Tag: AI

Strategic Use of AI Tools for Digital Marketing

November 19, 2024 • Content Marketing • no comments

Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now the bread and butter of digital marketing, with 72% of organisations integrating AI into at least one business function (McKinsey & Company). However, many marketing teams are barely scratching the surface of what AI can do.

In a field where understanding customer needs is the lifeblood of success, AI acts as both a microscope and a compass—digging deep into data while pointing teams towards smarter decisions. Tools powered by AI don’t just save time; they automate tasks, personalise customer interactions, and uncover insights that would take human analysts days, if not weeks, to discover.

Here’s how your team can embrace AI tools to build stronger customer connections and keep pace with today’s fast changing digital landscape.

Identifying the Right AI Tools for Marketing

For a start, your strategy should leverage AI to enhance your marketing campaigns, optimize efforts to deliver on your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and improve client engagement to reach your business goals.

There are numerous ways for you to tap on AI-powered tools for strategies like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Email Marketing, Content Creation, and Analytics. Here are some of the best tools to look into for these different areas:

Notion AI – the AI for Notion is an excellent productivity booster. It can help you develop ideas, write, and fill out things using automation. It’s like having your own personal assistant, where you can ask questions about anything regarding your business.
Content at Scale – this AI writing tool is most helpful for generating SEO blog posts, because it provides high-quality content that can help scale your SEO.
Grammarly – you can use this content editor to check your writing, and you can use it across many different different apps including Word, Google Docs, emails, and more. It helps spot redundant words, and fixes phrasing and style inconsistencies so you can improve your content.
io’s Email Assistant – your business can build email campaigns across numerous channels and this tool helps automate the rest with email replies, using responses and helping identify potential leads.
Zapier – for automating tasks, Zapier is the AI tool that helps with process integration. It connects across multiple apps and allows you to create customized workflows to link the actions while pulling data for analysis so you can make adjustments for future campaigns.

Do also consider how you can tap on the best practices in programmatic advertising to optimize your efforts.

Strategic Uses for AI

Through all of these tools, it’s easy to conclude that you can use AI for a wide range of digital marketing tasks. The benefits include automation, improved customer experience and targeting, and even enhancing relationships to give your business expertise and promote loyalty.

Content Personalization

AI tools can help you to tailor your content to your consumer’s journey. Optimizely is an AI tool with content personalization that creates meaningful experiences to drive conversions. You can use personalized content in blogs or articles, emails, product descriptions, and video content.

Your business can build personalized digital content that is based on your prospect’s interests and behaviors online. It improves your marketing strategy by honing in on what will draw in your ideal clients since it deeply understands trends that give your strategy a bigger impact.

AI can also automate certain tasks, like identify and organize images and videos. It also helps analyze data so your business can continue refining and adapting its content strategy.

Chatbots and Customer Service

Do also consider AI chatbots to generate conversations and provide customer service. These can be extremely helpful in saving you time and costs, simply by addressing common scenarios with your products and services that can be handled more efficiently.

Chatbots handle Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and can help your customers do things like track orders or manage their accounts. They free up time for your staff to allow them to focus on other pertinent tasks at hand, while improving your response times.

Monitoring these AI tools helps your company to maintain its human touch. Consider deploying more advanced AI chatbots that tap natural language processing (NLP) to understand human queries and provide accurate answers and solutions.

Predictive Analytics

With machine learning technology, you can easily do data analysis to identify patterns, forecast trends, and predict customer behavior. It works by collecting data, preparing it and applying algorithms and variables to supply accurate prediction.

Through this, it can learn patterns, behaviors, and relationships that your business can use to create more effective marketing campaigns.

Marketing Automation

AI has transformed marketing automation from handling basic tasks to delivering sophisticated, data-driven insights. Beyond simple tools like ChatGPT, AI now streamlines time-consuming, repetitive activities such as email personalisation, lead scoring, and customer segmentation.

This allows marketing teams to shift their focus to strategic and creative tasks, fostering innovation and better campaign outcomes. Advanced platforms further use machine learning to predict customer behaviour, optimise ad targeting, and personalise content at scale, ensuring more effective and efficient marketing efforts.

