The Increasing Role Of AI In Marketing

AI In Marketing

Harness the power of AI to make your marketing more effective! It sounds very sci-fi, doesn’t it? But artificial intelligence is not some pie-in-the-sky “someday” tech that you can safely ignore. There are already AI technologies ready and waiting to be implemented in marketing. Here’s a little guidance:

1) Start Small

The only way AI in marketing can disappoint is if you raise your expectations too high. Start with modest tasks and build up greater familiarity with what AI tools can and can’t do. You might try starting by using a tool like Motiva AI to test messages. AI can go a step beyond A/B testing and start building winning messages with minimal guidance.

2) Use AI In Fertile Fields

Machines are simply better-suited to certain marketing tasks than people. It’s useful to start by identifying the areas of your work that are particularly ripe for AI assistance. All of the following areas are places where current AI tools can make a great positive impact:

• Audience definition / segmentation
• Content improvement
• Optimising send times
• Advanced analytics (such as Google Ads)
• Data cleaning
• Personalisation
• Message Testing

Recently the Motiva AI Cloud for Eloqua was brought in to handle message optimisation for a national healthcare firm. By subtly varying the messages sent to patients and improving based on audience preferences, Motiva was able to increase click-through rates by 200 percent.

3) Look For Leverage

What do most of the tasks listed above have in common? They’re tremendous time sinks that burn up creative talent by forcing humans to sift through mountains of data. When you use AI to save time and effort in fields like these, you can improve the services you deliver while also making your team’s lives easier. As you get more familiar with AI tools, always look for the “10x” pivot points where their positive impact can be maximized.

4) Track Performance And Improve It

You mustn’t throw machine learning tools into the mix willy-nilly and hope they magically make your team more productive according to Harnham. Deploy your AI tools in pursuit of fixed goals and cultivate objective ways to track their performance.

With a little ingenuity, you’ll find no limit to what you can measure and improve. Want to chart how much time AI saves your team members? How about measuring its positive impact on your sales pipeline? Collect the right kind of data to verify that AI is actually helping to make your team more productive.

5) Content Curation through AI

Content curation powered by AI allows you to customise content shown to your visitors based on collected data. You may already be familar with the ‘customers who bought A also bought B’ section on ecommerce websites. This AI technique can also be used for blog content and personalising site messaging more generally.

Subscription businesses use this technique a lot, where the more someone engages with a service or product, the better the recommendations of content become, based on algorithm collected data.

An example of this is Netflix’s recommendation system being able to consistently suggest shows related to your viewing history and preferences.

6) Voice Search AI

Voice search is a rapidly growing AI technology, largely used by big companies such as Google, Amazon and Apple. It this point in time you probably wouldn’t develop your own voice search capacity, rather you would optimise your online presence for customer voice search.

Voice search is changing SEO strategies and your brand will need to keep up.

Here are some quick stats on voice search:

• Voice search queries up 35x since 2008
• 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020
• Between 20 and 25% of mobile queries are voice searches, according to Google, with voice search growing?due to people being?comfortable using virtual assistants
• 19% of people use Siri at least daily with 37% of people using Siri monthly

If your brand can capitalise on voice search you stand to see big gains in organic traffic coming from queries with high purchase intent, often driven by AI virtual personal assistants.

7) Never Put Tech Ahead Of Your Audience

For all the wonderful positives that machine learning can contribute to your marketing efforts, stay vigilant about potential downsides. Always hang onto your audience’s perspective; if your AI tools end up worsening your user’s experiences, they’re doing more harm than good.

Here are some important questions to ask before deploying AI-driven tools:

• Is this going to teach me about my customers and their needs?
• Will this help us serve our customers better?
• Is the customer experience going to be strengthened by these changes?

If you let the customer experience slip out of your sights while you’re fiddling with machine learning, you’ll end up missing the forest for the trees. AI can be a tremendous tool – but it has to be employed in pursuit of productive, meaningful goals.

The Future Looks Bright For AI In Marketing

This brief overview is just intended to kick-start your thinking on everything that adaptive intelligence can do to make your marketing work easier and more effective.

Make no mistake, the marketing industry is poised on the edge of a revolution in which machine intelligence is going to play a starring role. Don’t put off artificial intelligence until “later.”

The products and software you need to take full advantage of the latest possibilities are already available. Upgrade the level of service you provide to your customers and keep abreast of the competition: Get into?AI for marketing now!

Marshall Thurlow

Marshall Thurlow is Director and Founder of Orion Marketing Pty Ltd. He is a digital marketer with expertise in SEO, website design, content marketing and project management. With over 15 years of experience spanning government, not-for-profit and the private sector, he is well equipped to lead teams to success. He is a big proponent of environmental sustainability, critical thinking and progressive issues.