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How to Get Started with AI Marketing

Illustrator: Adan Augusto
ai marketing guide

Irrelevant ads, annoying marketing activities, and wasted money are problems for your company and buyers. And it’s all because of insufficient background data behind the marketing strategy. You can hire the best analysts and spend even more money, or turn to solutions like artificial intelligence.

If you aren’t already using AI marketing, you’re missing a crucial link between your brand and customers. Getting as close as possible to your audience, understanding what they think about when Googling, where and what they look for, etc., is the desired goal for every business.

Artificial intelligence in marketing will help you make informed decisions, build more intelligent campaigns, and be on the same page with potential customers. If you want your business to exist in the future, now is the time to embrace modern advanced technology.

Let us tell you more about AI marketing and its countless benefits!

What Is AI Marketing?

Getting started with AI marketing requires some background info regarding such an approach.

AI marketing is an approach aimed at data collection automation and behavioral targeting. It’s accurate, unbiased, and allows you to process enormous amounts of data effortlessly. As a result, you get actual information and predictions concerning the preferences of potential buyers and their online behavioral patterns.

Data gathering and analysis occur because algorithms read and fix every trackable interaction, such as reading your content, clicking on an affiliate link, responding to offers, social media actions, etc. This marketing model relies on first-party data. AI can also reach people matching your buyer profile automatically. 

AI is a part of social media, conversational, and many other types of marketing where time is a priority. Artificial intelligence approaches should definitely be in your arsenal if you want to beat the competition and always be at the right place, at the right time for your customers.

Why Is AI Marketing Important?

Nine in ten organizations believe AI brings a competitive advantage
Source: MIT

According to 2020 data, 87% of global businesses deem AI a tool that can give them a significant competitive advantage. The same figure shows that 63% would ask for AI-driven offerings.

AI marketing is crucial because it provides more accurate and up-to-date data without human bias. Such a technological advance helps minimize the analysis time, enabling you to appear before your buyers sooner than the competition and speed up decision-making. In a nutshell, this is what you want from a successful marketing campaign.

There are many benefits to using artificial intelligence as a marketing effort:

  • Increased ROI for campaigns: You get more significant returns when you launch a well-informed campaign aimed directly at your perfect buyer.
  • Personalized customer experience: 72% of consumers only engage with customized marketing messages.
  • Accurate needs and behavior predictions: AI data puts you closer to the real needs of target audiences.
  • Shorter sales cycle. The number and quality of leads increase with extensive AI data.
  • Actionable insights from marketing data. Machine learning and artificial intelligence in marketing turn raw data into actionable insights.

AI is the modern term for better, faster, stronger, and more accurate, of course.

How to Apply AI Marketing

AI used in digital marketing will make your campaigns more successful. Now, let’s see how to apply this approach for the best results.

Get AI-Powered Customer Insights with Social Listening

Social listening is an approach that involves finding out what users are saying about your business or the market in general and improving your marketing and other techniques to ‘catch the wave’ of potential customers.

Tracking mentions and keywords manually may be daunting, but thankfully, you can use AI in digital marketing for that.

AI-powered social listening tools enable you to see brand mentions, industry trends, how well people respond to your offers, etc. This allows you to see potential pitfalls and react quickly.

Sprinklr dashboard
Source: Sprinklr

One such solution is Sprinklr. It provides the opportunity to discover what people are talking about in up to 500 million daily conversations. The software structures the data and shows you actionable insights so that you can start improving your brand immediately.

Discover Insights into Top-Performing Content for Further Content Optimization

Content is everywhere on your website and social media channels. Some pages work well, while others need optimization ASAP. If you try to track performance manually, it will take too much time and effort.

AI-powered solutions can crawl your website in a short time, pinpointing issues regarding how web design affects SEO and other on-page issues that undermine your success. They also research your direct competition, looking for gaps in your strategy. 

By working on search engine optimization, you’re helping your pages to rank higher in Google and other search engines, resulting in more high-quality traffic and, eventually, more loyal customers.

SE Ranking on-page SEO analysis dashboard
Source: SE Ranking

Solutions like SE Ranking’s on-page SEO analysis can help you. The new AI checker surfs through your competitors, looking for things you can improve on your pages. The checker will help you optimize or re-optimize content according to:

  • The usage of heading tags
  • Structure quality
  • Length
  • Uniqueness
  • Meta titles and description tags
  • Keyword usage 
  • and more

The tool uses a complex approach to show you the pages that bring the most traffic to the site and potential issues with the pages that don’t perform as well. The data is visualized for your convenience, and an intuitive interface offers not just data but also actionable insights.

Measure ROI by Channels and Campaigns

Measuring ROI by channels and campaigns provides better insight into the marketing approaches that work and which don’t. By eliminating the channels that don’t bring enough return on investment and redirecting the money to more profitable channels, you’ll save finances and reach more people interested in your offers.

