Exploring the Potential of AI in Digital Marketing and How Brands Are Doing It

Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing is a leading-edge technology duo, constantly thriving with the increasing technological trends. Addressing everyday challenges, it is bringing back-to-back innovations to ease the lives of both consumers and businesses.

2022 Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies emphasizes that CIOs highlight the need for accelerated AI automation models.

In the next 2-5 years, AI innovations will primarily concentrate on data-centric, model-centric, applications-centric, and human-centric solutions. These additional capabilities will expedite the adoption of AI-driven systems in the digital sphere.

Stakeholders across industries are already implementing AI across all key segments. However, its fullest utilization still needs to be tapped, especially in Digital Marketing.

• Digital marketing evolved post-pandemic in late-2019

Digital Marketing witnessed a sudden surge in the past few years, particularly during the pandemic. From small to medium and large-sized businesses, the inclination towards digital marketing skyrocketed in all aspects. As technology adoption among customers reached a new high, businesses shifted to digital marketing to reach their customers where they spend most of their time.

The budget-friendly and fast tech stack of Digital Marketing is immensely helping businesses to generate better ROI. On top of it, AI Digital Marketing boosts the customer success ratio and maximizes overall business revenue.

Let us understand the relationship between Artificial Intelligence and Digital Marketing.

What is AI?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) empowers computer-controlled systems to operate exactly like humans. And improve learning experiences through cognitive capabilities.

Its core functioning depends on complex and deeper processes like Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning.

Notably, AI is becoming a significant contributor to the global economy. By 2030, its market potential could reach $15.7 trillion, augmenting the GDPs of national economies to 26%.

Undoubtedly, a massive paradigm shift is underway.

AI adoption is dramatically increasing as companies use AI to automate business operations, online marketing campaign personalization, and data analytics.

Specifically, in marketing, AI valuation grow to $107.54 Billion by 2028. The reason is that AI is greatly refining two critical parameters – promotion and advertising campaigns and customer response models.

From email sequences throughout the sales funnel to optimizing display ads and automated CRM, the concept of AI Digital Marketing is revamping businesses. It helps industry experts market the “right” products or services to the “right” people with the “right” channels.  

Moreover, AR/VR capabilities in AI are fortifying Digital Marketing efforts, especially in eCommerce, healthcare, gaming, and entertainment industries.

Across the board, Digital Marketing with AI combines valued services with profitability. It helps companies deeply connect with their potential customers and improve digital marketing campaigns.

Also read: Understanding The Role of AI in Big Data [and Vice-versa]

What is Digital Marketing?

It involves utilizing technology and digital platforms to market and distribute products or services, effectively reaching a wide audience through diverse avenues such as email, social media, search engines, and websites.

Digital marketing is crucial to a business’s marketing strategy, allowing businesses to connect with customers online. By using digital marketing, businesses can create a connection with their customers that is both personal and immediate.

It is an online version of marketing that encompasses digital channels to advertise brands. Though the fundamentals of digital marketing are similar to traditional marketing, the strategies, workflow, promotional campaigns, and skillsets are entirely different.

Digital channels include websites, social media platforms, online messaging apps, emails, podcasts, digital billboards, and many more. On a broader level, Digital Marketing is also famous as internet or online marketing.

Today, Digital Marketing is booming at its peak because users of all ages heavily rely on Internet media.  There are 5.03 Billion internet users, which covers approximately 63.1% of the global population. Concurrently, out of them, 4.7 Billion are social media users, equivalent to 59% of the worldwide population. 

It is, therefore, evident that digital marketing is critical for businesses of all sizes in the present scenario. Whether the business model is B2B, B2C, or D2C, it helps to reach the target audience economically and efficiently.

Above all, Digital Marketing facilitates an omnichannel customer experience. It strengthens brand reputation, reduces return rates, amplifies customer retention, and eventually drives sales.

It includes various forms of marketing, such as content, social media, search engine optimization, automation, native advertising, and influencer collaboration. These come together to contribute towards overall online marketing success.

• Digital Marketing with AI

Digital marketing incorporates many internal and external processes that require human-like tech support. Integrating AI-powered solutions in the current marketing framework increases the effectiveness of a company’s digital marketing efforts while also providing desired business outcomes.

Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing prominently helps in –

• Streamlining end-to-end content creation, curation, distribution, and associated operations
• Improving customer interaction with the use of smart chatbots and virtual assistants
• Creating hyper-personalized experiences throughout the customer journey
• Targeted advertising based on customers’ demographics and buying behavior
• Generating predictive analytics for devising strategies and better decision-making
• Facilitating intelligent search technologies via image recognition and voice search

Role of Al in Digital Marketing

Artificial intelligence in digital marketing is a total game-changer regarding scalability and precision. While significant investment is made in digital marketing, directionless advertisement is highly likely. Some of the major problems that companies mostly face after launching a digital marketing campaign are:

• They cannot find who all are watching the advertisement and clicking on the CTA’s or willing to know more. If the CTR (click-through rate) is 1%, it is not easy to find out why 99% of the audience is ignoring the advertisement. Advertising to the wrong target audience can make a huge gap in the marketing campaign’s effectiveness.
• The same advertisement being displayed multiple times to the same user becomes annoying. Gradually, it gets a negative impact irrespective of how interesting the product is.
• The irrelevant content display is another major challenge in digital marketing. For instance, if a viewer watches an academic tutorial and is interrupted by an advertisement for a beauty product, the content seems irrelevant. The same goes for a website where different banner advertisements not related to the content are displayed.

 Can AI in digital marketing solve these digital marketing problems?  

AI or artificial intelligence is a critical algorithm that works on trial and error mechanisms to understand distinct human behavior precisely. Marketing is all about understanding the consumer mindset. It helps predict demand, comprehend consumer reactions, and fulfill customer needs.

A clear understanding of consumer behavior allows marketers to showcase the best their brand can offer. Reaching the right audience and making the brand worth remembering without annoying them is critical. 

The role of AI in marketing is becoming more crucial as the competition is increasing daily.

Here’s how Artificial Intelligence and digital marketing are coming together to assist marketers and business owners:

• Online Advertising

Whenever someone is shopping or casually scrolling through applications, online window shopping is on their favorite list. Digital marketers consider it as a golden opportunity to showcase products.

AI companies can reach the right audience through programmatic advertising using a user’s search history and shopping trends. Only relevant advertisements are pushed to the consumer to increase the chances of conversion.

The above example showcases personalized recommendations and advertisements based on previous searches.

• AI-Powered Chatbots

Chatbots are one of the most important examples of the combined power of artificial intelligence and digital marketing. It can attend to several website visitors and respond to general queries. They are also useful to qualify leads and potential customers from the huge website traffic.

• AI-Powered Website Builders

Websites and applications are imperative to run or bring a physical business online. Businesses can easily make websites using automated tools like Wix ADI or FireDrop. While all the technical development is AI-generated, marketers can focus more on content optimization.

As the process gets more modern, the concept of ai digital marketing can help develop a website according to the brand, business theme, and product category.

The website can also be upgraded with custom offers and catalogs for a more personalized experience. These AI tools make online businesses and digital marketing more accessible to users.

• Personalized Recommendations

While scrolling through any application or opening websites, users may find many similar products to the one they were searching for. Based on user history and current search, recommendations are made.

It helps in brand visibility and promotes the products indirectly using marketing artificial intelligence. It also boosts sales as customers get attracted to better offers shown in personalized recommendations.

These recommendations are based on their buying habits and product preferences. The overall shopping experience can be enhanced by combining AR & VR capabilities with marketing artificial intelligence.

With the use of augmented reality, users can see how they look in a dress or a lip color by uploading their picture alongside the chosen product.

• Predictive Analysis

In the current business scenario, making decisions based on data is essential. Data-driven marketing has become one of the key focus for marketers. AI in digital marketing helps to gather more data about prospects and customers via different sources, including chatbots, survey forms, and popups.

The collected data is analyzed to predict their expectations and future behavior.

It is useful to develop better campaigns and send targeted messages. With the help of marketing artificial intelligence, it is possible to deliver dynamic content by churn prediction.

AI can find which posts or emails a user generally reads, so it pushes the product to suitable customers only. Businesses can, therefore, focus their resources on areas that matter the most and eventually achieve greater ROI.

Also read: How to Perform Social Sentiment Analysis?

• Marketing Campaigns

Different marketing campaigns like email marketing, Facebook marketing, and content optimization are crucial for digital marketing. Marketers can use AI to strategize customer-centric campaigns.

Developing personalized content for target customers takes a lot of research and time. AI can generate modified content for marketing and save a lot of time.

Pursuing an artificial intelligence in digital marketing course helps marketers use the tools efficiently.

