What is AI in digital marketing?
You’ve likely encountered AI in multiple facets of your life, but you may not have considered how AI and digital marketing can work together to reach company objectives. AI in digital marketing involves using artificial intelligence to design, implement, and personalize an organization’s marketing activities with attention to boosting sales, enhancing customer relationships, increasing efficiency, maximizing data value, and reducing costs. AI is a tool, designed to benefit your marketing team and make their jobs easier.
How can your organization use AI in digital marketing?
You may be surprised to learn how many ways your company can integrate artificial intelligence into its digital marketing efforts. Here are some AI digital marketing examples:
Data analysis
Your organization’s data can provide invaluable insight into customer behaviour, market trends, and the competition. The trick is to glean as much information as possible in a timely manner. Thankfully, AI can process a massive volume of info at a rapid pace while identifying patterns and providing insight. These insights can lead to the creation of more effective marketing plans while assessing the performance of past efforts.
Personalization of marketing efforts
The whole point of marketing is to understand your customers’ needs, identify the right product or service to meet those needs, and convince them to make the purchase. If done correctly, this can lead to customer satisfaction, repeat business, and consistent five-star reviews. The trick is to identify your customers’ needs in the first place.
AI can analyze consumer data to pinpoint a consumer’s preferences, enabling you to custom design your marketing efforts to make them more relevant to specific clientele. Furthermore, artificial intelligence can perform customer segmentation, identifying customers who share needs or behaviours. By using algorithms to form customer groups, you can create targeted messages.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Artificial intelligence can be used to conduct the sometimes onerous task of search engine optimization. Navigating Google’s complex algorithms, identifying the best keywords, and attempting to work your company’s way up Google’s search results can prove complicated. AI can help by more easily identifying the right keywords, predicting trends in SEO, and creating effective meta tags and titles.
Content creation
Artificial intelligence can enable your marketing department to generate new content quickly. Plus, it can use the information it has analyzed from company data to create articles that use top keywords and are relevant to your targeted audience.
If your organization prefers to compose its own content, AI can help by generating topics and writing prompts, composing original titles, or checking spelling, grammar, and punctuation.
E-mail automation
E-mail marketing remains an effective marketing tool, but it can be a time-consuming endeavour. Thankfully, AI and digital marketing have come together to enable your organization to save time and potentially increase your e-mail campaign’s success.
How can AI enhance your e-mail marketing efforts? Artificial intelligence can enable you to schedule your e-mails for the optimal delivery time, create audience-specific copy, craft result-oriented subject lines, and analyze the performance of your e-mail campaign.
Recruitment efforts
Your organization can use AI in its digital marketing efforts to attract more than just customers—it can also market itself to talented potential hires. Artificial intelligence can enhance your recruitment process and candidate experience in several ways. For instance, it can use data to understand the values, motivators, and interests of job candidates, enabling your company to create customized messages and responses. These expedient and personalized communications can foster a top-notch employer brand and help your organization attract and retain talent.
What are the benefits of using AI in digital marketing?
By joining AI and digital marketing, your organization could reap several benefits. Here are some of the potential advantages of incorporating artificial intelligence into your company’s marketing activities:
- Increased productivity and efficiency: AI can assume the responsibility for repetitive tasks through automation, freeing your marketing team to focus on more strategic, creative and critical-thinking tasks. For instance, AI can save time by collecting and synthesizing large volumes of data and converting it into valuable insights that can be used to design a more effective marketing strategy.
- Enhanced customer experience: AI’s ability to analyze customer data enables your marketing team to create and deliver personalized messages and recommendations, enhancing your customer experience. Furthermore, by monitoring social media, AI can quickly measure customer opinion and possible problems, enabling your team to take swift action. It can also improve future social media marketing efforts.
- Data-based decision making: Thanks to AI’s data collection and analysis skills, your marketing department can be equipped with insight into your customers’ behaviours and an enhanced ability to forecast market trends. This can enable team members to make decisions based on real data, increasing the effectiveness of future marketing campaigns.
- Improved employer image: By incorporating AI into your recruitment marketing efforts, you can make your communications more personal and meaningful to potential hires. These customized messages, in turn, can greatly enhance your Employer Branding and attract a larger talent pool.
- Boosted sales: By tailoring campaigns and e-mail messaging to specific customers, your company could see higher conversion rates and an increased ROI, leading to more sales.
What are the potential disadvantages of using AI in marketing?
While using AI in digital marketing can prove advantageous in many ways, there is also a downside. Here are some of the potential problems associated with using AI in digital marketing:
- Poor quality data: AI’s interpretation of data is only as accurate as the data it has been provided. If the data is flawed or incomplete, the analysis could be useless. Furthermore, some AI algorithms have the potential to produce biased results based on gender, race, or socioeconomic status.
- Cognitive limitations: While AI has made huge advancements in what it can accomplish, there are still limitations. Humans possess a better capacity for creativity, ethical and moral reasoning, conceptualizing, understanding context, and handling ambiguity. As such, AI remains a mere tool and not a substitute for human marketing professionals.
- Ethical concerns: Any time customer data is collected and interpreted, there is the potential for privacy issues, consent, and the misuse of information. Furthermore, some consumers experience AI anxiety, while others perceive targeted advertisements as obtrusive annoyances.
- Lack of transparency: When artificial intelligence creates content, there can be the risk of copyright infringement, plagiarism, and authorship issues. While AI is making advancements in this area, the human mind remains the best content writer, capable of generating original thoughts and creativity.
- Initial expenses: Before integrating AI into your organization’s digital marketing efforts, it is necessary to consider the costs associated with acquiring and installing the necessary technologies and training your team on how to use them.
How can you mitigate the risks associated with AI?
While there is no way to eliminate all of the risks associated with using artificial intelligence, there are some best practices that you can put in place to dramatically decrease potential risks and their consequences. Here are a few of these best practices:
Clearly define use cases
A use case is a description of how a system receives and responds to a user’s requests to achieve a desired end goal. Begin by identifying a specific use case, preferably something that will yield immediate results like generating personalized offers or composing e-mails. You can then measure the results and make changes if necessary.
Make data protection a top priority
Ensure that your company has a strict data management policy in place that ensures the ethical and transparent collection, storage, and use of customer information. Establish clear internal guidelines regarding what tasks can be performed by artificial intelligence and which ones require a human. While AI can be a huge benefit to your marketing team, they must view it as a tool to be employed responsibly.
Provide training
Your team will require training and ongoing support before integrating AI into your marketing activities. It is wise to budget for these expenses and plan ahead. You may wish to begin by ensuring they know how to responsibly use AI-powered tools. Proper training can enable your organization to maximize AI’s potential, ensure its ethical and moral use, and assuage any fears or misconceptions related to artificial intelligence.
Supervise your AI
While AI has immense capabilities, it does require human oversight. With this in mind, it is necessary to double-check any work generated by AI. For example, if artificial intelligence has composed e-mails for a marketing campaign, human eyes will need to proofread them. Furthermore, AI can generate a list of tantalizing headlines, but a human decides which ones will be used. The decision-making process should always rest in the hands of a human.
Artificial intelligence can become a valuable tool for your organization’s marketing team. AI’s keen ability to quickly synthesize data and tirelessly perform repetitive tasks can greatly enhance your team’s efforts. Before introducing it to your company, it is important to weigh the potential pros and cons, examine the associated costs, and assess your business’s readiness to put the required best practices in place.
Related:
