Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Artificial Intelligence Software Market to Reach $62 Billion in 2022. This far into the year, it is clear that this statistic is holding thanks to innovations such as virtual influencers and image generators that have been growing in popularity.
How can marketers harness this fast-growing technology to enhance their strategies, their outputs, and their teams? Here are 10 significant ways CMOs such as yourself can benefit from using artificial intelligence.
Changing Digital Marketing: 10 Benefits of Artificial Intelligence
Benefit 1 – Understand Your Customers Better With AI
You can capture a wide array of data using artificial intelligence that you could be missing out on using conventional methods. This includes quantitative data that cannot be captured using qualitative surveys.
You and your team can capture your customers’ responses in real-time, find the source of the problem, and spot (and even prevent) declines in sales. AI can even help train your team to become more attuned to the things that your customers find important.
Simply put, artificial intelligence makes the process of data capture and analysis faster, more accurate, and more thorough. This is important to create more personalized content that will resonate with your chosen target audience and grow brand loyalty. How does this work, you ask? Let’s delve into AI and personalization.
Benefit 2 – Let’s Get Personal(ized Content)
The more markets evolve, the technology adapts to accommodate this growth. We are at the point where customers have come to expect brands to understand them, their needs, and their preferences on a personal level. This is particularly true about brands and products that they use frequently. Your customers want to receive customized messages, recommendations, and offers at every stage of their journey.
Keeping up with these demands can be challenging, but the ramifications of not meeting them can be serious. In a study on consumer behavior, 45% of interviewees stated that they were less likely to purchase from a brand after a non-personalized experience, and nearly a third would stop using that brand altogether.
AI-based personalization enables brands to increase customer engagement, improve loyalty, increase sales, and more completely understand their customers — all in real-time. Using AI, brands can customize their website content based on each specific customer, which helps to improve conversion rates. For instance, a website article can look different for different people based on data collected about their preferences.
The more personalized your digital marketing campaigns, the more your brand resonates with your customer and the more sales or conversions you can expect.
Benefit 3 – Optimize Your Data Entry With AI On Your Side
Data entry can be a tedious and labor-intensive task, but AI is capable of optimizing it in a manner that is swift, intuitive, and yields the best results for your company.
With AI you and your team can enhance and hasten the data entry process while also enhancing its quality and analytics. Essentially, AI can quickly source, validate and convert captured data into structured formats so that analytics tools can process the information faster and more seamlessly. Here’s more on understanding and measuring data quality.
Benefit 4 – Cut Your Costs
Because AI can automate labor-intensive processes, it can reduce labor costs while also improving quality. As AI becomes more affordable and the return on investment becomes clear, more and more companies are embracing this technology and putting it to good use.
“The playing field is poised to become a lot more competitive, and businesses that don’t deploy AI and data to help them innovate in everything they do will be at a disadvantage.”
Paul Daugherty
Benefit 5 – Reduce Unconscious (Human) Bias
One way artificial intelligence can help reduce some biases that exist in human processes is by identifying them. AI can detect patterns within data sets that your marketing teams input into the system. According to SAP Insights, “if we want AI to counter the effects of a biased world, we have to begin by acknowledging that the world is biased. And that starts in a surprisingly low-tech spot: identifying any biases baked into your own organization’s current processes. From there, you can determine how to address those biases and improve outcomes.”
That is not to say that AI does not have any bias. Sometimes, human partiality can find its way into AI algorithms through the programmers that develop them. Explore more about these biases, how they arise, and how to counter them .
Benefit 6 – Reach People More Effectively With AI
Business is all about making the right connections, and one of the most important connections is that with your customers. Artificial Intelligence has made it easier than ever to make and maintain these connections. Here are a few examples of how:
Pre-qualify Prospects and Leads
Unfortunately, not every visitor to your company’s website will become a paying customer. If your traffic is high and you’re not getting the sales you expected, then the problem might be that you are getting low-quality leads. Here are a few reasons why this happens:
- Your content marketing strategy is not as strong as it could be
- Your team is targeting the wrong audience
- Your Calls to Action are falling short
- You’re promoting on the wrong social media platforms
These issues can be mitigated or completely resolved with the help of artificial intelligence.
AI can identify and isolate important data that enables you to learn more about your target audience. These tools also provide predictive analytics on your customers’ behavior. These analytics can in turn enhance your lead generation strategy because you’ll know which leads to pursue, where to find them, and how to effectively engage them.
Reduce Cart Abandonment
For many e-commerce businesses, a high rate of cart abandonment is a major problem. According to this study, the rate of online shopping cart abandonment is nearly a staggering 70%. The following are some documented reasons why this happens, as shared by customers:
- complicated checkout process
- privacy concerns
- not enough payment methods
- they’re just not ready to buy yet
An AI-powered chatbot is a great method to reduce cart abandonment because it can guide customers through their shopping journey. AI chatbots are capable of engaging online shoppers and deftly prompt them to complete their purchases. They can also take the place of an online shopping assistant that lets customers know about any discounts or incentives that will encourage them to complete the checkout process.
With AI, lost orders due to cart abandonment are recoverable and can lead to an increase in conversion rate for e-commerce businesses.
Social Listening for Potential Customers
Social listening is the process of analyzing the conversations, and trends surrounding your brand across different social media platforms. It’s the next step to monitoring and tracking the social media mentions of your brand and products, hashtags, and industry trends. Social listening is also a good way to keep track of your competitors’ online activities.
Artificial intelligence can be used to optimize your social media monitoring and listening by automating the process. AI can leverage data to provide valuable insights about your brand with high accuracy.
With an AI-powered social listening system, you can easily identify your audience, brand sentiments, customer shopping behavior, and many other important insights. With this information, you can then connect and convert potential customers into paying ones.
Benefit 7 – Always On With AI
There is a wide array of AI programs that you can use to carry out tasks in your stead. This can be especially useful during the times that you and your team are off the clock, on vacation, or otherwise unavailable. This is especially useful to ensure that your customers get the attention and service they need. This round-the-clock attention that your clients receive could go a long way in building brand loyalty and lead to more conversions.
Benefit 8 – Supercharge Your Ads
AI can help your company’s brand grow through targeted advertising. Targeted advertising involves delivering promotional messages to a customer based on their specific traits, interests, and preferences. Advertisers collect this information by monitoring consumer profiles and online activities. Using social platforms such as Instagram to gather information can provide many many helpful insights. Instagram keeps track of search preferences as well as user engagement. So, it sells advertising to brands who are interested in audience types specific to that brand. Companies use it as a means of communicating with prospects. Advertisers use user data to target an audience interested in a given product or service. The data collected may include demographic and behavioral information. Facebook/Meta owns Instagram, and it has 1.8 billion users. Facebook has a strong network of analytics data to target ads based on what people like, who they follow, and what they save.
In Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing can be used to examine huge batches of comments and feedback. Your team will be able to construct a list of consumer thoughts about your products and services, which in turn enables you to explain why a client is dissatisfied.
Benefit 9 – Elevate Your Chatbots
Chatbots are one of the most exciting and rapidly evolving examples of artificial intelligence in marketing. A large number of companies across various industries have and continue to use chatbots to automate a large part of their communications with their customers.
With this enhanced ability to reach out to customers and engage in real-time conversations and address their requests quickly and effectively, the chatbot market has seen remarkable growth in the past years and is predicted to reach around $1.25 billion by 2025.
Benefit 10 – Stay Connected With AI
With the right type of AI, you can stay abreast of what is trending in your industry. You can keep tabs on potential customers and get notifications whenever your company is mentioned online. This is crucial to get an accurate perception of your brand.
Artificial intelligence is an ever-growing innovation that is not only here to stay but is going to change the way digital marketing and many other industries are done. Talk to us today to get the best out of your digital marketing with help from our expert team of professionals.
