The new era of AI in marketing has officially arrived – and not a moment too soon. These days, achieving constantly excellent results from marketing campaigns can feel like an uphill battle. Customer preferences and expectations are constantly changing, new promotional challenges are emerging all the time, and digital algorithms are shifting non-stop.
The use of artificial intelligence in marketing, could be the ideal solution. More than 80% of marketers worldwide are now infusing some form of AI into their marketing efforts.
As AI technology continues to evolve, marketing teams are discovering new ways to use a wide range of platforms and systems to save time on repetitive tasks, enhance creativity, analyze data at speed, and increase the ROI of every campaign.
Increasingly, AI is becoming less of a novelty in the marketing landscape, and more of a strategic necessity for any business that wants to stay one step ahead of the competition. Here’s your guide to the growing role of AI in digital marketing, and how you can use it to your advantage.
AI in digital marketing is the process of using intelligent systems, bots and machine learning algorithms to analyze marketing data, create campaigns, and optimize promotional outcomes.
Using AI in the marketing world is basically like getting access to an always-on assistant that can turbocharge your marketing results in a multitude of different ways. Although AI in digital advertising and marketing can come in many different forms, from intelligent content creation tools, to analytics platforms, and even conversational bots, all of these tools deliver similar benefits.
With AI in marketing, companies unlock greater efficiency by automating repetitive tasks like social media scheduling and email segmentation, and improve accuracy by eliminating human errors in data analysis and customer profiling.
AI also gives marketers the tools they need to scale marketing initiatives, personalize campaigns to different audience segments, and reduce business costs. AI-powered tools free up employees to focus on high-value tasks while reducing the need for bloated teams.
In fact, around 71% of companies say that AI helps them “reduce busy work” and focus on more strategic initiatives. Plus, innovative tools give you the insights you need to make intelligent decisions about how to use your marketing budget, reducing waste.
As AI solutions evolve, marketers are constantly discovering new ways to bring intelligent tools into their day-to-day processes. Already, according to HubSpot, around 64% of marketing professionals are using AI marketing technology in some form, and adoption is expected to increase going forward.
Ultimately, you can use artificial intelligence in digital marketing in a wide range of different ways, whether you’re just looking for ways to streamline tasks, or you want to make your marketing assets stretch further, by converting them into new formats and mediums.
However, there are three main areas most companies focus on when they begin to implement AI-driven digital marketing tactics:
Data is powerful in the marketing world. Around 78% of organizations agree that taking a data-driven approach to targeting audiences, creating content, and building ad campaigns leads to better results. Unfortunately, while many businesses and marketing teams have access to large volumes of data, they often struggle to wade through all of that information and surface actionable insights.
Fortunately, AI can help. When you’re struggling to piece together data from Google Analytics, social platforms, CRMs, conversations with customers, and email marketing campaigns, AI connects the dots. It can integrate and analyze massive data sets in minutes, giving you a bigger picture view of your customers, their purchasing journey, needs, goals, and pain points.
Using AI in marketing gives you an opportunity to crunch through bigger volumes of data faster, so you can make intelligent decisions about everything from which marketing platforms to use, to which products you should promote. AI can even sort through lead data to help your sales teams decide which prospects they should be focusing on.
While the link between artificial intelligence and digital marketing is nothing new, the impact that intelligent tools have on marketing teams has grown significantly in recent years – thanks to the rise of generative AI. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, or MidJourney don’t just crunch data to help you build better marketing campaigns.
These tools can actually create content on your behalf. Around 45% of marketers in one survey said they’re now using AI to create everything from blog posts and articles, to guides, images, and even videos they can use in their marketing materials.
AI solutions can even help you make the most out of your existing assets, converting blog posts into video scripts, or graphs into infographics. Notably, though, while content creation is one of the most popular ways to use AI in marketing, it’s important to be cautious.
AI tools can still make mistakes, generate false information, or just fail to capture your brand’s unique tone of voice. That’s why it’s so important to make sure you edit, optimize, and fine-tune anything an AI system creates, before you publish it online.
According to HubSpot, around 71% of the companies using AI in online marketing use it to personalize and tailor content to the needs of different customers. This makes sense, considering the fact that consumers now expect every interaction they have with a company to be personalized.
AI is fantastic at helping you tune your content to the needs of different audience segments. It can translate content into different languages or formats, and even create specific messages for different user groups based on their historical behavior and preferences.
There are even AI tools that companies can embed into their websites to act as personalized guides throughout the customer shopping journey. For instance, the Aivanti chatbot can guide customers to the right products based on their browsing history or questions, provide them with access to tailored content, or even share personalized offers and discount codes.
This high level of personalization doesn’t just increase your chances of higher conversion rates. It also helps you differentiate your company from the competition, and earn customer loyalty.
We’ve already mentioned some of the benefits of using AI for marketing – such as its ability to improve efficiency and enhance the ROI of your advertising assets. But the advantages of an intelligent approach to advertising go further than you might think.
Here are the most significant benefits of AI in marketing right now:
Ultimately, infusing digital marketing with AI gives you an incredible way to boost the return on investment from your campaigns. AI can give companies a behind-the-scenes insight into which marketing strategies will actually work to increase conversions. That means they spend less time and budget on campaigns that don’t deliver results.
Plus, since you can use AI to convert content into different formats for different marketing channels, you can get more value out of every asset you create. For instance, you could build an entire social media campaign using the transcription from a single video.
Around two thirds of marketers agree that time savings are the biggest benefit they get from using generative AI in marketing. In fact, some professionals save around three hours a week just by using AI to create content and automate tasks like analyzing customer data.
AI tools help businesses to save endless time on all kinds of tasks, so they can focus their attention on what matters most – connecting with customers and improving products.
