How Will Artificial Intelligence Affect Marketing in the Future?
Have you ever bought something very specific through an online store, then later that day you see an ad on Instagram for that exact product? It’s not just a coincidence! Technology continues to advance to help brands personalize advertisements targeting individual customers in a meaningful way, through the power of artificial intelligence (AI). Using AI, brands can track customers’ product searching history and past purchases to recommend similar or equally popular products on their website or through social media. Companies continue to hire more and more big data professionals, like programmers and data scientists, for they will soon become the backbone of most marketing campaigns. Artificial intelligence uses machine learning and big data analysis to gather customer profile information for companies to enhance the customer experience and remain competitive in the market. Before diving into what this means for marketing in the future, let’s take a closer look at just what makes AI so powerful.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
Overall, it’s one of the many great examples of technology evolving to improve the lives of digital marketers. Artificial Intelligence is essentially teaching a machine to perform tasks that normally requires human intelligence. In terms of marketing, it’s a method of using technology to its fullest potential to both gain customer profile insights as well as improve the customer experience. AI is used to increase the return on investment (ROI) of marketing campaigns. Companies see this practice supporting the advancement of customer profiling, the improvement of chat bot communication, the personalization of product recommendations, and so many other benefits to this new digital marketing technology.
Advancement of Customer Profiling
One of the many ways companies can take advantage of artificial intelligence to improve their digital marketing ROI is by gaining a better understanding of what the target audience’s interests, preferences, and most importantly, needs are. As we have previously mentioned in our blog about creating a customer persona, characterizing your ideal customer profile and buyer persona is crucial for segmenting your messaging and content to the proper consumers. Allowing AI to collect, analyze, and process large sets of data will help your marketing team gain stronger insight into consumer purchasing habits and spending motives. This specific profiling lets companies send incredibly personalized content and product recommendations directly to their audience.
Personalized Product and Content Recommendations
Artificial Intelligence takes personalizing customer recommendations to a whole new level. A great example of how companies successfully use AI to influence customer buying decisions is Amazon recommending products to customers that they know they will appreciate through utilizing past purchasing data and product search history. A whopping 35% of products bought on Amazon are AI-driven recommendations, without the help of extraneous marketing investments. Using this tactic, companies can take advantage of AI to continue growing the customer shopping experience and earn brand loyalty. AI has already advanced to automating content, using complex algorithms and large data sets.
High-Performing Chat Bots
Enhancing the customer journey by providing support whenever necessary helps improve overall customer satisfaction and in turn helps companies earn brand loyalty. When customers have questions or concerns about the product or service available, transparency and communication will impact the buyer decision-making process. If a certain fault or question is not addressed in a timely manner, potential customers are likely to feel frustrated and opt out. Excellent online customer support available 24/7 is the most ideal way to avoid these issues, but having employees cover this task would be difficult to manage and costly. Thankfully, AI-powered, high-performing chat bots can use predetermined and canned phrases for customer’s commonly asked questions. Low-cost AI-powered assistants can solve nearly every customer dilemma in a way that makes it difficult to distinguish these bots from human customer support agents! Check out this article from our friends at Social Media Examiner with their top chat-bot recommendations.
Social Media Listening
Some may say the most important aspect of digital marketing is protecting and building the company reputation throughout all platforms in not only the content created, but also the social interactions with customers. On social media, it’s vital that the company addresses comments and reviews promptly to increase brand engagement and earn customer retention. Receiving comments online can be empowering and insightful, but there are times when dissatisfied customers will try to communicate their thoughts and feelings publicly. Marketing teams need to react to negativity properly and in an efficient manner to avoid the possibility of a domino effect. As companies continue to grow with larger social media presences, keeping up with comments and reviews, and addressing the positivity or negativity, will get more challenging. Social media tools using AI-driven technology can help spot brand mentions across the internet and provide insight for the marketing team on trending comments that could be addressed collectively. Companies can gain sentiment analysis, spot an influx of positive or negative comments, and even recognize tone of voice using AI tools like Mention. These advanced social media tools will improve the lives of digital marketers and help protect company reputations.
In my opinion, AI has the potential to create a positive impact on marketing campaigns in the future, if utilized correctly. There’s a powerful balance between earning your customer’s trust by respecting their space while also meeting their needs and as a result becoming the brand they know they can turn to. Overall, I look forward to further AI innovation and its role within marketing strategies in the coming years!