This year, the global Artificial Intelligence market is valued at over $136 billion.
For marketing teams, AI algorithms increase leads by as much as 50%, reduce call times by about 60%, and can result in overall cost reductions of up to 60% for your company.
Artificial Intelligence is a technology that is here to stay, particularly in the marketing realm. How can you, as a CMO, harness this? This Q&A is a great place to start!
What Is Artificial Intelligence Marketing?
Artificial intelligence marketing (AI Marketing) is a method of leveraging customer data and AI concepts like machine learning to anticipate your customer’s next move and improve the customer journey. AI marketing applications are growing as fast as the industry’s market value and the best time for you to consider investing in this technology for your company is now. But how to get started? Keep reading to find out the essential elements needed for your AI marketing.
What Are Some Crucial Elements Of Artificial Intelligence Marketing?
Machine Learning, often shortened to just ML, is a branch of artificial intelligence that is based on the principle that machines can improve their performance automatically based on their education from the data they analyze.
Machine learning plays a crucial role in understanding your clients better, particularly when there is a massive amount of data involved to analyze. When it comes to predicting and identifying trends, responses, and reactions from customers, ML is great because it helps marketers automate the process of making informed decisions on future courses of action.
Big data and analytics can be essential when it comes to keeping up with trends. They can also help determine what customers are likely to do next, so you can adapt your marketing efforts accordingly.
The effectiveness of your AI marketing depends on selecting the right AI platform. The right AI platform can help derive intelligent marketing insights to make data-driven decisions, depending on what result you desire from your campaign.
Once you have settled on these fundamental elements, here’s how you can put them to use.
How Can AI Marketing Be Used?
- Data Analysis: As previously highlighted, you can use AI to collect and analyze large amounts of marketing data from your previous campaigns quickly and accurately, saving you plenty of time and manpower hours.
- Content Generation: AI can save you and your team tons of time and manpower when it comes to content creation. Through the right programs, you can create both short and long pieces of content for marketing campaigns, blogs, social media captions, and much more.
- Real-time Personalization: Through AI, you can adjust a customer’s experience to suit their preferences and nudge them to enact particular actions, be it clicking a link, registering for a service, or buying a product. Personalization can be applied to web pages, social media posts, emails, and more.
- Media Buying: When used correctly, AI can be great for predicting the most effective ad and media placements for your business. Being able to predict this is crucial to better reach your target audience and ultimately maximize your marketing strategy ROI.
But, as is the case with most new innovations, they are some drawbacks and barriers to AI marketing. Let’s take a look at some of them below.
What Are Some Of The Barriers To AI Marketing?
AI Training Time and Data Quality
AI marketing tools need data training and input because they do not automatically know which actions to take in order to achieve marketing goals. Just like people, they need time to learn organizational goals, trends, and customer preferences among other variables. Inadequate training using low-quality data can result in inaccurate data decisions that don’t truly reflect your customers’ desires, and ultimately render your AI marketing tools ineffective. Here’s more on data quality for your marketing goals.
Personnel Training Time
Your team also needs training and education to know how your AI marketing tools work and how to effectively run them. As it stands today, not many marketers have AI in their academic backgrounds. Luckily, this barrier can be resolved with relative ease.
For instance, the internet is the perfect place to get acquainted with Artificial Intelligence programs. Resources like this one by Google and team training sessions have proven to be effective in educating marketing teams.
Human biases can sometimes reflect in AI algorithms. Here is more on strategies to identify these biases, and prevent them from occurring, or mitigate the effects of bias.
Are other marketers using AI Marketing yet?
Sephora Chatbots
To create an immersive, interactive customer experience, Sephora launched chatbot messaging apps in 2017. The first was designed to help customers book appointments with a Sephora beauty specialist while the second app helps customers make purchasing decisions on their own. Retail Dive breaks down how Sephora’s AI-powered chatbots work:
“The chatbot’s smart learning capabilities let it understand the natural language used by the consumer, whether they give a date, a time, a combination or specify their location in a variety of different ways – for instance, writing just their city or a more detailed address.”
Consumers can then instantly book the appointment through the bot on Facebook Messenger and receive a confirmation email a few seconds later. Sephora partnered with the company Assi.st to create this automated service.”
Starbucks
Starbucks was (and still is) on a mission to cement its position as the top coffee shop brand. In 2019 the company launched Deep Brew. Using their mobile app that was launched in 2011 as a springboard, Deep Brew used machine learning to personalize customers’ experiences based on their unique preferences and spending habits. This was accomplished by collecting and analyzing an enormous amount of data that included past orders and patterns. Through this data, Deep Brew could suggest food and beverage choices and even send tailor-made deliveries.
Starbucks used Deep Brew to send personalized recommendations, create innovative products, and even open new store locations. This is what the editorial team at Artificial Intelligence+ said about how useful Deep Brew was to customers during the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown:
“Deep Brew was particularly instrumental in the COVID world drive-thrus last year. They could use it to customize the recommendations that appear at drive-throughs at various stores. In addition to other factors such as the time of day, the amount of traffic, and the day of the week, every store has its personality. Each of these points was incorporated into Starbucks’ recommendation system based on Deep Brew.”
Nike By You
Nike By You (Previously Nike iD) is a service that allows customers to personalize and design their own Nike footwear and sportswear. Through artificial intelligence integrated into the specialized site, users can see their customizations in real-time. Overall, AI improves user experience by enhancing personalization, recommendation, smart search, digital demand sensing, and scheduling techniques.
Nike’s Swoosh is a Web3-enabled platform where people will be able to buy its virtual products. Recently, Nike has been considering allowing Swoosh Account holders to not only design but also sell sneakers for the Metaverse.
Artificial Intelligence could be the secret weapon you’ve been looking for to enhance your digital marketing. Through AI, you can reach a wider audience efficiently, optimize your UX, and ultimately make more conversions.
Reach out to our expert team today for effective and actionable strategies to power your company’s online performance.