• Lead Scoring and Segmentation

For any business, generating leads and converting them into customers is vital. With the help of AI and machine learning, businesses can score leads based on certain parameters such as interactions with previous emails, website visits, content downloaded, etc.

By doing this, they can identify which leads are ready to be converted and take necessary actions accordingly.

Segmenting customers is another important aspect of digital marketing. Businesses can better target customers with relevant content and improve conversion rates by dividing them into small groups based on certain criteria.

With the help of machine learning, this process can be automated and made more accurate, resulting in increased ROI for businesses.

Benefits of AI in Digital Marketing

Now, you might wonder, is artificial intelligence in digital marketing the future? And if so, what are the key advantages of investing in AI for businesses? 

So, the key benefits of AI in digital marketing are: 

• Better customer understanding

With artificial intelligence, it is possible to track complex human behavior, and based on that, it is feasible to make necessary improvements in the offered product or service.

Considering artificial intelligence in digital marketing course is a breakthrough for marketers. They can learn how to use AI to target their customers better.

While it would take more time and effort to research and conduct surveys manually to know customer preferences, AI can conduct it with real-time data.

• Precise personalization

The last point explains that better customer understanding brings precision to personalized content.  Gradually, artificial intelligence in digital marketing can be used to learn and optimize someone’s behavior frequently.

So, the problem of irrelevant content would decrease. According to recent search results, advertisements would also be customized to avoid negative marketing. 

• Real-time analytics

This is a key benefit of artificial intelligence. Most companies using AI save a lot of resources as AI makes it convenient to know the most recent market trends.

As a customer’s preference changes, AI can track that accordingly. For example, push notifications that can be sent to a customer in case of cart abandonment. 

• Predictive scrutiny

Prediction makes the user experience better and more satisfying. So, the role of AI in marketing is primarily to make better predictions to understand what the customer is looking for.

To boost sales, it is important to make the user feel worthy. With the real-time data collected, calculated marketing steps are performed along with artificial intelligence in digital marketing course. 

• Dynamic sales

Real-time analysis helps to decide what content to deliver and when to deliver it. A combination of artificial intelligence and digital marketing can decide dynamic content based on user behavior.

With artificial intelligence, it is possible to track the market demand, availability, and whether a customer is willing to purchase something without a discount. Based on the result, dynamic offers with content and pricing can be made.

Without AI, it is nearly impossible to know customers’ buying habits, and gradually, a business may face loss. 

• Automated content creation

Content creation has always been a challenge in marketing. Marketers face difficulty optimizing content, and creating personalized content requires more time based on different parameters.

AI in digital marketing tracks open communication in social media posts, search history, and buying habits and then delivers planned content.

How are Companies using Al for Digital Marketing?

AI is omnipresent! It is widely used among numerous platforms, from food delivery apps to OTT platforms. Currently, AI is introduced in digital marketing as well. It is gradually becoming more popular with every passing day.

Some years back, marketers hesitated to include Artificial intelligence in digital marketing. But fast forward to 2021, and many digital marketing companies are using AI to achieve their goals. They can achieve desired results quite effortlessly.

This is because AI plays a significant role in analyzing and simplifying mundane tasks. It has also helped various companies and organizations understand customers’ needs, increasing customer satisfaction.

A look at the advertisement below from Amazon Go will help you feel the power of AI in marketing

 

Contrary to popular belief, artificial intelligence is not introduced to replace jobs but to increase productivity and efficiency while saving time.

Applications of AI in Digital Marketing

• Predictive Chatbots

Chatbots are one of those things that probably come to mind when you hear about artificial intelligence in digital marketing. It has significantly helped various companies in their day-to-day tasks. The bots learn from interaction with new customers and conclude what makes a good conversation. Then, they take up these insights to improvise future conversations.

Therefore, chatbots are a company’s biggest customer service tool. They help answer customers’ queries and solve problems instantly. It is also a beneficial sales tool that ensures your visitors turn into customers. ChatMate, ManyChat, and Mobile Monkey are some of the popular bots.

• Assistance in Marketing

In the field of marketing, marketers try to create content that attracts their potential customers. Based on previous data, artificial intelligence in digital marketing can establish the most relevant content to bring customers back to the site. It tracks how much time customers spend on a piece of content and provides insights about what works best for the targeted customer segment.

Also Read: Time Series Analysis and Forecasting for Data Prediction

AI can easily identify which customer will most likely unsubscribe from a particular service and examines the constantly unsubscribed features. Marketers can use these analytics to strategize for upcoming campaigns and implement techniques that encourage customer retention.

