Artificial Intelligence Amazing Benefits of AI in Digital Marketing for Online Businesses

Have you ever pondered upon the idea of AI taking over the marketing world? Are robots really that efficient to take over marketing activities? AI in digital marketing is creating ripples beyond imagination. 

Where AI is contributing towards automating different marketing activities, it is also reshaping how digital marketers determine and contextualize user-intent, user journeys and buying cycles. 

In a rapidly changing digital marketing environment, AI is advanced enough to keep up the pace and complete complex tasks. It can do complex activities in minutes which would otherwise take years by a human. 

AI essentially deep dives into user behaviors based on the online user data. It determines user preferences, likes and dislikes, their interests, and buying intent. Ultimately, marketers can hyper-target their marketing efforts and become more effective in converting ROI with the help of AI. 

AI in digital marketing is bringing transformation in the following ways

AI For Improved Recommendations 

Consumer’s reaction to marketing messages is changing. The conventional marketing strategies involving direct mails and traditional advertising are no longer as effective as they used to be.

As consumers become more aware of what they need, the effectiveness of generalized traditional marketing messages is reduced. 

Now, consumers are more inclined towards reading personalized messages and following call to actions. Non personalized marketing messages are as good as nothing in the modern digital marketing landscape.  

Accenture^[1], a management consulting firm, reports that more than 40% of consumers change brands. The reason is to find better trust and personalization in newer options. Similarly, other reports also state personalization is a crucial factor in making purchase decisions. 43% of consumers buy from brands that personalize products based on consumer’s needs.

When it comes to crafting marketing messages, personalization is gaining more importance. Consumers are more inclined to interact with personalized marketing messages. Generic marketing messages kill the marketing campaigns, be it emails or promotion campaigns.

Personalized marketing messages bumps email open rate by 26%. Marketo reports that consumers are more likely to follow brand promotions which include personalization based on past interactions.

AI Understands Consumers Quickly

So, how can marketers achieve such levels of personalization in a shorter time?

The answer lies in AI.

AI deep dives into past consumer behaviors across various digital platforms. It identifies common points of interest in a consumer’s buying journey. Based on this learning, AI efficiently makes product suggestions and recommendations to consumers at the right time. This whole mechanism has an accurate timing. The right timing can potentially turn a lead into a customer and a customer into a repeat customer.

AI helps marketers to understand the customer’s behavior, preferences, and interests. Thus, it can deliver personalized content that will be relevant for them.

AI in E-Commerce Digital Marketing

For e-commerce store owners, AI can suggest products to customers based on their previous purchases and browsing history. These suggestions increase consumer’s chances of buying more from the same e-commerce brand.

It also helps marketers to identify the right time when a customer is ready to buy a product or service. This way, they can provide timely offers that are likely to convert into sales.

Have you ever made a purchase for, let’s say pet food on Amazon and ended up seeing pet accessories in your product suggestions the next day?

Well, thanks to AI. These suggestions are based on past user experiences from other customers. It is very likely that you, as a customer, will end up buying pet accessories and other related products.

Similarly, service-based e-commerce models, like Netflix, also use AI to improve viewer recommendations. Netflix uses AI to recommend shows, movies and series to viewers. These recommendations are based on their likes, past viewing history and inclination towards certain genres.

AI Recommendation Engines

AI Powered recommendation engines have extended their use into websites, service-based platforms and e-commerce product-based platforms alike.

Over the years, these recommendation engines have become increasingly sophisticated – thanks to increased data sets and advancement in AI. Owing to their sophistication, these recommendation engines are making startlingly accurate recommendations. The accuracy is increased especially for those users who have been affiliated with a particular platform for some years.

AI in Netflix

Netflix uses AI based recommendation engines to customize the following display elements for the user:

1. The Thumbnail or Icon of the movie, show or series on main page. Netflix displays artwork which is more likely to get more clicks from users

2. Optimized Streaming Quality for the viewer based on the speed of their internet connection

3. Tailored Recommendations for viewers based on their likes and past viewing history

2. AI for Personalized Marketing Messages

As discussed previously, personalized messages are effective in spurring brand interest and recognition in business leads. Without personalized messaging, hitting the target audience is less efficient and costly for any business.

Thanks to AI, you can create personalized marketing messages for your brand visitors.

Personalization is another important part of any marketing strategy. If you want to attract more customers, you need to send them personalized messages speaking directly to their needs.

But creating these messages manually takes a lot of time and effort! That’s why using AI can be very helpful here too! You just need to give it access to your database with customer information (like name, email address, etc.). AI will do the rest.

AI will analyze your database and create personalized messages for each customer. It helps in avoiding the costly generic targeting of masses. Therefore, it optimizes the marketing messages to convert the right leads into customers.

AI and machine learning algorithms enable marketers to hyper-personalize the customer experience through personalized recommendations and messages. It helps to directly hit viewers’ interest and turn them into customers.

AI in Automated Digital Marketing:

Copy pasting the same marketing message across all marketing channels, including social media, newsletters, marketing email lists and blogs is as hectic as anything.

Digital marketing firms can now simplify this complex process of delivering marketing messages to different targets through automated marketing. AI powered automated marketing enables you to ramp things up. It automates marketing message delivery across various platforms with just a click.

AI in digital marketing automation software has improved marketing productivity. Digital marketers can automate repetitive tasks and free up time to do things that require more “human” involvement.

AI in digital marketing automation also enables you to hit the right type of audience at the right time. Thus, it enables consistent communication with leads and improves conversion rates to get maximum ROI.

AI powered marketing automation is used for responding to customer queries, personalizing customer interactions, tracking and improving buyer journeys. It is also useful in contacting leads at the right time, and launching and optimizing digital marketing campaigns.

Better Decision Making

Marketing is a complex process that requires a lot of time and effort. It’s not easy to keep track of all the data, analyze it and make decisions based on it. That’s why AI can help you automate your marketing department. It can help you find the best content for your audience. You can create personalized messages for each customer, and even predict what they want to buy next.

AI improves the decision-making process and enables digital marketers to focus on business elements that require human interaction. Now, marketers can focus more on tasks such as in-person customer support and let AI handle the rest.

AI Content Creation at Scale 

Content creation and content marketing bring matchless ROI for growing brands. However, the main restraints in content marketing span from resource intensiveness, excessive time consumption and creative emphasis. All of these major restraints stem from limited human capabilities as well as limited time available to do the tasks.

 AI in digital content marketing solves these problems by taking over the chunk of content marketing tasks. Since content creation is the first aspect of content marketing, AI Content Creator comes in handy. AI Content creator for Digital marketing can make content creation more efficient than ever. With little human insight and supervision, AI Content Creator can scale content creation to boost digital marketing effectiveness.

AI Content creators usually bring content service add-ons with them. In most cases, you can organize different digital marketing content pieces into different folders within the AI Content creator dashboard.

Most brands do not struggle with data gathering as much as they struggle with sufficient content creation. This is where the role of machine generated AI Content creation is important. AI Content generators are becoming more intelligent and sophisticated with AI advancement. It means that brands can now use AI to create high volumes of original, context-rich, highly-relevant and accurate content for brand promotion.

AI Automates Content Creation

AI Content Creation automates many aspects of content scalability including:

• Social media caption generation
• Brand report writing and compilation
• Long form content for community building
• Brand promotional content for emails and direct responses
• Brand educational content for blogs and knowledge resources
• Idea generation for new content creation categories
• Formulating actionable headlines, aka “clickbaits”

You know that content is one of the most important parts of your marketing strategy. But creating high-quality content takes time and effort. That’s why you need to use AI to automate this process.

Although it is not a great idea to replace an in-house human writer with a machine just yet, you are closer to doing so than you can imagine. Several high authority content sites, like Forbes^[2], are using AI Content creators to write content for their platform.