Identify Right Influencers

AI is changing the face of influencer marketing by simplifying the once-complex process of finding the right partners for your brand. It can analyse large datasets to identify influencers whose audience aligns with your target demographics, evaluate engagement quality, and predict the potential impact of collaborations.

CommPRO is one such tool that analyzes massive datasets to quickly locate influencers who may be able to connect with your brand’s audience. This data-driven approach ensures that brands can easily connect with influencers who resonate with their audience, driving higher ROI and campaign success.

Digital Marketing AI Tool Examples

Many leading brands are integrating AI tools into their digital marketing strategies to improve their customer experiences and streamline marketing operations. Here are two standout examples:

Starbucks

Starbucks wanted to find a way to bring better offers to its audience through its widely used app. Customers have the option to use a service called “My Starbucks Barista” to place orders for pickup that uses chatbot innovation and voice technology.

Users can even adjust their orders in real time to ensure every detail is just right, combining convenience with personalisation to enhance customer satisfaction.

Lowe’s

Shopping for necessary tools and equipment while doing home improvement can be complex and challenging. Lowe’s took on that challenge by incorporating an AI innovation that offers its customers a more seamless and helpful shopping experience: LoweBot.

The AI-driven technology is a robot assistant found in-store where you can quickly locate what you need or work with one of their assistants. It uses cameras and sensors that capture and process data about that particular store so that it can quickly answer questions and make your shopping that much easier.

What’s Next in AI Digital Marketing?

There are many AI tools available that can aid your digital marketing strategy. You must assess your business needs and customer desires so that you can make effective choices about which tools to invest in to take your business to the next level.

Looking ahead, AI is likely to expand its capabilities into areas traditionally dominated by human input, such as creative content generation, relationship-building, and strategic planning. While these developments are still in progress, the technology already provides measurable improvements in campaign effectiveness and operational efficiency.

By adopting AI with a focused approach, businesses can enhance their ability to meet customer needs, improve marketing performance, and adapt to a rapidly changing digital landscape.

Guest Author: Donna Maurer

Donna is a seasoned marketing professional with expertise in digital marketing strategies and consumer engagement. Her interest for crafting targeted writing ensures brands connect meaningfully with their audiences. When not working, she loves playing guitar and attending music festivals.

Should Companies Embrace AI for Marketing?

July 2, 2024 • Content Marketing • 1 comment

Wish to tap Artificiall Intelligence (AI) for your marketing efforts? What should you consider before leveraging on AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, CoPilot, and many others?

The recent rise of artificial intelligence has completely shaken up the marketing industry. Today, you can find chatbots to handle customer queries, generative tools to produce content marketing, and analytic programs to break down the consumer data you collect.

However, before you shut down your marketing team and shift to AI-led operations, it’s worth considering whether or not AI will actually improve the quality of your marketing efforts. In their current state, many generative AI programs remain riddled with errors and may produce work containing falsehoods.

Additionally, audiences tend to favor work produced by humans. This may mean that switching over to generative programs damages your brand reputation and undermines your image. As such, you should proceed with caution and only use AI when you’re sure it will have a net positive impact on the long-term growth of your firm.

Generative AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is an umbrella term used to describe computing that mimics human-like cognition. Generative AI is a sub-branch of those efforts to mimic human intelligence that creates content based on user inputs and historical data. These generative programs use machine learning algorithms to “think”. At their core, these ML programs are defined by their use of:

Computational techniques that draw insights from large data sets;
Training that produces desirable results based on the programmer’s instructions;
Supervision that ensures they continue to produce the desired results
Increasingly complex as neural networks become deeper and more sophisticated

With these tools and techniques, users have found it a lot easier to deploy generative AI in their marketing activities.

Bad Actors Using Generative AI

While these facts may lead you to believe that you no longer need your graphic team or writers, a quick search online will reveal that AI falls some way short of the efforts of real content marketers — at least for now. Big brands like Sports Illustrated have landed in hot water after being caught using AI to create profiles for fake writers, and publishers like Wizards of the Coast have been forced to ban the use of AI after discovering that their artists had been using programs to push out new content quickly.

Crucially, this doesn’t mean you should turn your back on AI during the content creation process altogether. Instead, consider using AI to empower your content creation team. For example, if you currently rely on a fleet of writers to produce your blog content or marketing materials, consider investing in tools like Grammarly and Jasper AI. These tools empower, rather than replace, real marketers and improve the quality of their production by offering real-time editing suggestions.

