The artificial intelligence (AI) market grew by a staggering 54% in 2020. This innovative technology is changing entire industries left and right, providing opportunities for automation, growth, and better processes overall.
Digital marketing is no exception. In fact, AI has found its way into all aspects of this industry, and marketers are finding new uses for it every day.
From attracting quality leads to creating a personalized experience for the audience, AI has had a huge impact on digital marketing and its practices. Here are some ways AI is changing digital marketing for good.
Lead Generation
Lead generation is among the first and most important steps in any marketing campaign, and if that part is effective, the rest will go much smoother. AI can help with this stage as its machine learning capabilities allow it to sift through and analyze vast amounts of data. This is important because you need to identify your ideal audience to know who to target.
AI automates your lead hunting in many ways. It can identify the ideal customers, where to find them, and how to attract them. It saves a lot of time marketers would have to invest in research and trial and error.
The best thing about machine learning is its ability to learn from experience, i.e., the more data you feed it, the better it will become at identifying hot leads or those who are most likely to convert.
Better Customer Support
No matter how great you are at attracting leads, you need to find a way to make them stay and convert. That’s why customer support is essential for a successful marketing campaign. AI has found its way into this field as well thanks to its ability to process natural human language and communicates with people as effectively as, if not better than, live agents.
That’s why using conversational AI chatbots for customer service has become so popular in the last couple of years. They can provide instant support to customers and prospects in numerous ways. For example, they can answer any queries that a customer has, provide assistance, lead them to a specific page, and even help them complete the entire customer journey.
Marketers can implement these bots both on their sites and on social media to engage with customers in a meaningful way. Since these bots are available at all times and can cater to as many customers at the same time as necessary, they reduce the wait time and increase overall customer satisfaction.
Personalization
As many as 71% of all marketers agree that AI is great for personalization. AI helps personalize marketing messages in many ways. That’s because it has the ability to analyze previous customer behavior as well as behavior patterns of others belonging to the same demographic or another group.
That’s how customers can get automatic personalized recommendations. For example, if someone is shopping on an e-commerce website, AI software can analyze their searches and previous purchases to recommend products they might be interested in.
This ability of AI software allows marketers to optimize their email campaigns as well and allow them to maximize their results.
The best thing about AI-based email campaigns is that they can be automated so that certain actions can trigger a certain type of email instantly. This way, they can reach the right customer at the exact right time and encourage them to buy more, for example.
Content Creation
Hiring skilled content writing professionals is essential for any digital marketing campaign. Content marketing can also benefit from the use of AI greatly. It can provide the content intelligence necessary to appeal to the right kind of audience. In fact, Google uses AI-based algorithms to determine the type of content that is the most useful to the searcher’s query.
What’s more, AI can determine which type of content will be the most successful with the target audience. Thanks to various breakthroughs in the field of artificial intelligence and natural language processing, there are now apps that can help marketers and writers come up with content ideas.
Some short-form content can even be completely automated with the use of AI-based software, whereas these apps can provide outlines, first drafts, intros, and more for longer-form texts.
AI-based programs can even automate video content creation, and its potential in this area will expand in the near future.
Analytics
One of the biggest superpowers of artificial intelligence is analytics. This feature of AI is so important that it has ushered in a new era of digital marketing. Before AI, marketers had to rely on intuition a lot. Today, they can base all of their actions on data-based insights and real-time intelligence. AI eliminates the guesswork from marketing.
This type of analytics goes both ways, i.e., it can provide insights based on past customer behavior, but it can also be predictive. This way, marketers can anticipate what the customers will want and need and provide them with that.
AI-based software can go through an enormous amount of data to find patterns and insights people would never be able to find manually. These insights can help marketers create highly effective strategies.
Voice Search
Voice search has become quite important in the world of digital marketing. People find it much easier to simply talk to their smartphones and get the desired results. Personal assistant products such as Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and similar use AI to interpret the command or question and provide an answer or a solution.
As many as 20% of all searches in the Google App are done through voice search, and this number is likely to grow in the near future as conversational AI is pushing its limits. The increase in this type of search is changing the way we do SEO, and companies need to adapt their content to it.
These are only some of the most obvious ways AI is already changing the world of digital marketing. New AI-based solutions are emerging all the time, and we’re yet to see in what other drastic ways AI will transform our marketing game.