AI can analyze your website traffic, social media engagement, and other data. Therefore, you can find out what kind of content people like the most. Later, AI will create new posts based on this information. Ultimately, you don’t have to spend hours researching topics or writing blog posts yourself!

47% of marketers report that content generation at scale for digital content marketing is their biggest challenge. However, AI Content generation is a fast, efficient and cost-effective solution that addresses this challenge.

AI can help you automate your content marketing efforts. It can suggest the right content to post on website/social media, send emails at the right time, and provide relevant offers. Moreover, AI also helps marketers identify which of their customers are likely to buy a product or service.

AI Predictive Analytics:

The science behind human intent is complex. There is no way a marketer can pinpoint the exact premises of target audience’s nature and preferences. The digital marketing practices adopted till date are a sum of experiential learning and estimations. Thus, these estimations improve predictive accuracy for contextualizing the interests and preferences of target audience.

The practice of determining the customer behaviour and moulding it into the desired direction for the brand takes years to master. However, AI can complete a similar task in a few days – maybe hours. AI gathers data from different data points in a customer’s journey over a brand website. Afterwards, it can find common points of interest in the journey of different customer profiles. Where marketers struggle to map the customer intent, AI can offer realtime behavioural insights. Thus, it can facilitate the decision-making process.

AI Knows You Better than Your Spouse!

AI can predict your behavior^[3] and personality traits better than your spouse. For some of you, this information may come as surprising. But for modern digital marketers, it is nothing short of a boon to have a machine learn and report their target customer’s personality traits and preferences as accurately as possible.

Predictive analytics is one of the most important features that AI provides for online marketers. It helps them understand what’s going to happen next with their business so they can take necessary actions before it happens.

For example, if a customer has abandoned a shopping cart then predictive analytics will suggest ways how you can get him back into buying mode again like offering discounts or free shipping. This way businesses don’t have to wait until something bad happens before taking action against it but instead, they can predict what might go wrong and take steps ahead of time to avoid any losses due to such situations.

Catch Customers Right in the Middle of Buying Cycle

Predictive marketing is a very powerful tool that can help you predict what your customers want to buy next. This way you can offer them exactly what they need when they need it! But creating predictive models takes a lot of time and effort. That’s why using AI can be very helpful here too! You just need to give it access to your database with customer information (like name, email address, etc.) and let it do the rest. AI will analyze your database and create predictive models based on this data. Then you can use these models to send personalized messages to each customer or even recommend products that they might like!

Some Common Struggles of Digital Marketers

Restrictions and Rapid Evolution

The common struggles of a digital marketer include trying to understand how to reach the target customers effectively while circumventing restrictions and changes that are beyond their control. The main challenges include overcoming the ad-blockers, keeping up with changing media habits and ramifying reduced ad performance.

Cost Pressures and Customer Retention

Similarly, most marketers place special emphasis on customer support and satisfaction while maintaining good promotor scores. All of this requires resources and additional expenses which can not be maintained under increasing cost pressures.

Redundant Promotional Strategies

Another great challenge in sales generation is redundancy in promotional messages. Consumers are getting tired of seeing the same sales offers and marketers are actively running out of creative ways to pitch the offers to potential customers.

So, the question is, how to use the abundantly available AI Technology to Digital marketer’s benefit?

How AI in Digital Marketing Solves These Challenges?

Marketing leaders actively engaged in customer-centric organizations adopt AI to achieve better customer decisioning, improved predictive marketing and enhanced personalization for promotions.

In other words, AI can drive more sales, reduce costs, engage highly relevant customers, boost employee satisfaction and increase customer happiness levels by leveraging different predictive analytics.

