AI and the Marketing Revolution

Digital marketing is experiencing substantial changes in the last few years due to the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI). A report shows that over 60% of companies with an innovation strategy are using AI to identify opportunities in data they would have missed otherwise.

But the new technology goes way beyond strategic decision-making because it helps businesses to improve and automate everyday marketing activities. This is why more and more people talk about the AI-induced marketing evolution these days.

But what is it that makes AI so powerful? How is this new force able to revolutionize an industry that has been more or less resistant to changes for decades? We will answer these questions in our post and present you eight facts about AI in the marketing revolution. Let’s take a look!

What is AI?

Before we delve deeper into the subject, we want to explain the background of AI. According to the Merriam Webster definition, Artificial Intelligence represents the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behaviour.

Although AI is not able to simulate human brain operations to the fullest extent, it is able to achieve the highest level of productivity in specific areas. But as it runs on a much bigger hardware, AI has the power to conduct countless times more calculations per second than humans.

This feature is what makes AI so important in all fields of work, including digital marketing. This is why we are now talking about revolution – it’s a fundamental and radical change that shakes the very foundations of digital marketing.

If you don’t believe us, just take a look at this stat: over 40% of digital transformation initiatives as well as 100% of the Internet of Things initiatives will be by AI supported in 2019. The technology is almost too good to be true, giving marketers the opportunity to change and enhance everyday processes extremely quickly.

How AI Changes Digital Marketing

We told you that the new technology is revolutionizing digital marketing, but now it is time to answer the most important question: How does AI do that? There are many ways machine intelligence is influencing contemporary business, but we will present you the eight most significant implications here:

1. Content marketing automation:

Marketers often say that “content is king” because it helps companies to raise awareness, generate new leads, and drive conversions eventually. However, creating quality content is time-consuming as it takes an entire team of professional authors in order to keep the same rhythm of publishing week after week.

AI is making things much simpler by planning, scheduling, and even creating content independently. For instance, The Washington Post already uses neural language processing to automate a small portion of news articles, mostly stories they weren’t going to dedicate staff to anyway.

Analysing the already existing content, AI can come up with a trendy topic, create a compelling headline, and write a meaningful article. As a matter of fact, the average user cannot distinguish between posts written by smart machines and human reporters. This basically means that content creation is gradually becoming faster, more accurate, and cost-efficient.

2. Content visualization:

If there is one thing that users love more than good old textual content, it’s visual content. People process photos and videos much faster than plain text, which makes their experience easier and more efficient. This is where AI steps in to make marketing content even more visual than before.

How come? Well, AI can augment the existing content by adding new features to the image or video in real-time. Here’s a simple example: remember all those filters hidden inside your smartphone camera? It’s just an AI adding new layers of information to your images. Besides that, AI is capable of doing much more in terms of content visualization.

For example, Blippar uses Augmented Reality to improve customer experience. The process is simple but very effective – users point their smartphone cameras toward a real-world object and the app shows digital content right on top. That way, users receive additional content-related information to get an all-encompassing experience.

3. Predictive analytics:

Business intelligence is probably the single most important benefit of AI in the marketing revolution. Users leave all sorts of digital traces around the World Wide Web, so the only real issue is how to make use of gigantic data volumes to improve your marketing strategy.

Let’s say that you are dealing with a fan base that counts 50 thousand prospects. In such circumstances, handling all information sources and predicting behavioural patterns single-handedly is almost impossible. But with AI at your disposal, you can take predictive analytics to the whole new level. This is what you can do:

Detect new trends:

Predicting the next big thing in your niche is the best way to stay one step ahead of competitors. AI can analyse users’ behavioural patterns and figure out their future needs, so you gain advantage instantly.

Detect pain points:

Another way to improve user experience is by detecting and eliminating pain points from the customer journey. AI draws meaningful conclusions out of seemingly unrelated information, highlights the weaknesses of your service, and suggests the necessary corrections.

Personalize content:

AI marked the era of hyper-personalization, which means companies can offer tailored content to their consumers. This is exactly how Netflix saves around $1 billion a year: it uses AI-powered personalized recommendations to eliminate inaccuracies.

4. AI improves the customer experience

Customer experience is critical to business success, so it’s necessary to answer user inquiries as quickly as possible. Companies interact with their clients through various channels of communication, but live chat proved to be the most impactful medium in the last few years.

Now you don’t have to worry about having a thousand or 10 thousand inquiries on a daily basis. The service relies on AI-powered chatbots that answer questions almost instantly and keep getting smarter with each conversation.

Chatbots store the entire history of communication, so they don’t need to ask for the same information time and again. Besides that, comprehensive live chat data storage gives sales representatives more than enough material to work with when addressing a prospect.

5. Product information:

How many times have you heard consumers asking around about the basic product information? They want to know the origin, ingredients, and conditions in which the product has been manufactured. For this reason, some companies already developed AI-based apps to display all of these information in real-time.

While shopping in a store, customers can point a smartphone camera toward an object and the app shows what it’s made of and where it comes from. The other solution is to help people choose the best product by augmenting reality – IKEA Place is an iPhone app that allows you to virtually position furniture in your living room and see how it fits there.

This kind of AI usage in marketing completely changes customer experience, making it better and more convenient. In other words, it’s yet another link in the chain of the marketing revolution.

6. Voice search optimization

According to the study, 50% of all searches will be voice-based search inquiries by 2020. It’s a major SEO trend that would be impossible without the use of AI.

The system is designed so as to answer the basic 5W+H questions. Namely, voice commands almost always start with one of these questions: Who did what, where, when, why, or how? AI is able to process searches immediately and give answers that don’t differ from text-based search results.

This process is not only changing marketing as such, but it also affects user behaviour. Content consumption is getting increasingly vocal, speeding up the rate at which people can find answers to their inquiries.

7. Reporting:

Most marketers are dealing with thousands of followers, multiple communication channels, and all sorts of campaigns and content creation activities. In such circumstances, reporting is everything but a simple task for a small (or big) marketing unit.

AI solves this problem by automating intelligence processes. Quill is only one example of an intelligent automation platform that allows enterprise organizations to transform reporting workflows with natural language generation. Using a product like this, companies get:

Accelerated business insights followed by plain but effective commentary

Strategic improvements that lead to highly targeted marketing activities

Time saving since marketing teams don’t have to deal with huge data volumes to make reports

8. The death of content marketing:

The last item on our list is not exactly a fact, but it’s really not that difficult to predict the future of content marketing. Namely, AI will soon be able to overtake a vast majority of content creation processes and make an incredible amount of new posts.

Overproduction will naturally create a noise in the digital universe, so users won’t be able to distinguish between meaningful and irrelevant content. They will stop paying attention to online content and it will eventually become obsolete.

Conclusion

AI is changing the way we live and do business. It’s been around for decades already, but it has become so advanced that it revolutionizes almost every aspect of life and work. Marketing is not an exception here since the entire industry is going through major changes thanks to AI-based technologies.

In this post, we explained the power of AI and showed you eight facts about AI in the marketing revolution. Which fact do you consider to be the most important? Do you have other valuable insights to share with our readers? Let us know in comments as we would be glad to discuss this exciting topic with you!

Featured image by Sean Batty on Pixabay