If you’ve dabbled in digital marketing or are active on social media, you must have wondered about this at least once: How come we’re seeing ads, social media posts, and other online content that’s precisely what we want?
You may have just been thinking about buying a new washing machine–and just when you were ready to make a purchase, all you could see on Facebook were washing machine ads.
It’s like they’re listening in on our conversations and reading our thoughts!
So, are they? And who are they exactly?
The answer is yes. And they are the bots. Numerous applications, software, and tools that make up what we call artificial intelligence or AI.
How AI Is Being Used Today
AI can take over routinary and simple tasks that happen in the background, like measuring distances between point A and B, gathering data, and making computations faster than a human can!
In fact, these bots are all around us, making our lives more convenient.
Take GPS, for instance. That’s an AI tool that allows us to navigate easier and quicker–all with a nifty little software tucked inside our gadgets and cars.
And whether we notice them or not, they have become essential for modern everyday life.
4 Ways to Use AI in Digital Marketing
AI’s capability to gather and analyze large amounts of data means bots can not only help us make life easier. They can also transform our marketing strategies and allow us to create campaigns that are geared to succeed.
Using machine learning technology, AI tools provide valuable user data and analyze it to generate insights on behavior and interest, which help brands develop highly targeted campaigns.
What this means is that if you’re not using AI in your campaigns, you’re already way behind.
Here are four key ways every brand should incoporate AI in their digital marketing campaigns:
Chatbots
AI has made customer service quicker, more reliable, and ready in real-time–all the time. You may have noticed how we’re no longer talking to human beings when we click a “Chat With Us!” widget on a company’s website.
But chatbots don’t only make great customer service tools. They can boost digital marketing campaigns as well.
Bots can deliver targeted information about a business, guide customers to make a decision, and ultimately help visitors convert.
By using conversational, highly humanized language, these bots catch customers in their own time. They can also improve customer experience and assist in nurturing relationships by detecting when customers need a quick response or are ready to make a decision.
Chatbots engage these customers promptly to ensure that they don’t leave the page, but instead finish the engagement in a buy or another desired action.
Predictive and Targeted Marketing
One of the most impressive uses for AI in digital marketing is audience targeting. This enables brands to segment their audiences and deliver messages, resources, and content that fit them to a tee.
Why does this matter?
The more brands can utilize personalization in their campaigns, the more relevant their messaging is, and the more effective their campaigns will be.
Consider TV ads, for instance. Big brands used to spend big budgets on promoting on TV, where there was very little personalization for every viewer.
The reason is simple: We had no way of knowing how people reacted to these ads or measuring their relevance to every individual viewer.
The result? The ads reached a wide audience, but very little was done to tailor the message to what varying audience segments wanted or needed, resulting in meager ROI.
Not anymore, though.
Brands nowadays use machine learning technology to monitor practically everything that every user does online. This includes which posts get people to stop scrolling, how much time they spend on a web page, what links they click, and so on.
It used to be just the big guns, like Amazon, that used this kind of technology. But as we often hear nowadays, information is the new currency, and now everyone else is doing it. Because it works.
The information that AI tools collect is vital to shaping messages to fit exactly what audiences want, which ultimately leads to higher engagement and conversion rates.
Customer Relationship Management
Customer Relationship Management or CRM is another crucial area where artificial intelligence is making digital marketing more effective.
In a nutshell, CRM is the process of nurturing relationships with existing customers and developing brand loyalty. It addresses one main problem area: the churn rate.
A high churn rate is the percentage at which existing customers are leaving your brand by canceling subscriptions, unsubscribing, and even leaving carts without being checked out–for good.
This means that something isn’t clicking, and your retention rate is dropping fast.
The main benefit of AI in CRM is it allows brands to collect, organize, and analyze customer information so that they can make accurate forecasts, see sales opportunities, and cater to customer needs in a timely manner.
The better you know about your customers’ history, behavior, and needs, the better you can tailor experiences to encourage them to stay.
When customers are happy, there’s no reason for them to go looking elsewhere.
Personalized Content
One of the best ways to expand organic reach is still useful, relevant content. AI is a great tool for this too, whatever the platform you’re using to publish material.
Still related to leveraging user data, brands that incorporate AI into their digital marketing strategy are better able to determine what their audiences want to see, what they engage in, and what gets them to act.
In other words, AI can help brands shape their content for the most results.
But AI involvement can be taken a step further in content development. Now, brands can use AI tools as content prompts, to tailor article headlines for SEO, and even to plan buzzworthy content.
Of course, AI is not a replacement for human creativity, but it can provide valuable insights into what types of content are most effective for reaching–and keeping–audiences.
There’s no question that AI will continue to play a huge role in digital marketing. But not to replace human ingenuity.
By taking the load of simple, repetitive tasks off of people, AI can allow brands to focus on the bigger task of building impactful, winning campaigns.
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