As you move up the ladder, the same AI can impenetrate personalization across other essential aspects of digital marketing, including:

Customer Decision Hub

AI automates real-time recommendations to streamline customer experience

Natural Language Processing

Artificial Intelligence automatically detects the customer intention and mood from customer voice calls and emails data

AI Driven Applications

AI can auto-alert the retail store managers on how to enhance in-store customer assistance through their smart devices

Artificial Intelligence can efficiently draw commonalities and patterns from complex human nature including their mood, intention, interest, preferences and other similar factors. These drivers affect the digital marketing strategies in various degrees, depending upon their rank of importance.

Since AI is way more effective than humans in predicting what a potential lead or a customer will do next, it can offer recommendations for the next course of action. AI is accurate in what it does. It helps digital marketers to save time and align the marketing tactics according to future customer behavior to achieve better ROI.

AI in digital marketing essentially reduces the uncertainty by enhancing predictability of target leads. Marketers can identify high-value leads and spend more time on converting them than on nurturing less valuable or dead leads.’

AI Automates Sales

Sales is another complex process that requires a lot of time and effort. It’s not easy to keep track of all the data, analyze it and make decisions based on it. That’s why AI can help you automate your sales department too! Here are some examples of how AI can help you automate your sales:

Lead Generation

Finding new leads is one of the most important parts of any sales strategy. But finding new leads manually takes a lot of time and effort! That’s why using AI can be very helpful here too! You just need to give it access to your database with contact information (like name, email address, etc.) and let it do the rest. AI will analyze your database and find new leads for you!

Lead Nurturing

Once you have a lead, it’s important to nurture it until the customer is ready to buy. But manually sending emails or making phone calls takes a lot of time and effort! That’s why using AI can be very helpful here too! You just need to give it access to your database with contact information (like name, email address, etc.) and let it do the rest. AI will analyze your database and send personalized messages to each lead based on their interests and behavior. This way you can make sure that each lead gets exactly what they need when they need it!

Sales Predictions

Predictive marketing is a very powerful tool that can help you predict what your customers want to buy next. This way you can offer them exactly what they need when they need it! But creating predictive models takes a lot of time and effort. That’s why using AI can be very helpful here too! AI can analyze your database and create predictive models based on this data. Then you can use this data to manage products accordingly.

Selecting The Right Platform for Digital Marketing with AI

Have you ever found yourself switching between platforms simply because one platform did not give you sufficient results? Digital marketers often face this dilemma of choosing the right platform for running digital marketing campaigns.

Where digital marketing has opened new avenues of customer targeting for marketers, it has also created a lot of confusion and hassle for managing multiple marketing choices.

AI in digital marketing steps in as a savior owing to the fact that it can learn and analyze the results generated from different platforms. It can offer insights as to which platform marketers shall select to target the right kind of leads. AI eliminates the hassle of manually filtering the marketing channels based on their performance in each campaign. It enables the marketers to automatically detect the most beneficial channels with high success rate and real-time results based on brand interactions.

Similarly, timing is a vital element of running successful marketing campaigns. Where marketers struggle with hit-and-trial errors, AI in digital marketing eliminates the guesswork involved in selecting the right time for running marketing campaigns. From selecting the right time to post on social media to setting auto-responders at specific durations for your mailing list, AI can offer insights for every channel.

AI can help you automate your social media marketing efforts by suggesting the right content to post on social media, sending emails at the right time, and providing relevant offers. It also helps marketers to identify which of their customers are likely to buy a product or service in the future.

AI Enhances Shopping Experience

AI has truly changed the way we shop. Many brands have started experimenting with augmented reality to improve their shopping experience. This helps the customer to have a better visual experience of the products that they are offering.

AI enables immersive interaction between customers and brand offers. Customers can check how a dress looks on them by simply standing in front of their phone camera through AR. It helps them to decide which product is better for them and make an informed purchase without any hassle.

AI For Website Optimization: 

AI can help you optimize your website so that it can convert visitors into leads and sales. For example, if someone visits your website but doesn’t make any purchase then AI will suggest ways how you can improve conversion rate such as adding new features or products. This way businesses can optimize the website for better ROI.

