Is AI revolutionizing the Digital Marketing & redefining it as Artificial Intelligence Marketing

A few years back - incorporating AI in digital marketing was very much reluctant, but now, AI is evolving and has made its prominence in all aspects of our life, and; digital marketing is not an exception. Various surveys indicate that AI and ML would be the most critical platform for multiple innovations and pay the way for all the emerging technologies. AI technology with its core elements is already revolutionizing the digital marketing world in the most unexpected ways.  

AI is a generalized term that comprehends different approaches and technologies that are set up to “think” like humans. It is already included into many technologies you probably already know about, such as voice recognition, chatbots and so on ….

Core elements of AI marketing

• Machine Learning, a type of AI technology – enables machines to essentially figure out how to solve a problem on their own basis previous data-sets, thereby ‘learning’ on their own. In digital marketing context, AI helps strategizing - ad targeting, lead generation & search optimization to name a few. It also assists marketers identifying trends or common occurrences and effectively predict common insights, responses, and reactions to understand root cause and likelihood of certain repeated actions

• Semantic & Intelligent Searches – Digitally smart audience is growing smarter with advanced technology solutions, social media and rapid-fire search engines making it easier to find what they are looking for. AI and big data solutions are semantically analyzing these search patterns and helping marketers identify key areas where they should focus their efforts

• Smarter Ads – marketers are already dipping their toes into smarter ads, with ABM (account-based marketing) solutions; but AI helps them take this a layer further for truly insightful analysis. With abundance of data availability, online ads are becoming smarter and highly effective. AI solutions can dig deep into keyword searches, social profiles and other online data for human-level outcomes

• Optimized Content Creation & Curation – With AI, marketers can take data and targeting to an entire new level. Audience analytics can go past the typical demographics level, to understand people on an individual basis. Now, marketers are using AI to both – a) identify potential buyers or clients, and b) deliver the ideal content that is most relevant to them. A good example of this type of technique is when an e-commerce website shows you the “similar” recommendations of other products you might like

• Lead Generation – AI, like an automatic recruiter; can sift through enormous piles of data to find the ideal consumers, customers and clients based on information that it already has and the program that it’s using. To larger extent, it can also predict or rate how relevant a given lead is – saving significant time & effort for B2B advertisers, recruiters and many more

• Voice Search & Speech Recognition – With AI, marketers can recognize voice and enable voice searches. Furthermore, marketers can integrate various search techniques to customize results. And perhaps even more exciting is the personal assistants we are becoming familiar with today, like Siri, Alexa, and Google Home, are now able to have conversations with each other (or at least will do so in future models). And, to the extent speech recognition goes, an Aug 2017 report (Techcrunch) claims that Microsoft’s speech recognition system was then at an all-time low error rate of only 5.1%.

• Chatbots – are automated tools that essentially are responsible for interacting with potential clients / website visitors. Chatbots are able to do things like answering basic questions to fulfill orders and are becoming easier and easier to integrate into websites of all scales. Recently, we noticed Facebook would be incorporating chatbots into its messenger app; with an idea to enable customers to easily message a business page to discuss customer service matters. Soon, these AI bots will run chat functions and other direct-to-consumer engagement avenues. Companies across verticals are saving employee time and expenditures with these tactics

• Automation & Personalization – off late, a lot of what marketers had been doing in digital marketing sphere  is ‘guesswork’, constantly testing, adjusting and optimizing, experimenting what we hope to be a more profitable end. AI enabled analytics tools are far more accurate than they were in the days of traditional advertising, the ability to have “built-in” decision-making tools that basically learn as they go is really optimal for digital marketing

Now, as we see - Artificial Intelligence is all about data-driven approaches to digital marketing and decision-making using integrated data from different platforms. Digital marketing analytics platforms – collect and store all kinds of data to analyze consumer/customer patterns in order to develop real-time, automated systems and consumer profiles to target niche markets. It seems, in near future, computers (with AI and ML) will be increasingly in-charge of bigger & bigger decisions as they’ll be able to analyze consumer profiles from different perspectives; enabling marketers to essentially perform their “own” outreach strategy and building content that meets consumer’s voice.

Additionally, consumers will find themselves (perhaps unknowingly) handing their buying decisions over more frequently to robots who already have a record of their ideas, previous searches and preferences. This art of leveraging customer data and AI concepts like machine learning to anticipate your customer’s next move and improve the customer journey is Artificial Intelligence Marketing.

Do every Digital Marketer need to learn about AI

We know, a few years ago, digital marketers were somewhat reluctant to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) in their strategies due to lack of knowledge and lack of clarity on outcomes. Now, as they have gained a lot more confidence in using AI since its ambiguity have been reduced with respect to the results it can provide, marketers are adapting AI exponentially into their digital marketing strategies. In addition, as AI is becoming more and more ingrained in our world, we may think of it as some sort of invasion of privacy, but as a digital marketer – one needs to understand how to use it ethically & efficiently. AI directed tools are becoming more and more commonplace and are extremely useful tools when it comes to analyzing and predicting the customer’s and buyer’s journey. Also, marketers need not understand the technical nuances of AI to go into digital marketing, but it is essential to have a keen understanding of how this is shaping today’s digital marketplace on all levels, and how, in turn, it will shape the overall strategy holistically. Artificial intelligence is clearly sparking a revolution in the digital marketing sphere

So, Are you ready to incorporate these Artificial Intelligence applications into your Digital Marketing Strategy?