• Retain Existing Customers

Existing customers are more likely to re-purchase from the same brand than to purchase from a completely different company. So, keeping customers satisfied is a sure short pathway to guaranteed success. Many businesses rely on subscriptions; customer satisfaction is the most crucial part of their business.

By analyzing past behavior, preferences, and interactions, AI can help marketers understand each customer individually. This allows for more personalized and targeted marketing messages that are more certain to resonate with each customer, keeping them engaged with the brand.

AI can also help identify which customers are at risk of leaving and why so that marketers can take action to prevent them from unsubscribing.

• Personalization

We come across websites that initially ask for some details about the visitor. That is artificial intelligence trying to determine the user’s purpose on the website.

The probability of turning a consumer into a customer is much higher when the consumer is provided with exactly what he/she is looking for. With the advent of AI in digital marketing, personalization has become a lot easier.

It works by understanding the customer’s preferences, likes, and dislikes. By which marketers can provide consumers with a personalized experience.

• AI-Generated Content

AI tools can write articles and generate engaging content for consumers. However, the most important factor, creativity, lies in the hands of marketers, but they can guide artificial intelligence to create content as needed.

Marketers can only use these tools to increase website engagement through their blogs. These tools can benefit you if you write data-focused stories like market data or sports-related topics.

Examples of Companies using Al for Digital Marketing

Let’s look at a few examples of companies using AI for digital marketing: 

• Starbucks

Businesses that utilize predictive analytics to discern customer requirements can achieve a yearly boost of 21% in their natural revenue. This contrasts with the average growth rate of 12% witnessed in the absence of predictive analytics.

Starbucks is a brand that uses its loyalty card and mobile app to gather and analyze customer data. They announced the plans for personalization back in 2016.

Ever since then, they have built a seamless app experience. It records the details of purchases, including where and when they are made.

Starbucks uses predictive analytics to process this data and provide customers with personalized marketing messages.

The messages generally include recommendations when a user approaches a local store and provides special offers to elevate the customer’s average order value. For instance, Starbucks remembers your preference whenever you open the app or visit the store. 

• Unilever 

Unilever, one of the consumer goods companies, uses AI data centers worldwide to synthesize insights from multiple sources. It includes traditional marketing research, CRM, and social listening.

With the help of technology, Unilever discovered a link between breakfast and ice cream. At least 50 songs in the public domain include the lyrics “ice cream for breakfast,” and companies like Dunkin’ Donuts are already selling ice cream in the morning.

Unilever concluded these insights and developed many cereals flavored ice creams for Ben & Jerry’s, launched new flavors in 2017 following the user insights they gathered.

• Ada

Ada has developed an automation platform based on Artificial Intelligence to establish strong bonds between brands and customers.

Ada’s reliable technology helps you develop audience segments, initiate timely notifications, connect with consumers across several platforms, and tailor content to target audiences. 

Now, the companies that rely on Ada’s technology can provide 24/7 service and simplify mundane tasks while refining their outbound messaging strategies.

FAQs:

• How is artificial intelligence utilized in digital marketing?

Various brands across the globe have utilized Artificial Intelligence in digital marketing to interact with their target audience.

Artificial Intelligence can develop simulation models and tailor purchasing processes by leveraging suggestions and predictions generated by Machine Learning (machine learning technology). For example, companies like Amazon use AI to suggest products based on their previous purchase and page views.

Businesses understand the competitive opportunities to apply AI insights to achieve business goals. They also consider it a priority across the board to take its maximum benefits. For example, the targeted AI advice can assist establishments to make better decisions speedily. Many of AI’s traits and capacities can result in decreased risks, lower prices, minimal time to market, and more.

With AI, you can also digitize your mundane tasks. This will assist you in increasing your productivity and efficiency. It also assists businesses in raising revenue as well as reducing costs.

• Is artificial intelligence part of digital marketing?

Artificial intelligence is a significant part of digital marketing and has changed how brands interact with customers. It also helps in managing marketing campaigns. Since the rise of AI in digital marketing, the marketing landscape has been reshaped dramatically.

AI assists businesses in developing effective digital strategies, optimizing campaigns, and increasing return on investments. It has considerably influenced many facets of life through self-driving automobiles, chatbots, and smart devices. These intend to identify the customer preferences and interests and provide customized customer experience accordingly.