How AI Revolutionizes Marketing

Marketers currently use artificial intelligence, commonly known as AI, in a wide range of applications. Search engines like Bing and Google use it to provide people with more intelligent results leading them to delivery drones and personal assistants by Amazon and a self-driving car by Uber. This leaves many to wonder how marketing will be affected by different types of AI as they use it to improve return on investment (ROI) and make smarter business decisions.

So just what is AI? One simple definition is that AI involves non-human entities performing actions based on human behavior. Over time, AI robots can improve responses by analyzing customer responses. This is a big improvement over pre-programmed and possibly inaccurate responses. Below are several practical applications that AI developers and marketers should learn about as much as possible.

AI-Powered Predictive Marketing

Automation offers many benefits to marketers. However, businesses that plan to implement it must invest in computer-based learning and apply it at scale. It’s best to do this both before and during implementation of automatic processes that depend on evaluation by humans.

Some marketers are fortunate to have advanced tools for statistical purposes such as behavior information, demographic data, purchase history, and analytics software from a variety of sources. Even so, only a human can determine the actual results of a marketing campaign without using AI. Naturally, every marketer desires to improve his or her understanding of customer behavior and activity as it occurs in real time. Predictive marketing can help achieve this. The concept of predictive marketing involves forecasting success by using AI.

With AI implemented, a computer can analyze a website visitor’s unique actions and learn to predict what he or she might do next. In other words, you can predict and understand why your customers have come to your website and what they hope to accomplish during the online visit. This enables your company to deliver a personalized call to action at just the right time. Best of all, you can use this tool in a variety of ways.

For example, AI makes it possible to employ predictive marketing to increase the hit rate of your email campaigns. Instead of batch and blast campaigns or simply guessing, you can evaluate the previous shopping history of the customer as well as engagement rates from past emails to similar customers. This makes it easier to create new and more effective marketing campaigns.

Another example is using AI-based intelligence to obtain real-time stock updates from local stores and use this information in customer emails. You could also implement a higher level of machine learning to provide personalized banner advertising on your website.

You can expect AI to improve as it learns. Eventually, it will offer visitors to your website recommendations based on products that people often purchase together or match it to email campaigns that show a more personal touch.

Improve CX with Chatbots

Chatbots, which first became popular in 2016 and 2017, are a tool that provide customers with an experience that doesn’t include the human element. By 2021, industry analysts expect chatbots to grow into an industry worth $3 billion dollars in the United States alone. While some people view chatbots as a slight improvement to the online inquiry form or a way to deal with unhappy customers, the software is poised to have a much greater reach in the future.

Currently, various marketing brands are devising chatbots that can advise customers and easily transition into the role of a sales representative. At the same time, other chatbots gain even more detailed information about prospective customers. Sophistication and level of intelligence are both key when it comes to developing a truly useful chatbot.

Marketers can consider a chatbot intelligent once it recognizes and responds to the needs of the user. The intelligence it possesses is what gives it the ability to handle all customer conversations and scenarios with confidence. This includes everything from understanding the tone and mood of customers to gathering data and guiding them towards making a purchase. Many people report that they enjoy interacting with chatbots, especially as they become more advanced.

Plug and play is a great AI tool but there’s more to come. One of the top chatbots in 2018 is Zendesk Answer Bot. This customer service platform answers questions in real-time and assists customers with purchase decisions.

Chatbots are an excellent first step for first-time users of artificial intelligence (AI). Developing your own chatbot can help you create a niche such as offering assistance in a variety of languages or recognizing phrases unique to your line or work or ongoing customer issues. In the future, you could find yourself developing a chatbot that understands marketing campaigns in the same way that a human member of your marketing team would. You might even be able to skip weekly meetings and download information from the Chabot instead.

Smart Homes Marketing

There’s a strong likelihood that you know someone who has Alexa or another smart home device. These AI-powered machines can do everything from play the type of music its user requests to dimming the lights in the home to acting as a virtual assistant that responds to voice commands.

As a marketer, the popularity of these devices means that the relevance of conversational marketing will only increase. You should plan to tailor your content for easy use by home assistants by including accurate answers to specific questions as well as long-tail search terms.

Improve Understanding with Image Recognition

It’s probably not surprising to learn that AI leads the way in image recognition search marketing. Also called computer vision, companies as diverse as L’Oreal and Coca Cola use it to scan social media as intelligently as possible. This enables them to strategically place branded messages with photos related to their brand image on websites across the Internet.

Another name for these ads is “in-image.” Instead of relying only on text advertising, an in-image ad applies pictures to the top of other pictures to provide customers with a unique real-time experience. As an example, an existing image of a disorganized desk could have a fun pop-up ad for a desk organizer. When marketers search for images, they should ensure that it’s as relevant as possible to the content that already exists. This enables them to deliver the most appropriate message at the ideal time.

An image-based AI experience is useful for online marketers who want to glean data about their brand without investing hours of work into manual research and conducting surveys with people who already know about the brand. Rather than face an unpleasant tweet directed at your brand by an angry customer, you can serve brand photos of products on social media directly.

This technology enables brands to leverage a more sophisticated understanding of how many people they have promoting or detracting from their brand online. Because of this, a change in metrics is necessary as well. By switching to image recognition, marketing agencies need to increased attention quality, promoter sources, and engagement along with several other metrics to achieve the desired results.

Enhancing UX

A recent article in UX Magazine indicates that AI and UX will change at the same time. Naturally, this will have a big impact on marketing. According to a recent announcement from Adobe, a program called Sensei will enable AI designers to edit, patch, or possibly recreate specific scenes.

Squarespace, Wix, and other mass marketing website developers already use AI to help with UX and other types of existing technology. This enables users to make minor decisions more seamlessly.

Anyone who has ever groaned about the monotony of working on repetitive tasks will enjoy working with AI and allowing it to take over the time-consuming task of analyzing data. Many types of website design feature this type of work already, but it’s another area that AI-powered UX could apply to content marketing. Specifically, it works well with content written mostly for SEO purposes or to answer certain types of questions from prospective customers.

While you shouldn’t expect AI to write the next best seller, it could be the ideal tool if you want to pitch mass content to find unique locations and buyer personas. It’s far superior to the currently existing tools of article spinning and scrapping. If you have ever read anything produced by either of these software programs, you know how robotic and useless it sounds.

With AI, you can combine the best conversational skills from smart devices and chatbots and apply it to copywriting. This allows you to develop content that appeals to people who are searching for your product or service using long-tail keywords. AI learns the patterns and rules of your current content and then produces new content. Although it’s specific to your industry, you can apply it to various niches. This provides you with maximum flexibility as you create your marketing campaigns.

We encourage you to contact us at Call Sumo if you have additional questions about this technology or to request a demonstration.