The Rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Marketing

Artificial intelligence is everywhere. Whether you like it or not, AI is the way of the future, and we’re just scratching the surface with its capabilities.

While it may sound dramatic, every minute that passes where your business fails to adopt AI hurts your competitive edge. According to Forbes, 76% of enterprises are prioritizing AI and machine learning over all other IT initiatives.

In terms of AI in marketing, this methodology focuses on the customer journey. AI helps organizations of all sizes across every industry boost ROI in marketing. With the help of big data, machine learning, and advanced analytics, AI is the best way to gain deep insights into consumer behavior. It also provides extensive information about your target audience, which makes it easier to create more effective marketing campaigns.

7 Ways Marketers Are Using AI

How can your business leverage AI in the marketing department? Here are seven examples that show how versatile this technology can be:

1. Content Creation

Content marketing still needs to be a top priority for every business. AI can improve your efforts by helping you generate new content from scratch.

There are platforms out there that use AI to create original content for your business. From landing page copy to blog introductions, email subject lines, Facebook ads, and more, AI can produce high-converting content with the push of a button. We’ll discuss some of these platforms in greater detail later on.

The first time I used one of these solutions, I was shocked by how much everything sounded like a human wrote it. Granted, these tools aren’t perfect. But AI is improving exponentially, and over time, the content will continue to get better and better.

Internally, AI can even be used to generate profit and loss summaries or quarterly business reports for your marketing department. The possibilities are really limitless here.

2. Content Strategy

AI even has the capability to help businesses with content planning and content strategy. This makes it easier to streamline your content creation and make data-driven decisions.

Without AI and big data, lots of your marketing strategy is likely guesswork. If you’re using data to drive decision-making, trying to crunch that data and analyze everything manually can take days or weeks. But AI technology can do this for you in minutes.

There are AI platforms on the market today that help you come up with marketing topics for your industry. You’ll learn more about the best topics to publish and see how likely you are to succeed with that strategy.

You can even use AI to help you create outlines, learn more about target word counts, and understand which KPIs to track for success.

3. Churn Prediction

Advanced AI models can determine when a current customer is going to churn. By predicting who will churn and when they’ll do it, your marketing team can step in and target those users before it’s too late.

Churn has a significant impact on your bottom line. Take a look at this model showing the impact of churn on revenue:

By lowering your churn rates by just a few percentage points, your company’s revenue can grow exponentially.

If you’re able to combine churn prediction with personalized content creation, you’ll be able to increase customer engagement and ultimately boost LTV (lifetime value).

4. Customer Insights

Marketers need to have an in-depth understanding of current and prospective customers to come up with the best marketing campaigns. But this information is something that changes in real-time. The ability to collect, crunch, and analyze this type of consumer data on the fly is near impossible without the help of AI.

Artificial intelligence has the ability to create unique customer segments with the help of big data and machine learning.

Your marketing team can create advanced customer personas with data points like purchase behavior, previous communications, on-site engagement, psychographics, location, and more. As a result, you can identify which segments to include and which ones to disregard for specific campaigns. Marketers can figure out which products each segmented group is most likely to use as well.

With AI, each visitor on your website can see the most relevant content and the most relevant products based on their customer persona.

5. Image Recognition

There are lots of different use cases for image recognition in the world of marketing. This is an excellent tool for large organizations with a seemingly endless collection of images and videos for marketing campaigns.

AI can help you make sense of your library by scanning those images and organizing them accordingly. These AI models can be programmed to take an image and create an output, such as a caption or category.

You can use this technology for automated photo and video tagging for marketing, moderating user-generated content, improving visual search, and improving your interactive marketing campaigns.

6. Predictive Analysis For Better Personalization

Take a look at this graph from Marketing Charts, showing how businesses are currently using AI:

Globally, the top two are data analysis and on-site personalization. When you combine these together, marketers can use predictive analytics to improve the way campaigns are personalized to each customer or prospect. We’ve touched on this concept before, but it’s worth mentioning in a section on its own.

From website experiences to in-app engagement, push notifications, and email marketing, AI takes your personalized marketing campaigns to the next level.

When a customer opens your mobile app or lands on your website and sees personalized product recommendations, it drastically improves your conversion rates. For other tips and best practices about increasing on-page conversions, check our guide on Design CRO: How to Design a Website That Drives Conversions.

7. Chatbots

Chatbots are something that you’re probably familiar with. This is the best way to provide your customers with fast answers to questions or concerns without having to pick up the phone or wait for an email reply.

Your chatbots will be available 24/7/365. They don’t get sick or take vacations either. While many companies understand the concept of using chatbots for troubleshooting and customer service, this AI technology can also be leveraged for marketing.

When a customer lands on a certain page of your website, chatbots can send targeted marketing messages to them based on their customer persona. From product recommendations to software demos, the possibilities are endless. Chatbots can guide customers through the marketing funnel with ease and automation.

The Best AI Marketing Software

Now that you understand the importance of AI in marketing, it’s time to apply those concepts to your business. Here are a few popular tools on the market today that can help you implement AI into your marketing plan.

MarketMuse

MarketMuse is an AI tool designed for content planning and optimization. It helps companies build content strategies and optimize their campaigns using artificial intelligence.

Some of the top features of the platform include:

• AI content research
• AI content creation
• AI content strategy
• AI content optimization
• AI natural language generation

Whether you’re a marketer, editor, content strategist or SEO specialist, MarketMuse can take your marketing strategy to the next level.

Conversion.ai

Conversion.ai is a fairly new player in the AI marketing category. The software helps generate high-converting marketing copy from scratch using artificial intelligence. It can be used for such a wide range of potential use cases, from landing page copy to Facebook ads, video descriptions, and more, Conversion.ai boasts an impressive list of capabilities.

To get started, simply choose a template for the type of marketing content you want to create. Examples include:

• Product descriptions
• Sentence expanders
• Blog post introduction
• Blog post outline
• Google ads headline
• Website sub-headline
• Photo captions
• Video titles
• Review responses
• Value propositions

The list goes on and on. Speaking from first-hand experience, the tool is impressive. While there is still definitely room for improvement, it can fast-track your content generation.

Drift

Drift is branded as a conversational marketing and sales platform. It’s trusted by 50,000+ brands, including Grubhub, Zenefits, Marketo, and other organizations across a wide range of industries.

The platform uses AI for visitor intelligence and real-time personalization. Drift is best-known for its AI chatbots, but it also uses AI for other applications, like email.

You can use Drift to guide your prospects through the sales pipeline. The chatbots make it easier to scale your marketing team without adding anyone else to your staff. The bots can automatically qualify new leads and guide them through the next phase of the marketing process.

Optimove

Optimove is built to help companies scale CRM marketing using intelligent AI technology. The software can group your prospects and customers into hundreds of different segments based on a wide range of analytics.

Businesses like Staples, Papa John’s, Penn National Gaming, and Dollar Shave Club all rely on Optimove for marketing.

Optimove has a built-in marketing optimization bot that’s programmed to eliminate complexities with large-scale marketing operations. It combines campaign data and customer data to help marketing teams maximize the impact of their strategies.

Final Thoughts

AI is the future, and the future is now. If you’re unable to adopt AI in your marketing department, your competition is going to surpass you in the coming years.

While you may not be ready to apply all of these strategies today, start by identifying your biggest marketing challenge and try to incorporate AI into that process.

If you’re stuck and don’t know where to go from here, check out the platforms listed above. Otherwise, you can reach out to our team here at McDougall Interactive for some insight.