Insights Candidate

An introduction to AI and marketing.

over 1 year ago by Oli Robinson

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one tool which is increasingly being used to improve marketing strategies today. It has a variety of uses, some of which we don’t yet fully understand, but with time it will develop to become better, more targeted and intelligent. AI essentially helps us do tasks with maximum efficiency.

Amazon has been successfully using AI for a long period of time. Quite often, as customers of Amazon, we don’t even realise that the website is so heavily AI powered. Amazon is actually the very first company to start offering product recommendations online for the last 20 years. Facebook also utilizes AI to gather information about its users and prepare their data for marketers which allows for growth as a business. Big corporations aside, even SMEs and individuals are using AI. In this blog we’ll look into some of those uses, the benefits and implications of using AI for marketing.

Uses

Content personalization – For content, AI can help with simply personalising an email with a name or ID number, or analyzing the online behaviors a user has, to suggest similar products, based on this behavior.
Data analytics - The ability to read large amounts of data and summarise the findings or even predict the results of campaigns based on historic data.
Content generation - AI can recommend content that will be popular and write articles, blogs, social media posts, and more for a particular topic.
Media buying - Predicting the right media placements and recommendations on ad spend to maximize ROI and reach a target audience.
Chatbots - We have seen AI used in Chatbots for many years. Chatbots act as a customer service tool, able to answer queries, give suggestions and solve problems.
Automated email campaigns - AI can help produce engaging email content by sending it to a set list of your target audience based on their online behavior.
SEO - Helping you optimize content for search engines, identifying the best keywords to improve rankings, learning from historic web traffic data.
And much more…

Benefits

Saves time - The obvious benefit is that it helps automate tasks, often bringing us results at a much faster rate than a human and therefore freeing up time to do other tasks.
Keeps users engaged - AI can suggest similar products or content that they may also like by analyzing their customer journey. This may take several programs and reports for a marketer.
Makes informed decisions - AI makes suggestions based on either historical data or instructions that are given. Over time it will get better at learning and understanding prompts.
Grow without growing. AI offers marketing teams the ability to increase their productivity without increasing in headcount volume. This allows smaller teams to have the output of larger teams by leveraging the power of AI.

Implications

Content quality - While AI can help produce content that is likely to be popular in a timely manner, without a human touch to check on any bias, or tone, or inaccuracies, the quality will be affected.
Privacy and safeguarding - In order to personalize marketing, AI uses cookies and data to remember surfing behaviors. Marketers need to ensure their tools are GDPR compliant.
Empathy - While chatbots can be very helpful they cannot assess emotions and therefore could not identify if people are feeling a particular way, therefore they couldn’t connect on a human level.
Data - AI requires you to tell it what to do first and that may mean providing a lot of data to help create automated emails for example.

Whether AI achieves the potential that clearly exists depends on businesses coming to understand the need for a coordinated and strategic approach to marketing AI implementation. It should be clear enough how the different use cases I have mentioned above can be useful in isolation. But the real value is unlocked when we start using them together, with the aim of answering our most pressing questions, influencing our most important metrics, and achieving key business goals.

To explore this further, please get in touch.

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