One of the great things about AI based marketing, is it allows companies to adapt faster to changing market dynamics and customer trends. AI tools can help you track customer preferences in real-time, and adjust your marketing strategies according to new purchasing habits.
You can even use artificial intelligence tools to automatically adapt to new customer priorities. For instance, an AI system infused with your ecommerce platform and inventory management tools could identify a low-performing product and suggest launching a sale to increase conversions.
AI tools can improve the customer experience in various ways. As mentioned above, you can use AI in marketing to create more personalized campaigns tailored to the needs and expectations of different customer groups. AI tools can also have a direct impact on the customer journey.
For instance, using AI-powered digital marketing solutions like bots on your website gives you a chance to provide your customers with assistants that can help them find the right products, source information about deals, and even access troubleshooting support.
Another major benefit of digital marketing with artificial intelligence, is that it makes it easier to gather and use data in your marketing strategies. As mentioned above, AI can help you combine and analyze larger volumes of user and campaign data. However, some tools can also assist you with collecting that necessary data too.
For instance, an AI chatbot can capture feedback from customers about a product or service in an instant. An analytical platform can scan the web for mentions of your product or brand, and give you insights into what customers are feeling and saying about your company.
You might be thinking that all of these benefits of AI for digital marketing sound great – but it’s difficult to understand the impact they can really have on your business at a glance. Here’s a quick insight into how some of the world’s biggest companies currently use AI to transform customer experiences, personalize content, and increase sales.
Netflix is a master of AI-powered digital marketing. For years, the company has used AI-powered algorithms to determine how it suggests shows and movies to customers, based on their preferences, and what they’ve watched in the past. More recently, Netflix has taken this strategy to the next level.
Today, the platform doesn’t just customize suggestions for what to watch next based on your behavior, it also dynamically changes the artwork you see connected to each movie or TV show.
For instance, if the algorithm recognizes you’re more likely to watch comedy movies, then it will select a comedic scene from a film to show you on your home dashboard, rather than just using the standard movie poster. If the same algorithm senses you prefer romantic movies to comedy, it will show a more tender, emotional image instead.
By customizing this first impression, Netflix increases the likelihood that you’ll hit play, which boosts viewer satisfaction and retention.
And it’s not just about visuals. Netflix’s recommendation algorithm accounts for past viewing patterns, time spent watching similar genres, and even the time of day you’re watching. The result? A deeply personalized experience that keeps you binge-watching.
Spotify has been using AI in marketing and advertising strategies for years, using it to identify specific user groups to target with promotions, and create unique promotional content. However, the best thing about Spotify’s approach to AI in marketing, is how it uses the technology to create a more personalized experience for every user.
Each week, Spotify uses AI to generate a “Discover Weekly” playlist for each individual listener, based on their previous listening habits. The playlist doesn’t just look at songs either, it considers your podcast preferences, and interactions with brands and influencers too.
Spotify also uses AI to create personalized email campaigns with recommendations based on your past activity. These emails might nudge you to revisit a playlist or introduce you to a new album from a favorite artist. This approach has helped Spotify to increase audience engagement and retention rates, boost brand loyalty, and make its platform more appealing to artists too.
Amazon is probably one of the best-known examples of a company that knows how to use AI for digital marketing. Even when other companies were still only using AI for analytics and automation, Amazon was already giving customers personalized product recommendations based on their previous purchases, and access to handy customer service chatbots.
The Amazon recommendation engine is one of the most sophisticated in the world. It doesn’t just suggest products based on your browsing history. It uses predictive analytics to determine whether you’re likely to make a purchase at a specific time. Those same analytics give Amazon the insights it needs to determine which products to stock, promote, or put on sale.
Amazon even uses AI to suggest the types of products you might want to buy together, which increases its chances of higher average order values from each customer. Amazon’s AI-first strategy has helped it to become the leading ecommerce marketplace for customers all over the world.
When most people talk about AI and digital marketing, they focus on the use cases we mentioned above – using generative AI to create content, analytical tools for insights, and systems for personalization. However, there’s another major “AI solution” that has a powerful impact on marketing results too: chatbots.
Chatbots have emerged as an incredible tool for increasing customer engagement, and boosting sales through conversational marketing. Chatbots excel at increasing the ROI of marketing campaigns by:
Chatbots are also incredibly effective at collecting and analyzing customer data. They can gather feedback from customers which companies can use to make better marketing decisions, develop stronger products, or launch more effective sales.
Some bots can even qualify leads as they arrive on your website, defining which prospects have the most potential value to give your company by asking strategic questions. They can then route those customers to members of your sales team, along with contextual information.
Chatbots aren’t just fantastic tools for initially engaging and converting customers, they can help you to retain your target audience too. After you’ve upgraded your digital marketing using AI bots, you can use the same smart assistants to boost your chances of long-term loyalty.
Chatbots improve customer retention by:
Around the world, companies in all industries are discovering new answers to the question: “How can AI help marketing teams?” AI is quickly becoming a critical resource for businesses that need help improving conversion rates, scaling marketing strategies, and boosting customer retention.
Aivanti is leading the charge to a new future of AI in marketing, with an innovative solution designed to help businesses stay one step ahead of the competition. With Aivanti’s state-of-the-art chatbot, companies can guide customers through every stage of their purchasing journey, answer questions 24/7 and deliver personalized recommendations to buyers in an instant.
What’s more, Aivanti’s intelligent tools can surface behind-the-scenes insights and data about customers, preferences, and purchasing trends, helping businesses make more intelligent decisions that increase sales and revenue.
Are you ready to discover the benefits of AI in marketing? Tap into the endless opportunities that intelligent bots can bring with Aivanti today.
