With every passing day, Artificial Intelligence is creating new capabilities that were once considered impossible. The time has come for marketing to be infused with the power of Artificial Intelligence.
More so than any other function, Artificial Intelligence gathers, analyzes, and co-relates so much data about human beings and their behavior. It is quite natural that a rule-based technology like Artificial Intelligence will pave roads into digital marketing sooner rather than later.
To back that fact, Gartner predicted that, “by 2020, 85% of customer interactions will be handled without a human.” This would take the form of chatbots and live chat software that does not need human personnel to drive conversations.
The same AI power is fueling the staggering growth of FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) companies. Along with conversational capabilities, AI also provides insights on users and how to deliver content that matches their preferences.
In this article we will discuss how Artificial Intelligence is infusing new intelligence into digital marketing and how AI can be used for content generation, chat bots, personalized content recommendations, and dynamic pricing models. Let’s take a closer look at the many other ways artificial intelligence is going to transform digital marketing.
Content Generation
Creating high-quality content is one of the biggest challenges digital marketers face. Content is one of the best ways to promote a brand or business. It typically helps B2B buyers make an informed decision. Content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing and can create up to three times more leads (DemandMetric).
Creating high-quality content that educates, engages, and promotes a business requires a significant amount of manpower. This can prove to be a problem for larger companies that have business models revolving around content production. Additionally, content generation is essential for small businesses that want to grow their business organically.
Thankfully, Artificial Intelligence can help with scaling content creation. AI-based writing programs can create catchy meta titles, descriptions, or even long-form content based on the data fed to them. This data is typically in the form of keywords, length of the phrase, negative words to be avoided, and so on.
Based on this set of data, the AI tool can quickly create content that is ready for publication. To ensure writing finesse, the AI tool can also be embellished with region-wise grammar, spelling, and punctuation rules.
Chatbots and Live Chat Software
The term chatbot is largely associated with customer support. Live chat software is synonymous with a website fixture that can handle conversations with people when agents are not available.
Recommended Reading: 5 Marketing Automation Tools for Small Businesses in 2021
Upon taking a closer look, chatbots and live chat software are both excellent marketing tools. They can connect with customers instantly. They can have focused conversations with a surface level understanding of what customers are looking for on your website. This is beneficial if you are a B2C business with a long list of product offerings that a customer needs help selecting from.
Brands like Sephora have realized the benefits of these chatbot-led conversations with Gen Z. Their Facebook Messenger chatbot dons the hat of a virtual shop assistant that helps users find the right product without the hassle of visiting and browsing the website.
There isn’t a prize for guessing the technology powering chatbots and live chat software. it’s Artificial Intelligence in the purest form. The good news for marketers is that these conversations open a treasure chest of customer behavior.
Personalized Content Recommendations
If you are a Netflix binge-watcher like most everyone else in the world, there is one striking thing you might have noticed: that your Netflix recommendations will not be the same as someone else’s. This is because Netflix tailors its content recommendations to each user based on sophisticated user analysis. It takes the help of Artificial Intelligence and its subset of Machine Learning to implement this user analysis.
Recommended Reading: 7 Reasons Why Email Marketing is the Ultimate Solution for B2B
Netflix specifically uses Machine Learning to generate a multitude of content that will maximize the chances of the user’s click-through rate and maximum watch time. These suggestions are again made subject to A/B testing to drill down on the exact set of user preferences. The ‘Because you watched’ label that Netflix displays is just a subtle way of showing how it has meticulously tracked your preferences to arrive at the next suggestion.
How can businesses in other industries and verticals replicate this? For example, eCommerce sites like Amazon can show related products that ‘complete the look,’ or ‘goes well with this product,’ or even subtle nudges like, ‘customers who bought this bought this too.’
Ultimately, all this will lead to optimum usage of marketing funds and help boost the bottom line.
Dynamic Pricing Models
Pricing is a key element of the marketing mix. The right price can make a skeptical prospect become a paying customer. Marketers used to segment prospects into various buckets to target them with the right price range. This is a time-consuming process, and the RoI is not always there.
Luckily for present-day marketers, this is a problem that Artificial Intelligence can solve to some extent. Artificial Intelligence can sift through real-time pricing trends, analyze uploaded prices, and help marketers fixate on competitive prices for narrower time slots.
For example, the marketer of a travel agency can increase or decrease the flight ticket prices within hours or even minutes to maximize their campaign RoI.
In fact, as you are reading this article, data scientists at KLM are asking their AI system to answer one crucial question – “Where to fly?” The system helps them identify routes where demand has picked up and arrive at a specific price range that the customer is willing to pay. Based on the demand and the willingness to pay, the ticket is priced variably for each traveler. As a result, the airline is able to reduce costs while continuously increasing profits.
Conclusion
Artificial Intelligence has become a buzzword in boardrooms. C-suite members are debating its benefits. Although it’s been almost a decade since AI has become mainstream, there are still raging debates over its efficacy. There are also questions about how ethical Artificial Intelligence is.
Looking at only the positive side, it’s clear that Artificial Intelligence can do a lot of good, particularly for marketing. Marketers can count on the ability of AI to automate tasks that require huge amounts of manual labor, time, and resources.
With its ability to crunch massive amounts of data, Artificial Intelligence can help marketers make informed decisions that can yield returns in both the short-term and the long-term. The fact that major brands have already invested in it and achieved positive returns is a testament to this fact.