany, France, and Australia showed just how sensitive consumers are to outdated messaging. They found that 63% of consumers were annoyed by brands that use generic, old-fashioned advertising messages. 

AI in marketing helps brands predict customer behavior by analyzing their previous choices. 

3) Reduce Marketing Costs and Increase Conversions

Each marketing tactic we discuss makes one thing clear—using AI in marketing to interpret your consumer data improves productivity. It saves you time, money, and resources while powering up your sales and conversions.

Moreover, AI helps you retain more customers by giving them a better brand experience.

The power of AI to improve your ROI by gathering data and providing powerful insights will become increasingly critical soon.

Applications of AI in Marketing: More Growth for Less Investment

At this point, you may be wondering how, specifically, businesses can leverage this technology. In that case, it’s worth examining some general applications of AI in marketing. 

1) Personalized Shopping

What does this look like?

Send an email at the time a specific customer typically opens their email. Include a personalized recommendation that you know the customer desires from their past activity. This is targeting at its best. 

Here are some other data points that brands collect about consumers habits and preferences to help them hyper-personalize marketing:

• Location
• Browsing history
• Purchase history
• Purchase history of others who bought similar items
• Email open times
• Downloaded content
• Downloaded apps
• Music you like
• Products you reviewed

AI can capture any move your consumer makes to improve their experience, so you can give them exactly what they want, where and when they want it. 

2) Simplified Ad Buying

Some marketing professionals may prefer to use their experience and gut feeling to buy ad space. After all, it’s complicated and time-consuming. Plus, results are usually too late to help direct the current campaign. But with AI, that reasoning no longer holds water. 

That’s because AI makes it easy for businesses to purchase digital ads. Continually recalculating to predict where to buy ads to achieve the most engagement significantly improves a campaign’s impact and efficiency.

As programmatic ad buying technology improves, the process could become even simpler, allowing more time to optimize ads and target potential customers better.

3) Enhanced Content Marketing

Effective content marketing involves offering useful and relevant material that readers want to read. AI can be a great tool to help you optimize content for your target audience. It can help you select engaging topics for readers and match your content with websites and social media channels to reach your target audience. 

AI algorithms can also help you improve your organic content. Just as Google uses algorithms to determine a web page’s originality, usefulness, and relevancy for SEO, marketers can use AI to measure content’s performance and recommend improvements. These recommendations could include:

• Choosing popular and engaging images for blogs and social media 
• Improving headlines 
• Editing content to improve ratings and shares 
• Selecting CTAs with different offers depending on shopping behavior and level of engagement

4) AI-Driven Email Marketing

AI-powered marketing takes some guesswork and time from testing and sending email campaigns to get better open rates and clicks.

Some ways AI in marketing can optimize your email marketing include the following:

• Create automated email drip campaigns based on a user’s behavior with your site and their stage of the customer journey. 
• Personalize images and product recommendations according to user activity.
• Determine when and how often to send emails 
• Make email content relevant to users’ interests to reduce unsubscribes.
• Send cart abandonment emails to reengage customers or recommend an alternative product.
• Segment email subscribers into target groups for easy personalization.
• Automatically generate subject lines and human-like content that subscribers are most likely to respond to.

5) AI-Powered Chatbots

If your chatbot isn’t saving you time and increasing productivity, you aren’t using it right. Remember that one of the best benefits of AI is increased productivity because AI powers your business in the background while it works to understand your customers better.

Now, we’re not telling you that robots should be running your company. The human dimension will always be king. But AI can gather data in the background so you can give customers a stellar experience of your brand. 

Chatbots to Improve Customer Service and Experience

Customers want quick answers to their questions. Once AI-powered chatbots have learned and provided answers to common questions, they will save time and money by providing faster responses than humans can. Further, they can provide support to customers in different time zones when human representatives are unavailable. 

Chatbots for Lead Generation

As chatbots interact with consumers, they can collect data to help you develop new leads. They can learn a consumer’s issues and pain points to determine how best to engage with them and better target your marketing message.

Chatbots for Personal Assistance

It’s easy to underestimate the potential of AI products like Amazon’s Alexa and Siri for marketers. But the presence of such devices in homes is becoming increasingly common. Alexa accounted for 62% of global smart speaker sales in 2017, with 10.4 million units shipped worldwide.

As Alexa’s abilities have multiplied, it’s evolved from a smart speaker to a personal assistant with ever-increasing marketing potential. 

It can now recognize your voice, learn your name, tell jokes, make shopping lists, and, of course, answer a multitude of questions with all the knowledge on the internet at its disposal. Once it’s learned your preferences, it can recommend products and services and order your weekly shopping from an associated supermarket.

If you ask where you can buy a particular product, Alexa will tell you if you bought it before and reorder it for you. Alexa will also suggest where you can buy a similar product locally. 

Thanking it will even prompt a quip like, “My pleasure. Just doing my job.” 

While chatbots aren’t ready to engage customers in a natural back and forth of human conversation, their responses feel natural, and it’s easy to see where the technology is heading.

The Takeaway: What You Need to Know About AI in Marketing

AI is changing marketing and the role of marketers at an awe-inspiring rate. To stay competitive and thrive, marketers need to adapt to the new reality—and fast. That’s the stick. Here’s the carrot: AI in marketing has provided huge benefits for marketers in its own right. 

As machine learning improves, the potential scope and benefits of AI have become increasingly apparent. And each AI innovation creates new demand. 

We discussed some of the many ways AI benefits marketing by optimizing processes and increasing conversions to close more deals. Here is a summary of some of the benefits and applications of AI in digital marketing:

• Enjoying increased productivity with more growth for less investment
• Closing more deals with AI-powered sales predictions
• Getting higher engagement with personalized marketing
• Reducing marketing costs and increasing conversions
• Driving content marketing efforts 
• Powering email marketing
• Improving customer experience with AI-powered chatbots

As we stated earlier, we are all about data here at Viral Solutions simply because we won’t settle for anything less than winning. If you want to learn how to win at marketing without blowing your marketing budget, we can help. Request a free marketing audit to get started.  

Filed Under: Content Creation, Tools & Technology Tagged With: artificial intelligence, Chatbots, digital marketing, growth, sales tools, trends in digital marketing