Artificial intelligence (AI) is currently shaping and disrupting the world of digital marketing.
Digitally advanced and progressive organizations are utilising advantageous AI tools and software to better their marketing efforts and focus on customer delight.
Here are 5 ways in which AI is helping marketers improve their customer experience, build brands and bring in more revenue –
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – How many times have you tried the ‘Hey Google, coffee shops near me?’ search or How often have you misspelt a word and the search algorithm have provided suggestions of other search results? Search algorithms, business listings and integrated AI are becoming the smart way of SEO efforts.
AI helps marketers to understand search patterns, and customer intent, and analyse search history for refined recommendations. Similarly, voice search is gaining increasing popularity. AI interprets the speech patterns, understand the meaning of the queries, and improves site traffic through voice search optimizations.
- Content creation – AI-powered software help marketers generate content on a real-time basis, conduct basic research, and provide writing suggestions. AI-generated content gives companies the opportunity to scale up content generation. For those companies for whom real-time data updation is required such as newspaper publications, AI-generated real-time content helps them to ramp up the speed and saves time of the content writer in gathering information & collating it in a news article. For example, Washington Post’s Heliograf.
The AI software also helps to understand the current trending topics, widely used keywords, consumer preferences, and popular search phrases. This helps the content writers to generate content targeted towards a specific set of customers and allows customization of the content marketing efforts. These software also give writing recommendations, check for grammatical errors, and give suggestions to make the text SEO friendly.
- Chatbots – Chatbots or any other messaging platforms like WhatsApp or Meta messenger are gaining popularity and customers are getting comfortable with such interactions. These chatbots can be programmed to answer the FAQs, thus saving the time of the salesperson in answering mundane questions and focusing more on personalized messaging. Chatbots also prove to be an effective first step in nurturing a lead before handing it over to the sales executive.
A Gartner customer service and support (CSS) survey in 2022 revealed that 54% of respondents use some form of chatbots, VCA, or other conversational AI platform for customer-facing applications.
- Email marketing – AI software and search engine algorithms help marketers understand their customers, their preferences, thought processes, behaviour patterns, and search patterns. This information helps companies build a marketing strategy that is best suited for their customer groups. While using email marketing to generate a customer funnel, marketers can make use of the software data to improve their email marketing performance metrics, get subject line recommendations, and predictive text, gauge the tonality, check grammar & spelling, and decide the relevancy of the audience.
5. Predictive analytics – Data, statistical techniques, and machine learning, all these tools collect, process, and analyse data received through digital channels to drive meaningful insights. The data pertaining to customers is of importance t marketers to decide the content & overall marketing strategy to best suit their audience. AI allows marketers to identify patterns, gauge behavioural patterns, and understand potential customers based on various parameters. This reduces the time and human effort of pouring over thousands of data points, preparing countless excel sheets and drawing conclusions from high data volume.
The possibilities of AI in digital marketing go beyond what is explored today. These AI technology and tools help marketers stay relevant in the business and embracing the change denotes progress.
Understanding the trends and changes in the digital marketing industry is necessary for one to be a success in the industry.
With the aim of creating holistic marketers that are well-versed with all the platforms and latest trends possessing a problem-solving attitude, MIT School of Distance Education offers Post Graduate Certificate (PGCM) course in Digital Marketing. This short-term course covers not only the basics of digital marketing but also focuses on the application of strategies & analytics.