If you’ve paid any attention to tech news recently, you’ve undoubtedly heard about the absolute avalanche of artificial intelligence, or AI, and how rapidly it’s begun to advance. The potential of AI for marketers is immense and undeniable.
It can help marketers more clearly understand their target audience so that marketing campaigns can be more finely-tuned and optimized, and so more personalized content can be provided. AI also has the potential to help with and increase lead generation, segmentation, and even content creation. This can be even further extrapolated into predictive analytics, essentially calculating potential human behavior based on countless variables and historical data points.
We’re going to take a look at what exactly AI is, and why it might not be what many people think. Then, we’ll look at some of the basics of how using AI for marketers is one of the most likely natural progressions of the technology. We’ll also look at how AI is already being used in some marketing.
What Is AI Exactly?
Generally speaking, AI or “artificial intelligence” is a rapidly-advancing field of technology whose goal is to create “intelligence” by way of algorithms and coding in machines. The secondary goal of AI development is to get machines to a place where they can use the same skills of intelligence and what we might call “common sense” to perform tasks that are currently limited only to humans.
The technology of AI can often be separated into narrow AI and general AI:
- Narrow AI platforms are created to use AI for one specific task, or one narrow range of tasks, like speech recognition
- General AI platforms can perform or complete any task that a human can do – the ultimate Turing test
What AI Is Right Now
As of February 2023, while AI has made incredible leaps and bounds in recent years, it is still essentially just an interface for a collection of everything we, as humans, know.
This is good news for marketers because it means we can’t be replaced yet!
Humans are still needed to guide the various AI platforms to collate and interpret the vast amounts of data and information they’ve been trained on, to give us the answers or results that we want. The implementation of natural language processors like ChatGPT and its competitors is a major step, but there’s still a long road ahead. Despite the progress, it’s still more or less in its infancy, meaning there is still a lot of growth and development, which is nonetheless very exciting.
AI In Marketing – The Basics
AI is quickly transforming the field of marketing, and how marketers approach their work. By leveraging the power of AI, even small businesses can get invaluable insights into their target audience, create content optimized for them, and personalize interactions with that audience even further.
The biggest and most well-known use of AI in marketing is predictive analytics, which is compiling historical data and identifying trends or other patterns that can be used to make more effective predictions of a consumer’s behavior. This allows optimization of the campaign that can significantly boost the return on investment for every marketing dollar spent.
In addition to predictive analytics, AI is used in marketing to effectively analyze and take meaning from human speech or written language. This is another important aspect of making more personalized and effective content.
Your software of choice likely uses natural language processing or NLP to analyze customer feedback or reviews and to create bulk responses that address their concerns and feel like they were written by a human. Up to 90% of marketing professionals report the use of AI of some sort during customer interactions.
AI In Marketing Is Becoming Inevitable
No matter what your personal feelings are regarding AI for marketers, the data is clear. As recently as February 2022, 32% of global marketing professionals who responded stated they were using some form of artificial intelligence in combination with marketing automation tools for their paid advertising campaigns.
This covers a lot of ground and could mean anything from running a full AI chatbot on their website, to just using it to enhance the personalization of some communications. It was also reported that AI was specifically combined with marketing automation tools by nearly one-quarter of respondents.
How AI Is Currently Used In Advertising
Advertisements have evolved from word of mouth, billboards, and newspaper ads, to commercials on radio and TV. Now with how prevalent internet usage is, especially on social media, brands need to work smarter to both reach and capture the attention of their audience.
Currently, AI is used to ensure potential customers see targeted ads for brands and products they are likely to use. Every modern digital advertising platform and exchange uses AI to manage the placement of ads throughout popular social media platforms. It decides who sees your ads and how the ad spend is used.
As competition grows, many businesses are making improvements in the ways they advertise their products and services by using machine learning. By recognizing the behavior and preferences of customers, AI can help you create more personalized ads and potentially make more sales.
Looking Forward – Unlocking The Full Potential Of AI
With the rapid progression of AI technology and the evolution of technology and processing power in general, the potential for AI is nothing short of staggering. It can reach all corners of the marketing space, making the most effective and efficient marketing campaigns imaginable.
