6 Ways Artificial Intelligence is Changing the Digital Marketing Industry

Why should we care about Artificial Intelligence technology

Artificial intelligence (AI) is creating the fourth industrial revolution by shaping every single aspect in the world. AI is taking away jobs, and revolutionizing businesses only to create new human-driven creative opportunities.

The new technology has influenced the way we drive cars, grow vegetables, detect cancer. It can even speak, and recognize emotions in speech. AI technology is disrupting right now all industries including digital marketing.

So what is Artificial Intelligence?

Simply put, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is building machines that are intelligent to think and act in a rational way. Similar to humans at much greater scale and speed.

Within AI, you will come across two terms: Machine Learning & Deep Learning.

Machine learning is a subset of AI that is fed structured data by humans to come up with an algorithm to learn and analyze massive data.

Deep learning is a subset of machine learning, in which no structured data is needed. It relies on various layers of neural networks to digest massive unstructured data. The learning and analyzing process of this data happens independently of human intervention.

The relationship between AI & Digital Marketing

We’ve seen the evolution of marketing in the past years and its transformation into the digital space. Companies shifted their strategies, tools and budget from traditional to digital marketing.

Today, AI is pushing further the digital marketing transformation to a new level and in various aspects.

So if you’re wondering how Artificial Intelligence is Disrupting Digital Marketing.

Here are 6 ways Artificial Intelligence is changing the digital marketing industry that every marketer should know:

1- Automating Content:

In the digital marketing industry, content is king. AI aids marketers in 2 roles: Automating content creation, content curation and delivery.

Content creation using NLG (natural language generation), a process that generates content from data automatically. The marketer will choose the content type, topic, number of words and data to be used. The AI-driven platforms such as NLG then uses an algorithm to produce unique articles. The content produced will simulate human-written content saving company time & money.

For example, Washington Post published more than 850 articles written by Heliograf, its AI-driven robot author.

Content curation is the process of collecting quality published articles and spinning the content while adding your own opinion. Not only did AI help automate the content collection process but also customized it depending on the targeted audience. AI harvests the audience’s social media activities, engagements and interactions on the web. Then it ensures individualized content is delivered to each target audience.

2- Mass Personalisation:

The value of personalisation lies in its ability to greatly influence the behavior of consumers. Prior to AI, marketeres used tools to segment their audience in clusters. Based on location, interests, preference, demographic and other attributes and then create various customized offering to each segment of this audience.

Today, marketers are able to provide each of their million users a personalized experience specific to them. The availability of this technology replaced general audience segmentation into personas. Powered by AI, specifically machine learning, unique offerings to each customer are created based the users digital footprints. The ability of AI to review and analyze a mix of overlapping attributes “finding patterns inside patterns” which humans are not capable of doing. These AI capabilities help companies implement digital marketing campaigns based on micro-segmentation. This technique ensures marketers know what kind of message resonates with their audience and delivering to them exactly their needs.

3- Advertising & Product offering:

In digital marketing, online ads is one of the key channels for lead generation. Platforms that offer ad services such as publishers, and social media websites are competing to offer marketers more targeted advertising. Targeted ads generate higher conversion rates for companies.

For example, suggested products / articles used to appear to users based on their transactional history only. While now, websites are deploying machine learning (ML). ML considers the users behavior history along with their implicit and explicit intent into consideration thus delivering more relevant suggestions.

Bidding is another aspect within online advertising that consumed most of marketers time as its manually handled. Artificial intelligence automated the process leveraging smarter bidding. AI combines user based info (signals) such as device, location, language and other data that can also be collected from third parties. This improves ad performance and campaign outcome while saving marketers time to focus on more valuable campaign aspects like content & layout.

4- User Tracking & Data Analytics:

Another aspect of digital marketing that has been massively transformed with AI and Machine learning. A buyers journey is a funnel that includes various steps. Starting from brand awareness, to showing interest and interacting with a brand to purchasing.

Digital marketing altered the funnel by simplifying purchase, increasing interaction channels, offering comparison and review tools which helped users move faster in the funnel. However, these digital marketing advancements missed a vital aspect which is the ability to track and analyze results. Not only is Artificial Intelligence able to integrate huge data collected from different sources. But also it can analyze the type of content users mostly interact with, the products searched for, and each users preferred marketing channel.

The availability of this filtered, structured and simplified analysis of huge data enabled marketers the ability to create data driven marketing campaigns and make intelligent decisions, reduce testing phase and eliminating speculations.

5- Customer Service & Chatbots:

AI plays an important role in leveraging customer satisfaction in multiple phases. Social listening is the process of monitoring consumer conversations on social media and online about your brand which includes feedback, experiences, reviews… Machine learning has helped brands process huge data. This even includes recognizing images that include your brands logo, and intelligently extract relevant conversations.

AI is also used for voice authentication to verify clients and expedite the support process bypassing security and password process.

Deploying AI chat bot support, powered by deep learning and NLU (Natural Language Understanding). NLU is also part of AI and allows the machine to understand human language, analyzing written sentences or voice and interacting with humans. So the AI driven chat bot interacts with customers providing relevant information. This alone solves repetitive questions and queries which account to more than 30% of the support cases and deliver a seamless, and consistent support experience.

6- Predicting Customer Behavior:

Marketers no longer develop strategies to meet customers needs and wants based on their own understanding solely but rather relying on concrete data and information.

AI, specifically deep learning has enabled marketers not only to analyze but also to predict future customer behaviors accurately. This has become possible due to the availability of massive data.

There’s more users Facebook than the population of the United States, China and Brazil combined. Companies are now able to sort huge detailed data like customer interactions, likes and dislikes to identify various metrics that identifies a user behavior. Then transform these findings into actionable insights to connect with their consumers on a deeper level and predict their future actions. Machine Learning’s ability to provide real-time predictive analysis combined with continuous learning is impacting digital marketing immensely.

Today’s Digital Marketing: AI vs Human or AI with Human

AI, machine learning and deep learning are helping marketers build data-driven digital marketing strategies. While brands can leverage AI to optimize their digital marketing, and streamline online business growth. However, brands must know that marketing is still about humans and the value of human interaction is a key to successful marketing.