AI & Digital Marketing: Creating Data-Driven Strategies
Whenever we think of the integration of technology – specifically, artificial intelligence – with marketing, we obviously think digital. But, a lot of the time, our imagination tends to limit itself to paid media campaigns, data retrieval, and website development.
While artificial intelligence definitely plays a key role in all these aspects, it doesn’t just end there. In fact, if you haven’t explored its applications in strategy, we have some bad news for you: your creative and strategy team could be missing it’s most important member right now.
Not to worry though, we’ll break it down for you.
To start with, ‘artificial intelligence’ is basically what provides machines with the ability to analyse data and perform cognitive tasks. It trains them to think the way we humans do (picture the robot from the movie ‘I, Robot’, but tinier) and they learn to make relevant decisions with time and experience.
Now that that’s cleared up, let’s talk about how AI can help us in creating marketing strategies.
We’ll start off with an unfortunate truth – there are a lot of marketing teams and agencies across the world that still rely on assumptions. They work by guessing who their target audience is, what they’d like, and what will resonate with them.
We believe that this trial-and-error approach should be taking a backseat in 2020, and that we should be using all the technologies that we have at our disposal to create data-driven marketing campaigns and strategies. Not to forget, AI also plays a key role in keeping an eye on what your competitors are doing and how you can stay ahead of the curve.
Using data to create marketing strategies might seem very obvious – but few truly know how to go about it the right way. Let’s see how AI factors in at different steps of building your strategy and approach:
- To start off with, AI helps you really know your customer. When studying market research and data, it can help pull key insights by recognising patterns. Moreover, you can also use it to pull data from social media sites and it can sift through countless numbers of users and their activities to get more insights. The cherry on top? It’ll take way, way less time than a human would.
- E-mail marketing has now moved beyond just excessively long recipient lists (we hope) and shots in the dark – AI can help you in leveraging this fantastic tool for even more awesome results. Along with increasing personalisation, AI helps you in testing, which is a key component in not going by assumptions. You can A/B test various subject lines, layouts, and send times too. It also helps in overall automation – for example, with broadcast messages. You can set up certain trigger words that prompt a relevant reply. Since there is no human manually doing all of this behind a screen, you can be sure that there will be no errors, and that users will not have to wait for a timely response.
- It can help you give millions of customers personalised experiences. Machine learning algorithms can identify which stage of the buyer journey they are at, the items they are most interested in, the ones they are most likely to add to their wishlist and keep there for another 2 years, and so on. Along with improving customer service, it will help curate your paid ads too, so that conversions hit an all-time high. So, you can definitely look at seamlessly integrating personalisation into your marketing strategy because AI can easily do the grunt work for you!
- Your activations can now be taken to the next level by combining AI with AR and VR. This does not only help give users an incredibly unique brand experience, but also engages them in a memorable way and crafts a distinctive brand identity.
- Like we mentioned earlier, AI helps give customers personalised experiences – this also means that it is behind the mystical algorithm that we social media marketers love to please. By tracking your social media activity, it recommends content that it thinks you’ll like, and will keep you on the app longer. Oh, and when we say ‘tracking’, we truly mean that it gauges every video view, how long you saw a post for, the users you shared it with, and more.
Like we mentioned earlier, a lot of organisations are still slowly taking the leap into integrating AI into their marketing strategy and functions as a whole. So, if you choose to leverage this tool now, you definitely have an advantage over your competitors. Still unsure how to go about it? We can help you out. Let’s connect over a (virtual) cup of coffee and we can help you meet and exceed your customer expectations in no time!