Lead Generation

Finding new leads for your firm is crucial when you work in marketing. However, lead scoring and data analytics can take hours to complete if you’re entirely reliant on human marketers. Similarly, human marketers require time away from the desk, meaning that new leads that pop up in the wee hours of the night may be left to cool while everyone’s asleep.

Today, you can use AI to embolden your lead-generation efforts by investing in tools that automate the process. For example, many modern AI tools can score incoming leads in real-time based on variables like historical data and user behavior. This can quickly sort your hot leads from your dead ends and will ensure that you are able to focus on the folks most likely to convert.

Data Analysis

You can also use these AI tools to enrich your data and predict changing trends in your industry. For example, if you collect a large volume of data from social sources, modern AI tools can stitch together data from other sources like surveys and email forms. This will give you a more comprehensive understanding of user intention and may aid your efforts to create marketing content based on hard data.

That said, you will likely need to improve your data-cleaning efforts to make use of AI for lead generation and maintenance. If you feed bad data into your analytic programs, don’t be surprised when it produces poor results. Investing in data cleansing tools and intentionally retraining your AI program to parse out useless data points is key to your efforts and ensuring your team is empowered by data that is relevant and accurate.

Pivoting Towards AI

It’s clear that, though caution should be exercised, AI is fundamental to marketing companies making the digital transformation. ML programs can personalize advertisements for folks online, natural language processing algorithms can aid consumers with accessibility concerns, and generative software can edit and suggest revisions during the content creation process.

However, pivoting towards AI shouldn’t be undertaken rashly. Rather, marketing teams that want to increase their use of AI should treat the digital transformation as a journey. This means that marketing managers should move through distinct phases when rolling out new tech, including:

Enablement: Are there any processes that the marketing team already does that would be instantly empowered by the introduction of automation and AI? For example, could you use AI to track invoices or send automated emails upon purchase completion?
Transformation: Which processes will be a little harder to automate, but will pay dividends in the long run? For example, could you embed more AI into your CRM in order to track trends and keep tabs on shifting consumer behavior?
Investigation: Keep an open eye out for emerging technology that could be useful for your firm. You don’t have to try every new AI product in the marketing space, either, and should ensure that anything you do decide to use fits in with your existing tech stack.

Following this process-oriented approach will help you make good use of well-established AI tools and will give you time to on-board new programs properly. This can help you target problems that are specific to your firm and will ensure that you’re aware of existing and emergent solutions in the marketing industry.

Conclusion

Embracing AI for marketing can seem intimidating if you’re new to the idea of automation. Get the ball rolling by using well-established tools that empower your team and enable them to be more productive.

As AI programs become more sophisticated, consider utilizing more transformational tools that change the way you work. Just be sure to maintain strong human supervision, as most consumers show a preference for human-generated content and may turn away from your firm if they discover you’ve been using AI to gain their personal data through illegal means.

BIO: Ainsley Lawrence is a freelance writer from the Pacific Northwest in the United States. She enjoys writing about better living through education and technology. She is frequently lost in a mystery podcast.

The Case for Automation in Marketing Mix Modelling

June 18, 2024 • Content Marketing • 1 comment

Heard of the Marketing Mix (MM)? Well, most business students would be familiar with the 4 Ps — Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.

However, do you know that artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to power up your Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM)?

How Machine Learning Personalizes Content in Digital Marketing

June 1, 2024 • Content Marketing • no comments

Can machine learning help to strengthen content personalisation in digital marketing? How can such algorithms be deployed to improve one’s digital marketing results?

Marketers, designers, and business owners should strongly consider investing in personalized content creation if they haven’t already done so. People are inundated with emails, online ads, and sponsored articles, often feeling discouraged as much of what they encounter seems irrelevant or unworthy of their attention.

Is AI Really Ruining Google’s SERPs?

August 7, 2023 • Content Marketing • 1 comment

In the ever-evolving landscape of the digital world, search engine result pages (SERPs) have become the heart and soul of online discovery. As internet users, we rely on search engines, and in particular, Google, to deliver accurate, relevant, and reliable information at our fingertips.

However, as Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to assert its dominance in the technology realm, questions have emerged regarding its impact on Google’s SERPs.