For that, you need AI marketing analytics. Such a solution will help you:

  • Understand your target audience(s)
  • Monitor customer behavior and trends
  • See what the audience likes
  • Plan future campaigns wisely

The data on ROI will show you where your perfect buyer interacts with your offers, how they do it, and whether there are channels that should be deleted from your future marketing campaigns.

Looker marketing analytics tool
Source: Looker

Looker is a platform for this, offering ROI data and extensive information on your customers. The insights help you find upsell opportunities, tailor marketing messaging to the needs and behaviors of potential buyers, etc. In the dashboard, you’ll see the return per ad, conversion cost, CPC (cost per click), CTR (click-through rate), and more!

Adapt Audience Targeting Based on Behavior and Lookalike Analysis

Creating an approximate buyer profile to target your ads isn’t enough nowadays. You have to know the search intent of your target audience and its overall online behavior.

Where do they hang out? What type of content do they consume? Cookies seemed to provide answers to many of these questions. AI marketing has a more sophisticated approach that improves privacy and offers effective results.

One great example of such a use of AI is Google. As the search engine giant announced that third-party cookies would die by 2022, it also mentioned that a new AI-powered solution would gather data and store it to build predictions and accommodate proper targeting.

One of Google’s patents shows that users’ temporal data may be used in the future to better targeted ads. This means that more attention will be paid to what a user is doing at a specific moment rather than data collection over some period of time.

Forecast Campaign Results Based on Predictive Analysis

The predictive analysis forecasts are based on machine learning skills, existing statistics, and data models. You can use it to plan future campaigns and peek into the future results of existing campaigns.

By using artificial intelligence in marketing in the form of predictions, you can make well-informed decisions on media buying and understand the success or failure of your marketing campaigns.

Predictive analysis helps to:

  • Understand consumer behavior better based on past actions
  • Identify audiences more clearly to get more high-quality leads and prioritize them properly 
  • Optimize the budget and focus on the best-working ad channels
  • Retain existing buyers who can become loyal advocates of your brand
Emarsys AI-powered analytic
Source: Emarsys

With a powerful marketing analytics tool, you can process large amounts of data, structure it, find patterns, and make predictions. Doing this increases your chances of a higher ROI and more high-quality leads from each campaign. Information makes you powerful, so beating the competition requires valuable insight into the market, its fluctuations, and common patterns.

AI and machine learning will gladly help you with that.

Increase Conversion Chances with Chatbots

Chatbots may be the most talked about thing when it comes to AI. Initially, they may not have been that useful, but nowadays, you can actually guide a person to purchase using intelligent AI-powered chatbots.

Usually, several answers are needed for the algorithm to understand what products the person wants. This makes the sales process shorter since the user doesn’t need to suffer the burden of looking, matching, and considering.

Bringing purchase opportunities to the inbox of a potential buyer may increase the conversion rate. And the good news is that you don’t need a lot of knowledge or effort to create a chatbot for your business.

Landbot chatbot builder
Source: Landbot

Landbot offers users the possibility to build a website or WhatsApp bot with no coding experience. Neat, friendly bots will enhance the customer experience and nudge leads into buyers. You can design a unique chatbot logically and make them visually appealing with no code. Templates are available.

You can shift conversations to human operators whenever you need, offering a smooth experience. Besides, with lots of integration possibilities, you can get real-time data about conversations from the bot. 

Additional analytics tools offer the ability to compile reports, set and achieve goals, and analyze conversations that were abandoned.

Ask if AI Marketing Solves Your Business Problems

As you learn more about artificial intelligence in marketing, identify your business problems, set clear goals for resolving them, and available research solutions. Eventually, you’ll have to make a well-informed decision on whether or not you need such an approach.

AI is very effective but is an investment, so you must plan your budget carefully. Prioritize your problems and see if artificial intelligence can help you solve them as soon as possible.

Advanced tech is connected to the business world more than you may think. So, you’ll encounter AI sooner or later on your way to company promotion or expansion.

If you choose to step into the future now, consider your choice of solutions. To narrow down the list and ensure you pick the right tools, prioritize the main channels where you’ll need AI-powered solutions.

Also, as you start using AI marketing, create an AI ethics statement and act accordingly. When you use powerful tech ethically, you garner loyalty and support from your employees and current and potential customers (if you choose to post it online). Emphasize data safety and transparency in the statement.

Conclusion

AI marketing comes in various shapes and sizes. It could be an intuitive chatbot, an AI-powered SEO solution, or an algorithm gathering and analyzing specific data types. Your job is to research the market, pinpoint your business problems, and match them with the proper solutions.

As a result, you’ll launch more successful campaigns, increase their ROI, and get to know your perfect buyer better. 

Be sure to take care of technicalities. It’s important for your reputation as a trustworthy business and for employees and customers. Wise use of powerful AI will only benefit your company, but be careful regarding data safety.

The world is moving swiftly into the future. Make sure you keep up!