Digital Marketing Cheat Sheet: What Savvy Marketers Are Not Telling You About AI

Be it businesses or consumers, it cannot be denied that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has touched our hearts. From helping enterprises scale, predicting climate change, helping detect life-threatening diseases to Siri’s witty replies, AI has amazed us in so many ways this year.

As adoption of AI gradually increases, specific business functions will witness a significant transformation. And one such business function is marketing.

Artificial Intelligence is gradually finding its way into digital marketing strategies. According to BridghtEdge, the next big marketing trend is seen as being consumer personalization (29 percent), followed by AI (26 percent).

The need to understand customers better, boost user experience, improve scalability, ensure accurate targeting and increase ROI of marketing campaigns are some of the major drivers of AI adoption in digital marketing.

Here are three smart ways savvy marketers are leveraging AI to gain a better competitive edge.

Understanding Customers

AI feeds on data. According to a report by Forbes, there are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day. Imagine the possibilities. AI algorithms can analyze huge chunks of historical data sets to help marketers understand what exactly their customers are looking for, what’s their usual buying behavior and what are the channels they use to consume a particular type of content.

Spray and pray marketing does not work. Targeting customers indiscriminately and then praying that something will eventually stick is a poor way of executing digital marketing campaigns.

McKinsey&Company highlights that in an increasingly customer-centric world, the ability to capture and use customer insights to shape products, solutions, and the buying experience as a whole is critically important. The research firm highlights that organizations that leverage customer behavioral insights outperform peers by 85 percent in sales growth and more than 25 percent in gross margin.

Enhancing User Experience

Enhancing user experience encapsulates a lot of things, but here we are talking about a marketing department’s ability to deliver personalized experiences. And for AI instances to help marketers personalize content, it should first be able to understand the level of engagement a particular customer has with a brand.

According to a Constellation Research report, lack of content relevancy generates 83 percent lower response rates in the average marketing campaign.

For instance, if a customer frequently comments on online, if he or she talks about your brand on social media and so on. Using data management platforms (DMPs), marketers can map that data against their CRM and ERP and chalk out how exactly they have been interacting with a brand.

Once such disparate data from different platforms are connected, AI instances can start drawing insights about a customer and make recommendations accordingly. Let us explain this in a simpler way.

Imagine you are telecom provider. You have a specific set of customers who have bought Business Internet Plan A, a particular messaging service and a set of specific iPhone devices. With an AI solution in place, when a different (or someone who does not fall under your specific target audience) customer buys that same messaging service and iPhone devices, marketers can easily recommend the Business Internet Plan A.

Similarly, if a customer goes for the Business Plan A and the same iPhone devices, AI engines can automatically recommend the messaging service that customers usually buy along with the business plans and mobile devices.

Organizations that leverage customer behavioral insights outperform peers by 85 percent in sales growth and more than 25 percent in gross margin.

Based on similar customer engagement patterns, an AI-powered software can recommend products and services based on a customer’s industry, geography, the kind of business he operates, the type of job role she is into and more. This helps marketers eliminate guesswork.

Boost ROI

Spray and pray marketing does not work. Targeting customers indiscriminately and then praying that something will eventually stick is a poor way of executing digital marketing campaigns. The challenge with this approach is that marketers end up spending hundreds of dollars in ads to reach out to a large generic audience but rarely touch customers whom the ad is actually meant for.

Leveraging AI, marketers can make sound decisions on what content, offers, solutions and products to share with a unique set of customers.

Irrelevant content is a disaster for digital marketing campaigns. According to a Constellation Research report, lack of content relevancy generates 83 percent lower response rates in the average marketing campaign.

There are a plethora of benefits that AI can deliver for marketers, we have just scratched the surface. Come 2019 we hope more use cases of AI in digital marketing will surface and the technology will be gradually perceived as a competitive differentiator.

Powered by: GetIT – B2B Tech / IT / Telco Marketing Agency : Singapore, India, Malaysia, APAC