AI-Powered Website Builders:

AI has also stepped in to take the website building load off your shoulders. Using AI, you can easily build websites based on the user data and how they interact with your content.

Here, the only thing you have to work on is the content. The rest, from the content blocks to colours, is done by the AI-Powered website builder.

Some of the examples of such website builders are The Grid, FireDrop, Wix ADI, etc. Most of these website builders are still in their early stages and are expected to get more sophisticated over the years. They are considered to be the future of AI in Digital Marketing. 

Artificial Intelligence Powered Website builders adopt different website elements like modals, recommended product sliders, chat popups, headline and foot-lines to display pitches that are more relevant to the next step which the user will be taking on the website.

AI For Email Marketing:

Artificial Intelligence can help you automate your email marketing efforts by suggesting the right content to send, sending emails at the right time, and providing relevant offers.

It also helps marketers to identify which of their customers are likely to buy a product or service in the future.

Suggested Read: Is Email Marketing Effective? Top Reasons and Tips to Use It

For example, if you are running an e-commerce store then AI can help you by suggesting products based on your previous purchases and browsing history which will increase your chances of making more sales from existing customers.

In digital email marketing, AI can personalize email subject lines, messages, pitches, email layout, design, images and product placements to boost the email KPIs.

AI Social Media Optimization:

Artificial Intelligence can help you optimize your social media accounts so that they drive maximum traffic towards your website/blog/store. For example, if someone follows you on your brand’s social media handle but doesn’t make any purchase, then AI will suggest ways how you can improve conversion rate by adding new features/products.

Platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Google have vast amounts of user data pertaining to gender, age, demographics, psychographics, location, interests, what they like, who they follow and similar other data. This collection of data is useful for enhancing AI performance.

AI in social media marketing can learn different user behaviors and preferences. Based on this learning and past user experiences, AI can help marketers to spot microtrends, identify future trends and start new trends that align with marketing goals. AI plays a role in strategy building for social media marketing and boosts ROI by making possible recommendations for improving social media marketing campaigns.

Suggested Read: Craft Your Social Media Ad Copy To Perfection – Top 5 Tips

On Facebook, brands can customize auto-responder messages for potential customers using AI auto responders. Similarly, on LinkedIn, users are led by a series of responses for effective communication with suitable connections and job posts.

AI Improves User Experience

User experience can make or break a marketing strategy. Marketers struggle with balancing UX/UI of an app or website and their desire for generating higher conversion rates. AI in UX designing automatically adapts the UX design based on realtime user interactions. It means that the changing layout of an app or a website will be more efficient than traditional UX testing cycles. It is also more targeted to meet the needs of every visitor.

An improved front facing experience, supported with AI, increases conversion rates and buying intent among visitors.

AI For Enhancing CRM

CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a customer-centric business approach for addressing customer concerns. It is used for collecting customer information, funnelling leads into appropriate promotional campaigns and filtering out dead customer leads.

AI and big data go hand in hand to maximize the efficiency of CRM. It means that AI can suggest different points of customer data collection for CRM managers. It can offer accurate insights on how to target customers based on the pre-identified user preferences/needs.

Any behavioral information becomes a part of AI. Based on this information, companies can adopt or adapt their marketing strategies.

AI in CRM management also enables digital marketers to visualize and manage customer engagement journeys. It streamlines customer onboarding process in a highly efficient manner. When customers receive a solution tailored to their needs, they are more likely to be happy with their shopping experience. Companies can convert one-time customers to repeat customers who love to buy again.

Rapid Responses via AI Chatbots

AI in customer service is done via AI Chatbots. Customers seek rapid responses from companies and the chances of buying are increased manifold owing to quick customer engagement. AI Chatbots enable businesses to break the conventional barriers of customer support. It helps them to deliver one-to-many customer service for repetitive customer queries.

