AI, a part of our daily lives for a while, primarily via smartphones that we share our any minute, is simply defined as “the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior”. This imitative genius, a recommender of clothes, movies, and music of our favorite, answering our questions, recognizing us by face and even describing our destination as well as going there with us, learns everything from us. This means… It is impossible to mention a limit to human intelligence, so it is the same for AI!
So, why don’t we teach digital marketing to AI? Now, it’s time to see it.
Defined as AI Marketing, this concept positions AI as a tool at the heart of digital marketing. (“yapay zekayla entegre pazarlama” in Turkish) How? Let’s look at it together.
AI as a digital marketing tool
The multichannel data collection and analysis is the most significant part that makes AI a digital marketing tool, which has gained a seat in the digital world. Before explaining its reason, let’s discuss why data collection and analysis are noteworthy for digital marketing. The logic of marketing is based on learning from the past, evaluating the present, and predicting the future. Yet, it is impossible to take these goals even one step further with ungrounded predictions, especially in the digital age. Measurability is a must, in other words, data-driven strategies.
Real-time decision-making is another vital point. At this point, AI and machine learning, a subset of AI, turn digital marketing into a real-time and self-learning field. The world tech giants have already been leveraging AI to develop platforms and apps that understand customer needs and optimize communication depending on actual outputs. They’re all at our elbows. Google Maps, Netflix, Spotify, Facebook, Uber…
Do you have data to train AI?
We agree that AI is revolutionizing the future of digital marketing, right? Yet, there are gaps in your mind when it comes to AI integration — how to develop integrated digital marketing with AI. Now it’s time to fill those gaps.
We said that AI learns from humans, and it imitates these learnings. To this end, there is a need for understanding and processing natural language (NLP — Natural Language Processing) and images (Image Processing), along with the capability to learn, reason & interact with people, machines, and the environment.
Unlike traditional software, an AI system is also based on learning methods since it practices everything it has been taught, which is the common feature of every AI-based algorithm. The teaching part is vital for functionality because you need data to train AI. Let’s give an example! You should provide some data to ensure the algorithm properly works and sends the e-mail at the specified time if you want to use send-time personalization for each person in your e-mail database. For this, whether it is e-mail marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, whatever kind of digital marketing your focus is, integrating multichannel data into the AI-supported platform you will use is a must. In other words, the first question you should ask before you search for AI integrated digital marketing: “Do I have the data to train AI?”
Advantages of AI and machine learning to digital marketing
Using AI and machine learning, you can analyze data from all channels — from social media to chatbots, from websites to landing pages, from e-mails to digital ads in digital marketing, which we can think of as a multichannel interaction process. The point that needs attention here is that you can get data from multiple sources through NLP technologies — not only texts but also images, videos, and audio conversations. So, you can segment the customer base into multiple and default parameters such as personal and demographic characteristics, preferences, and brand engagement. You can determine how to engage with customers in your digital marketing strategy as well as the most appropriate content for each customer segment with the help of these steps. Plus, it boosts potential customers & customer engagement, brand loyalty, and responses to trigger campaigns. It may seem very blue-sky up to this point. So, it’s now time for applications.
Increases the personalized message effectiveness
In digital marketing, personalized messages are among the most effective ways to show that you know your customers & target audience well. The be-all and end-all of especially e-mail marketing, these contents, combined with smart algorithms, hit the white. Let’s look at e-mail marketing tools.
AI-supported e-mail algorithms are your helper to share the scheduled messages such as newsletters, campaigns, webinar invitations with your customers via e-mail. It separates your customers based on their interests, industries, or titles at the same time.
Everything is great until now. It is even possible to do this via Excel, right? Not exactly, unfortunately. The leader of such digital marketing tools, AI technology, helps you access information: Who opened your e-mail? When did they open? Who clicked on the invitation link embedded in the e-mail? Who shared this e-mail with others? This is an excellent opportunity to improve customer segmentation. You can prioritize the ones who immediately opened your e-mail and send a reminder e-mail to the ones who clicked the invitation link yet didn’t register. You can also remove uninterested people if your focus is similar in your next campaign, or create content that is only for them, maybe an interest of them. What AI provides you with is basically the possibility to track user preferences.
Improves customer experience
Keeping track of user preferences paves the way for improving effectiveness in all kinds of digital marketing, not just e-mail marketing. Tracking especially visitor behavior on your website, on your digital shop window, gives you outputs that you can entirely change your digital marketing strategy. Monitoring the visitor behavior during their browsing session and using AI learning algorithms to optimize the next navigation ways provides a lot of information: Which pages do visitors search for? How do they engage with your website’s chatbot? What do they expect from you? Which aspects of your brand are they interested in? What are the characteristics they are not satisfied with? All are, in fact, the outputs that AI provides you through behavioral data. Click rates, page views, interactions… Tracking helps you define such predefined behavioral patterns, see risks, and improve the customer experience, discovering parts that you must support or completely change.
Ensures that you follow an error-free, consistent strategy
AI and machine learning in digital marketing are based on automating, accelerating, and obtaining bug-free processes. In this way, you can create a consistent customer experience. For example, the only way to bring together target people and the content they are really interested in is social media marketing automation — creating post and campaign schedules, capturing and profiling them.
In this way, digital marketing specialists have a chance to understand the customer/buyer demands and satisfy them with the products, services, and content based on their unique needs.
How will AI change the face of digital marketing?
Integration of AI and machine learning into digital marketing needs a long process, as in the case of all-size enterprises adopting digital transformation. Yet, the estimates suggest that acting quickly will open up new opportunities for us to a great extent.
Data used by AI to evaluate user behavior, a big helper to understand the target audience preferences, has already presented quite successful results. Siri that we can even chat with when we want… The mood predictor Spotify that friendly says, “listen to this”… Google suggests informing our guests that we will be late in case we haven’t arrived at the meeting location… Extremely breathtaking, isn’t it?
That AI introduces more effective innovations through technologies such as Image Processing, and NLP is considered as a new era for performance-based marketing. Of course, this does not change the fact that we are only at the start point of our journey. Yet, there is no reason why digital marketing specialists should not start developing AI in the next few years.