Marketing
The future potential of AI in the marketing sector is infinite. The increasing accuracy and training of AI platforms, as well as the evolving language platforms they are built on, will begin to create marketing campaigns influenced not only by data from countless sources but with advanced behavioral inferences and predictions that would be on par with a therapist or psychological profiler.
This may include custom-generated ad copy and graphics to make the ad more enticing to the consumer.
For example – An AI platform examines a person’s dinner delivery orders for the past few months, and finds a pattern of ordering a pizza with a certain topping. On the assumed days they get paid, an ad with an image of their favorite toppings is shown to them to prompt a sale.
Advertising
The continued advancement of AI can be expected to completely revolutionize the entire advertising industry by completely managing the buying, selling, and usage of advertising space across all mediums. The effectiveness of programmatic advertising will continue to improve, optimizing ad placements on a highly individualized basis.
Public Relations
AI can potentially help professionals in the public relations sector to create more accurate and effective messaging as well. It could be used to analyze social media data, along with data from many other sources, to pick out rising trends or growing sentiment toward a brand, and can help create messaging that conveys the message needed, in the way most effective for the audience to hear it.
This can eventually lead to more effective communication with customers, and better brand engagement overall. Not only that, but AI would also be able to recognize the pattern of growing sentiment with its audience, helping to isolate and address problems or negative sentiment much quicker and easier than ever before. This can prevent the bad press from going viral and can help save a brand’s reputation.
The content that an AI platform would be able to craft would be ideal for public relations professionals that need to deal with small issues before they become massive problems. It can allow companies to be far more proactive when dealing with unhappy customers, and it can boost the overall effectiveness of nearly any PR campaign. AI would be the perfect vehicle for delivering news that people don’t want, in a way that makes it simple to accept.
Content Creation
With the proliferation of AI content creation now, it’s difficult to think of something that an AI content platform wouldn’t be able to do in just a few years. If the AI platform were trained on the right set of data and the right content, it would have the potential to create more accurate and relevant content than any human could produce. Guided by a sense of human creativity and strategy, the content production potential of AI would be unmatched.
With the ability to analyze incredible amounts of consumer data in an instant, content tailor-made for a specific consumer can be crafted in a few moments. It can use natural language processing to determine what content is the most useful, provides the most value for the user, and can help illustrate that relevancy.
Additionally, AI has the potential to be completely unrivaled in the quantity of content production. It would be able to create content at such a scale that even if it didn’t have value, we wouldn’t know because it could simply drown out all human contribution. In a business sense, this can be leveraged to create content cheaper and faster than ever before, all without having to hire additional creators, editors, publishers, etc.
AI in Marketing FAQs
To close things out, below are some of the most common questions related to using AI in marketing.
How is AI Used in Marketing?
AI is used for predictive analytics, natural language processing, chatbots, and more. Predictive analytics is an essential tool for marketers, as it allows them to analyze historical data to make predictions about future trends and behaviors.
Will Marketers Be Replaced by AI?
The short answer is no, marketers will not be replaced by AI, not for a long, long time, anyway. Instead, AI will assist marketers in making better decisions and delivering more personalized content, because while AI can help automate repetitive tasks, it cannot replace the creative and strategic thinking that marketers provide.
How AI is Used in Advertising?
AI is used for programmatic advertising and audience targeting. AI can also be used to identify new target audiences and predict which ads will be most effective.
Will AI Take Over Advertising?
AI won’t take over advertising but will begin to play a larger role while performing more significant tasks and research. The biggest benefit of AI is the assistance in making better decisions for the advertising campaign.
What is an example of the Use of AI in Digital Advertising?
One example of the use of AI in digital advertising is IBM Watson Advertising. IBM Watson uses AI to deliver more personalized and relevant ads to consumers. This is done by analyzing consumer data and behavior to create custom ad campaigns.
Wrapping Up
As we can see, AI has tremendous potential in marketing and advertising. By leveraging AI, marketers can gain valuable insights into their target audience, deliver more personalized content, and improve their overall marketing strategies. While AI will never be able to fully replace human marketers, it will continue to play an increasingly significant role in the industry.
