A recent study by Price Waterhouse Cooper (PwC) shows that artificial intelligence (AI) will generate more than $15 trillion for the global economy by 2030 and boost local economies by up to 26%. (1) But what about the potential of artificial intelligence, especially in the area of marketing?
From personalized content creation to task automation and data analysis, AI offers seemingly limitless uses in marketing, but it also poses some potential risks. Here are some key definitions, benefits, use cases, and finally a step-by-step guide to integrating AI into your next marketing campaign.
What is AI marketing?Marketing
AI is the process of leveraging artificial intelligence capabilities such as data collection, data-driven analytics, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning (ML) to provide customers with insights and automate key marketing decisions. Today, AI technologies are being used more frequently than ever to generate content, improve customer experiences, and deliver more accurate results. Before choosing an AI tool, companies should fully understand the different types of AI-powered marketing applications available and how other companies use them.
Use Cases for AI in Marketing
Examples of AI in marketing abound as more companies use it to improve everything from social media posts to email marketing to content marketing . Here are some examples of how companies are making greater use of AI to achieve their marketing goals.
Content Generation: The recent launch of the generative AI platform OpenAI ChatGPT in November 2022 has sparked a wave of new AI use cases. Using AI to generate content, marketing teams can save time and money by creating blogs, marketing posts, copywriting, emails, subject lines, video captions, website copy, and many other types of content targeted at audiences. Audience Segmentation
: Artificial Intelligence helps companies intelligently and effectively segment customers based on different characteristics, interests and behaviors, resulting in better audience targeting and more effective marketing campaigns that result in stronger customer loyalty and better return on investment.
Customer Service Chatbots: Marketers are increasingly exploring the possibility of using AI-powered chatbots to improve certain aspects of customer service. Once trained, these robots can interact with customers regardless of where they are in the customer journey, helping resolve tickets quickly and efficiently and improving customer satisfaction.
Programmatic Advertising: Programmatic advertising is the automation of purchasing and placing ads on websites and apps. Artificial intelligence has significantly improved companies’ ability to deliver programmatic advertising by leveraging customer history, preferences and context to deliver more relevant ads with higher conversion rates.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Implementing an AI solution to improve search engine optimization (SEO) helps marketers improve the ranking of their websites and develop more effective strategies. Artificial intelligence can help marketers create and optimize content to new standards.
E-Commerce: Artificial intelligence helps companies improve their e-commerce programs and digital marketing capabilities by giving them a more detailed understanding of customer needs and purchasing habits, automating tasks, and streamlining workflows.
Advantages and challenges of using artificial intelligence in marketing
As with other emerging technologies, the use of artificial intelligence for marketing purposes presents both benefits and challenges. Whether it’s maintaining the quality of the large amounts of data required to train AI or complying with the industry’s ever-growing privacy regulations, companies that have never used AI before are rightly wary. However, there are manybenefits for companies that have invested and found an AI-based marketing solution tailored to their needs.
benefits
Faster, Smarter Decision Making: Marketing teams equipped with cutting-edge AI tools can see the impact of their marketing activities in near real-time and adjust their tactics accordingly. AI-powered marketing platforms can create AI-based marketing strategies and analyze data faster than humans using ML algorithms and recommend actions based on customer stories for data-driven sentiment analysis.
Better return on investment (ROI) for marketing efforts: AI-powered marketing tools can help marketers gain actionable insights from campaign-generated data in near real-time. Additionally, these same tools can help identify the right media buying channels and even optimal ad placement based on customer behavior. Modern AI-powered marketing solutions help stakeholders get the most out of their campaign investments.
Measure KPIs More Accurately: Digital campaigns generate more data than people understand, which can make it difficult to measure the success of your marketing efforts. AI-powered dashboards help marketers connect the success of their efforts to the specific tactics implemented, allowing them to better understand what is working and what can be improved.
Improved customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities: AI technologies help marketing teams improve customer relationship management (CRM) programs by automating routine tasks such as preparing customer data. They can also reduce the risk of human error, deliver more personalized messages to customers, and identify at-risk customers.
Better insights from customer data: Many marketers today struggle to manage the amount of data available to them when planning campaigns. AI can help by performing predictive analysis of customer data and analyzing large volumes in seconds using fast and efficient machine learning (ML) algorithms. Use this data to gain insights into future customer behavior, suggest more personalized content, and identify big data patterns that marketers can act on.
challenges
AI Solution Training: Like humans, AI requires extensive training to learn a new task. For example, if you need an AI solution that engages customers in an engaging way, you’ll need to invest time and resources to train it. To create such an app, you will need a lot of data about customer preferences and possibly data analysts who specialize in this type of training.
Ensure data quality and accuracy: AI solutions are only as good as the quality of the data they are trained on. This happens regardless of the technical level of the tool: if the data it trains on is not accurate and representative, the answers and decisions it generates will be of poor quality and ineffective.
Compliance with data protection regulations: Since AI is trained withcustomers’ personal data, regulations regarding possible uses must be strictly adhered to. Companies that use AI for marketing purposes must be able to comply with consumer privacy regulations or risk hefty fines and reputational damage. According to HFS Research, reputational damage due to poor implementation of AI in the media has increased pressure in Europe and North America for better regulation.
A step-by-step guide to integrating artificial intelligence into your marketing strategy
Follow these five steps to successfully integrate AI into your next marketing campaign.
Step 1: Set goals
The first step to integrating AI into your marketing campaign is to define your goals and expectations.Evaluate what worked and what didn’t in previous campaigns and describe how you hope AI can help you improve your results in the future. Once stakeholders are aligned with expectations, it becomes easier to select an AI solution and set relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate its success.
Step 2: Find the right talent
Data analysts or engineers with expertise in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning are not typically part of marketing teams, but their expertise is critical to the success of AI-driven marketing initiatives. To solve this problem, companies have a choice: they can invest in hiring the data analysts and engineers they need, or they can turn to a third-party provider for help training and maintaining an artificial intelligence-based marketing tool. Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages, mainly related to the level of investment the organization is willing to make.
Step 3: Comply with data protection regulations
One of the biggest challenges for AI-based marketing solutions is using customer data for training and implementation purposes without violating data protection regulations. Throughout the training process, companies must find ways to maintain the security and privacy of their customers or face hefty fines.
Step 4: Check the quality of the data
The success of an AI marketing tool depends on the accuracy and relevance of the data it is trained on. AI tools trained on data that does not accurately reflect customer intent will not provide useful insights into customer behavior or provide actionable strategic recommendations. By prioritizing the quality of their data, companies can be confident that their AI solutions will help them better achieve the desired results of their marketing programs.
Step 5: Choose the solution that suits you best
Organizations choosing an AI solution have many different platforms and features to choose from. If you’ve carefully followed the first four steps (setting goals, hiring the right people, and ensuring data quality and accuracy), the final step should be the easiest: choosing the right tool for you.
AI-powered marketing solutions
Today’s most effective AI-powered marketing solutions leverage AI and machine learning technologies to improve customer experiences and provide marketers with relevant insights quickly and accurately. You can read more about IBM’s approach here. IBM Watsonx Assistant is the market-leading conversational AI platform that enables companies to create voice agents and chatbots that can speak naturally to customers and help them solve their problems.