It also helps marketers to understand what people are looking for in realtime. When marketers understand visitor needs through AI Chatbot conversations, they can offer solutions tailored to customer needs.

AI Chatbot breaks the time and space bounds. It means customers can continue to engage with a brand at any time of the day. Customers can also switch between different AI Chatbot languages. AI Chatbots can also make recommendations to take further actions to streamline user experience.

Should an AI Chatbot fail to address a query, only then a real human representative can connect with a customer. It enhances productivity and filters lead who are more likely to convert.

AI Sets Dynamic Pricing

Pricing is another factor that contributes majorly to customer’s decision-making process. Marketers resort to offering discounts to boost sales. However, an important finding is that some customers happily buy an offering with little to no discount at all.

AI can optimize the pricing for different customer profiles depending upon product demand, availability and buying trends. It does so to ensure maximum profits.

AI learns pricing fluctuation of a product price over different seasons, popularity and different points throughout the year. With the help of this information, AI can predict and set product price to meet customer expectations. Dynamic pricing is set to convert more sales during on-peak and off-peak product seasons.

AI For Search Engine Optimization

It may come as a surprise to many. But AI is deemed to be more SEO friendly than manual SEO practices. The reason is that search algorithms are improving and AI is able to cope with rapid evolution than manual practices.

From e-commerce product database search improvement to displaying relevant search ads on SERPs, the search engines are improving every day. AI in Search Engine Optimization can detect grammatical errors in user searches. It can suggest different relevant searches to users depending on past shopping or search behavior.

It means that AI in SEO is highly aware of user intent. Moreover, most AI powered search engines know which device a user is using. These engines can identify whether a user is using a smartphone, or a computer to search for a particular thing. AI can make recommendations for food places, fun activities or any other products/services near a specific user location. This is beneficial for nearby businesses.

As more and more search engines adopt Voice Search, AI can interpret complex speech tones and patterns. It can identify search queries from users. This method of search has an edge over traditional text searches and digital marketers can use it to their benefit.

AI Content Creators help marketers to create more relevant and context-rich content for voice search engines. Artificial Intelligence improves and supports SEO and site traffic to help digital marketers stay one-step ahead in rapidly changing digital world.

AI Aids PPC Ad Optimization

PPC Ad optimization is a laborious task involving A/B Testing with countless variables. Every variable test requires marketing messages optimized to display ads. This painstaking process utilizes a great deal of time and resources. It can be simplified by using AI algorithms for optimizing ads based on interactions and conversions.

The customer journey is no longer limited to the buying cycle. It starts right from the moment a customer shows interest in an ad, how we engage him through relevant information. The journey entails how our ads improve the likelihood of the customer to respond to the displayed information. Ultimately, these events convert visitor into a customer.

Recently, Google has adopted Conversion Metrics as a default method to measure intent. The shift from Click Through Rate indicates that ad performance is no longer indicated from aggregated results. The measure of intent is beyond the aggregation of how customers change their behavior based on the ad format.

Measuring User Intent Accurately

So, how can we measure user intent? The answer lies in understanding the events that occur in the customer buying funnel. These events are a direct reflection of customer buying behavior.

Recognizing the pattern in these buying events is where AI in digital ad marketing becomes useful. AI algorithms can analyze the social media accounts or any other marketing channels followed by a particular user. Then, AI sifts through user interests and displays ads more relevant to a target user. Thus, user experience with ads is enhance. Therefore, there is an increased likelihood for the user to interact with the relevant ad and convert. It also helps in reducing costs through displaying fewer, relevant ads for the digital marketer.

Don’t Fall Behind!

In short, AI is becoming more and more significant to boost digital marketing efforts for modern online businesses. If you are not using AI yet, you are already falling behind!

References:
[1] Accenture Puts A Number On Consumer Distrust: $756B – MediaPost

[2] Forbes Is Using AI to Create Content & (Surprise!) Now I Want My Own Robot – Forbes

[3] AI can predict your personality traits – Michael Brenner Tweet