In the past, artificial intelligence (AI) has been nothing more than a concept for science fiction. Today, however, AI has become integral in aiding digital marketers in their work. And whilst in no way is the AI advanced enough to replace the human factor, it plays a very valuable role and could be considered an integral part of the digital marketing team.
What is artificial intelligence in digital marketing?
Although the world of digital marketing can be exciting and keep you on your toes – much like any other job role – there are some elements to the industry that are necessary but repetitive. For a digital marketer, this is when AI becomes their best friend. Artificial intelligence takes these tasks and automates, freeing up the human’s time and focus for things that are less straightforward and need more thought.
Tasks an artificial intelligence would take on could be scheduling social media posts. Sprout social is a prime example of this. AI can automate your everyday marketing tasks like scheduling and sending emails or predicting campaign performance.
The benefits of AI in digital marketing
Fast data-driven decisions
With marketing and analytics tools producing piles of data to sift through and understand, the AI will build on top of the data generated by these tools to give you insights into, for example, when you should reach out to a customer to gain their interest in your product or service at the right time.
Build stronger customer relationships
This is a huge benefit as you don’t just want your customers making one-time purchases – ideally you want them coming back time and time again with a sense of loyalty and trust for your business. However, with a busy business, sometimes responding to customers who’ve reached out to the company directly can get buried in all the other emails you receive. Chat bots, unlike humans, are able to operate 24/7. They can answer queries or complaints from customers with efficiency and in a timely manner, allowing the customer service team to save time and allowing them to focus on other important tasks and queries that are slightly more complicated.
Personalise your campaigns
Within the digital marketing world, with our analytics tools, it’s quite easy to identify your target audience and customer demographics. However, identifying their behaviour is definitely more complex. Two 30 year old women from a similar area could come on to your website, but once they are there take a completely different buyer’s journey and end up purchasing completely different products. The artificial intelligence will identify all of your audiences, segment them into smaller groups of between 10-100 and send each group targeted campaigns specifically suited to them. Give the customer a personalised ad that they are more likely to interact with and you will boost your campaign’s ROI.
Predictive analytics
Wouldn’t life be easier if we could predict how things will go? If you want to know how successful your campaign will be, AI is able to look at past and current data, produce forecasted data on how a customer may behave, how the next month will go etc. With this knowledge you can better apply your budget and strategies to ensure that you’re being as successful as possible.
Dynamic pricing
Put simply, dynamic pricing is a method in which your prices change depending on a number of elements such as peak user times, type of customer or a sudden increase in demand. A good example of this is Uber which is well known for surge-pricing during busier times in specific areas, for example outside an arena after a sports game or concert. It’s considered one of the most innovative ways for a business to use AI.
The drawbacks of AI in digital marketing
Although there are many benefits of AI, it’s only fair to also look at the potential drawbacks. The main drawback is the lack of emotion and human elements we all expect in customer service. A chatbot, if well designed, can respond to queries and complaints quickly and with a logical solution, however logic isn’t always the only thing to consider when dealing with people. A customer service team with situations with empathy and understanding of what the customer has been through, offering solutions based not only on the issue itself but also how the customer feels about it, and how it has been dealt with. AI simply can’t offer that level of service.
There is a lack of creativity with AI. Technology such as this isn’t designed to think ‘outside the box’, it stays firmly within the realm it has been placed in, which is inside the box.
Then there’s the fact that most AIs can’t learn from their own mistakes and experiences in the way a human naturally does. There are AIs that can learn, however, and one of the most noteworthy examples of this would be a program called AlphaGo. This was developed by Google, which taught itself to play Go. Within three days it had started to invent new strategies that humans hadn’t yet thought of. But this is a rarity and to acquire such a high level of artificial intelligence is incredibly difficult and very costly.
Help your business thrive with these top artificial intelligence marketing tools
Now we know the benefits and drawbacks of using AI as a digital marketer, we need to know the top artificial intelligence marketing tools to use in order for the business to best utilise the tools.
Firstly, there is ChatGBT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer). This tool focuses on language and uses AI to interact with users – it can answer questions, have human-like conversations and even acknowledge mistakes. ChatGBT is capable of producing large volumes of text in the form of essays, stories, ad copy and meta descriptions. SEO specialists can use this tool for keyword research and analysis, effortlessly. All that’s required is to type some keywords for the chatbot and request related words. ChatGBT will then provide you with a list of keywords based on its understanding of search results. The more specific you are with your requests, the more accurate the results!
Next, there’s a lovely tool called Beautiful.ai. This is for you if you create a lot of presentations for clients and colleagues but become frustrated with the designs and how much time you spend on them. This tool provides an elegant solution to this. It uses AI to automatically enhance your designs based on your content, giving you the peace of mind that your designs always look their best and are relevant to the topic you’re covering.
If you’re looking to create a unique, professional logo for your business then look no further. Brandmark is used for graphics, particularly logos, and with the use of AI, creates your logos automatically based on set preferences. It can create a vast quantity of different variations to choose from, and when you see one you like, you can purchase it right then and there. Logo sorted!
Finally, let’s take a look at Oribi.io. This tool takes analytics to a whole new level. It automatically tracks all events on your website and provides you with suggestions of actions that could be made to improve overall performance. It deep-dives into things like conversion funnels and traffic sources to identify strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for improvement. This is all automatic.
AI developments in the field of digital marketing to watch out for in 2023
In terms of AI developments, 2022 was a big year. When we made digital trend predictions at the beginning of last year, we said that AI would be at the heart of all things digital. This prediction couldn’t have been more accurate, with AI being used heavily within the digital marketing industry in terms of content creation, SEO, content scheduling and much more.
So, what’s in store for 2023? We are likely to see further developments in the automation process. Specifically, speeding up the process and developing a deeper level of simplicity and accuracy with minimal human effort required. This concept is often referred to as digital or intellectual automation. Nowadays, companies have to work with vast amounts of information and so automation is needed to effectively use it. Data analysis and data knowledge can be found everywhere, and so you’ll find that tools such as these are becoming a lot more accessible to everyone.
We can also expect to see a rise in augmented intelligence. This concept is designed to enhance, not replace. You will often find this technology in virtual assistants like Alexa or Siri. It is a subsection of AI machine learning which has been developed to enhance human intelligence rather than operate independently or outright replace it. Augmented intelligence is designed to help improve decision-making done by people and also improve actions taken in response.
Will AI replace digital marketers?
In short, no. Artificial intelligence may seem like an alien concept to some, but it really is in our best interests as digital marketers to treat AI as an ally, not an enemy. It’s just another one of your colleagues, taking on the tasks that are time consuming or repetitive so you can focus on more pressing and complex matters.
It’s also important to recognise that, although recent developments in AI over the past few years are astounding and should be highly commended, the technology is far from perfect at this stage. Human employees bring elements to the table such as emotion, flexibility, creativity and making real connections with customers that AI just isn’t built or designed to handle in its current state. Development of this nature will take years, so essentially humans still have a lot to bring to the table, so we shouldn’t be putting our total and unconditional trust in AI technology yet!
If you are interested in having your digital marketing done with a bespoke and professional touch, get in contact with us at Cariad today!
