Marketers are making real connections with consumers by using AI to improve access to data and overall strategy. Here’s how.
Artificial intelligence isn’t just a plot point in a science fiction movie anymore. It’s here. It’s all around us, running operations, streamlining processes, and predicting outcomes. As of 2019, 22% of marketers were using AI-based applications, with another 57% planning to jump on board in the next two years.
Surprisingly, AI technology isn’t just relegated to mega-corporations either. An estimated 38% of small companies and 52% of medium companies under $25 million in revenue use AI in areas like content optimization, advertising, and audience insights.
Although AI is impacting every aspect of business, marketers in particular are able to see benefits quickly. AI has been shown to increase sales, customer retention, and lead quality, among other things. Its predictive nature gives marketers a deeper insight into their audience and its behaviors.
A major part of the success of AI is the data it has to work with. It needs robust information to gather and evaluate, and it will use that data to develop even better insights, improving the overall information available.
So, what exactly is artificial intelligence, and how is it improving marketing in 2020. Let’s take a look.
What is AI?
Contrary to popular belief, artificial intelligence doesn’t only come in robot form. Those who study AI seek to create problem-solving systems that operate on a human level. AI machines can take in complex data, analyze it, and derive conclusions from it.
There are multiple branches of artificial intelligence, such as machine learning and deep learning, that evolve as they gather more information, but not all AI is like this. Everyday examples of AI include things like Uber and your email spam filter.
With Uber, the software is taking your location, time of day, available drivers, and ride distance into account to calculate your total. These factors change over time as the app gathers more information that enables it to make better predictions. Likewise, your email spam filter gets better over time by gathering data from thousands of emails and analyzing them for keywords and links that identify them as spam.
Although
AI is designed to think and act similarly to humans, its computational power
means it can do so on a much larger scale than we can. From a marketing perspective, the amount of
data AI can gather and use about customer behavior, preference, and traffic is
unparalleled. It’s changing the way businesses appear in front of their
customers by improving the data they have at their fingertips.
How AI is improving marketing and marketing data
Using AI to create content
Although AI can’t write full-length blogs and articles yet, it is well on its way to doing so. Simple content pieces already use AI to fill in short updates, numbers, and stats. But the hope is that someday AI will be able to write drafts and brainstorm content ideas.
In the meantime, marketers can use the data output from AI to segment their customer base and create targeted content that is more likely to convert. You need to bring value to your end users, and you can’t do that with generic bland content. AI can analyze groups of customers to identify similarities, pain points, and behaviors that you can use to craft a unique message.
Using AI to advertise
Online advertising is one of the most useful places for artificial intelligence. Consider using online advertising without AI. Larger corporations have more resources to create, place, and analyze ad campaigns, but small to medium businesses don’t. Creating graphics, developing a strategy for ad placement, and measuring performance are extremely time-intensive tasks. It’s an entire job unto itself.
AI can take some of the guesswork and manual work out of this process. Programmatic advertising is an AI technology that can create campaigns and place ads by analyzing which spaces to buy and which users to place the ads in front of. Many platforms are also offering A/B testing, which is a type of AI that can run two separate campaigns and identify the best one based on a certain set of metrics.
As you can imagine, this type of targeted marketing is much more appealing to a customer. They are seeing a relevant and timely message aimed at them instead of a generic ad aimed at no one in particular.
Using AI to communicate with customers
By now, we’ve all interacted with a chatbot on a brand’s website. It’s an easy way to get answers and make a decision, which is why it works. Artificial intelligence is able to understand human conversation and provide relevant information in return.
This is a huge benefit to a company’s marketing efforts because it meets the customer where they’re comfortable. It doesn’t require the customer to go out of their way to contact you, and it doesn’t bombard them with a bunch of information they don’t need.
Using AI to improve overall marketing strategy
The information gathered from AI gives marketers the insight they crave into their audience. They can better understand the customer journey from start to finish: what pain points customers have, how they discovered the business, and how they made their decision. Marketers may discover new customer segments they didn’t even know they had.
Gathering this much data over a period of time gives companies the ability to identify patterns and even predict customer behavior, which will only add to their ability to create hyper-focused campaigns and advertising.
Above all
else, AI helps save marketers time. Creating a system for gathering data from a
campaign and analyzing it thoroughly in order to modify future campaigns is a
lot of work. By letting artificial intelligence do some of this legwork,
marketers can focus on the actual strategy of their campaigns and come up with
more creative ideas.
How AI is improving marketing data
AI is constantly gathering new information and analyzing it in different ways to create completely new data sets. The speed and thoroughness with which AI can do this means it’s improving the data available to businesses all the time. Over time, the marketing data available will only become richer and more targeted, which means customer experiences will become highly personalized.
However, AI is only as good as the information it’s given, which is why it’s critical to supply it with high-quality data. Using the BDEX Data Exchange Platform is a great way to ensure that your information is updated and cleaned to give you the best results possible.
BDEX collects real-time data from hundreds of sources, so you can see how and where customers are searching for solutions. This gives you the opportunity to be in front of them when they need you.
With BDEX, you can develop a personalized, relevant, and timely marketing strategy to increase sales and build a loyal following. Contact us today to learn more about how we curate our data and how we can make your efforts with AI even better.
