How It Is Shaping the Future Of Digital Marketing And Why You Can’t Ignore It

We’ve come a long way in terms of technology. Living in the digital era means there is a myriad of new technologies geared towards improving business processes at your disposal. To be able to get a leg up on the competition, an entrepreneur must invest in technological advancements that will make his/her business grow.

One of the most attention-grabbing, most useful technologies that is making a huge buzz on the internet is Artificial Intelligence. In the digital marketing world, AI holds unique capabilities that reinforce digital marketing efforts. It has caused a shift in the way businesses treat their digital marketing efforts. AI’s impact in the internet marketing world cannot be denied or ignored. It is changing the future of advertising and marketing in multiple ways, especially when it comes to user experience.

How is AI gearing digital marketing for the future?

Many organizations have turned to AI to enhance their marketing strategies. You can say that AI and digital marketing have gone hand in hand as marketers are on a quest to improve marketing efforts and dominate different industries. Artificial Intelligence’s ability to analyze data, is shaping today’s digital marketing landscape.

Here’s how AI is shaping the future of digital marketing.

Predicting customer behavior

In order for Artificial Intelligence systems to determine the most likely prospects to make a response on an online ad, it uses different types of propensity models, which are statistical scorecards that predict customers’ behavior or prospect base. That is to draw similarities between customers’ characteristics and the expected behavior. For marketers who use AdWords, they use AI-powered tools that will let them define their campaign’s objects and determine the target audience to be able to automatically recommend different ways to achieve their goals. Additionally, AI is useful in defining the best strategy based on past purchases and other user trends. Doing all of these helps gather invaluable insights.

Using AI to predict customer behavior can be done in the following manner.

1. Identifying the objective: This involves recognizing the chief objectives of the business and analyzing the data source to determine the patterns matched to the needs. Once the objectives are recognized, data extraction is done to create different models.
2. Creating and validating the model: Models are created and refined using data mining. After they are identified, they are validated depending on the set goals.
3. Applying the results: Once all the data has been gathered, the final step is to apply the results to make critical business decisions and achieve the desired outcome by continuously refining the models.

Enhancing customer service

Through AI semantic recognition, voice conversion technology, and language processing, customer service has been easier with better results. AI chatbots continue to prove to be more advantageous than manual customer service.

1. Enable businesses to go beyond the traditional form of customer service. Instead of the one-to-one style, AI chatbots allow for one-to-many customer service, allowing businesses to cater to more customers at the same time and in different time zones.
2. Answer customer queries anytime of the day and in real-time because AI chatbots don’t need to rest. This means that chatbots are highly efficient, providing customer support even outside of office hours and improving customer experience.
3. Allow customers to choose the language used by AI chatbots, allowing brands to deliver localized customer service while making people’s lives easier.

Improving personalization and recommendations

Traditional marketing methods, like direct mail and media advertising, are no longer as effective as they were before. Similarly, the way customers respond to and interact with marketing messages has changed as well. One of the reasons is that today’s consumers want tailored messages that fit their location, interests, and demographics. In fact, a lot of customers nowadays ignore or do not respond to generic messages that sound robotic.

A report found that over 40% of consumers nowadays have switched to brands that personalize messages and customer experience. This means that customers are more likely to engage with companies that take the time to customize their marketing messages. A global poll conducted by Marketo revealed that 79% of consumers are more likely to use brands with messages that are specifically tailored according to past interactions.

AI can be used to personalize communications rather than provide a generic format that marketers have gotten used to in the past. This is done by predicting customer behavior based on data gathered from previous interactions. This allows marketers to send content and marketing communications that are more effective in converting the leads into sales at the best possible time.

Similarly, AI can also help businesses tailor-make recommendations offered to buyers. Excellent examples of personalized recommendations are those that pop up when you log in to Amazon or Netflix. Over the years, the recommendations engines have become more sophisticated and more accurate, especially for users with old accounts, allowing the system to collect lots of valuable data, including past purchases, browsing history, wish lists, contact information, downloaded apps, songs, and TV shows played, product ratings, devices used to log in to different sites, etc. All of this information can be useful in delivering accurate recommendations that will help consumers in their decision-making.

Through Artificial Intelligence, improving personalization and creating better content is possible. This is because it can analyze customer data faster and enable marketers to provide a highly personalized customer experience.

Refining search engine optimization

Search algorithms continue to improve in every aspect. Google, for example, is becoming increasingly sophisticated when it comes to working out search “intent”. If a user searches for the word “apple,” for example, search engines will want to know whether it is about the fruit, record label, or technology company. Similarly, search engines would also know whether a user is currently using a mobile phone or computer to search for any keyword. They will also know whether you’re looking for a “coffee shop” within a few miles or one in general.

Furthermore, AI makes voice search commonplace as more and more AI-powered devices and assistants become more prevalent. Through AI, search engines are able to interpret complex patterns in speech and recognize definitions from voice queries, which are entirely different from typed searches. Aside from that, AI can be used to optimize voice search content to improve SEO and website traffic as the digital world is moving towards the direction of a voice-operated era.

Optimizing content creation and curation at scale

Without a doubt, content marketing is still king. When it comes to bringing in the highest ROI, content is still as impressive as ever. However, it can also take up a lot of resources.

One way to optimize content creation is to use AI. While Artificial Intelligence cannot replace the entire content creation process, there are some tools you can use to make this task more refined. These can speed up content marketing in different ways. For one, it can generate new stories and reports that would otherwise take a human writer several hours to a few days to produce. It can also be useful for minor tasks, like generating social media posts. Additionally, AI can be efficient in finding and choosing the right content for your target audience, allowing you to automate the curation process. Aside from that, AI can be used to come up with formulaic headlines, especially those called “clickbait.”

Forbes and other global brands are now incorporating AI to create content because it’s much faster and more efficient since it allows marketers to scale up their content marketing.

Automatic marketing processes

Email marketing has been around for a long time now. It’s an excellent tool that allows marketers to create and send personalized emails to thousands of subscribers all at once. Incorporating AI or using automation software allows businesses to ramp things up. Plus, it saves a lot of time and resources for tasks that involve a human element, such as email marketing. This also makes performing repetitive tasks, such as communicating directly with customers and following up on leads, more efficient.

Some of the best examples of automating marketing through AI include personalizing the customer experience, contacting leads, and responding to customer interactions at optimal times through the channels that offer the highest conversions. Using AI for these tasks increases your productivity and allows you to focus your time and resources on strategic marketing planning and other core business processes.

The bottom line

Because AI can improve customer service, understand customer behavior better, optimize content creation, refine search engine optimization, improve personalization, and automate marketing processes, this technological advancement can improve overall user experience. Artificial Intelligence can help improve user experience through deep learning and be able to tailor every marketing aspect to each customer or visitor’s wants and needs.

AI can analyze and process a huge volume of data from thousands of users, including contact information, demographics, interests, and the like. This allows AI to separate into different smaller groups and sift through a large amount of data to create a unique, curated more personalized one-to-one user experience that allows companies to form intimate connections with prospects.

As digital marketing continues to evolve, as a marketer, you need to keep your business updated with the latest trends and best practices, including Artificial Intelligence.