Digital marketing has become so much of a level-playing field, that marketers often struggle to find creative ways to beat the competition. Every trick is tried and tested and no channel is left open for new experiments. With this overwhelming cacophony all around, marketers’ search for uncontested space often becomes a futile exercise.
If as a marketing strategist, you are having a similar experience, AI-enabled marketing can bring you some good news. But remember, you are not alone and AI has already made deep inroads into marketing. But even while the field is leveled for all marketers to grab AI opportunities, they enjoy the more creative scope to make their voices heard. There is more scope for personalization than ever before and you can do a lot more with the same marketing resources.
But how to leverage this AI opportunity to the favor of your marketing campaigns? Let’s explain.
Define what you want to achieve
Do you have a clear idea of what extra you want to achieve by leveraging AI into your marketing campaigns? If not, you may not reap the right advantages and may not see any significant change in your marketing output. You must begin with a clear assessment of the gaps and shortcomings and the ways you can turn things around by leveraging AI tools. This assessment should be followed by setting up precise metrics and KPIs for evaluating the results.
What marketers want to achieve by integrating AI into their campaigns, may vary. Common goals for most marketers may include the following:
- Enhanced ROI: Figure out the extra leads or business conversion the use of AI tools can deliver through marketing outreach.
- Optimizing brand traction: Figure out how much extra traffic, additional session time, and customer interactions your brand can get across channels by leveraging AI.
- Agile & data-driven decisions: How far AI can help in agile and real-time decision making through data-driven actionable insights, you need to assess.
Establish critical metrics & KPIs
Once you have figured out the above objectives, you need to set specific metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for evaluating the achievements against the set goals. Here are some important things for setting relevant KPIs.
- Specific & measurable: You need to specify the desired progress in precise and measurable numerical terms. For example, you want a 30% increase in lead generation from email campaigns.
- Achievable: Don’t go overboard when setting goals. Make sure the target remains tuned to the baseline figures and sounds realistic. For instance, when your website gets a mere 2% month-on-month increase in traffic, you cannot set a new target of 15% just because you are using AI.
- Deadline-bound: You can only measure your achievements against your goal when you have a deadline. For instance, you want a 20% increase in website traffic within the next 3 months.
- Fix priorities: Last but not least is the need to set your priorities right when chasing a goal and measuring your achievements with the right KPIs. This is particularly important when you have simultaneous goals and corresponding KPIs.
AI-powered personalization at Scale
How does your content, pitch, and presentation resonate with the target audience on a personal level? This has become a key determinant for marketing success. But despite the rigorous focus on personalization, at times marketers end up generalizing things. This is where AI can play a crucial role by curating your marketing approach based on individual customer data.
Moreover, thanks to AI personalization doesn’t necessarily limit your scope to reach out to a large number of people. It allows you to scale your outreach without compromising on personalization. For example, using AI you can shoot thousands of personalized emails in one go.
By leveraging AI you can also ensure dynamic personalisation of the end user experience. For example, the content flow of a landing page can dynamically change with specific user preferences. AI tools based on user behavior and intent can dynamically change the webpage content and send messages or emails. The way product recommendation engines in e-commerce websites change featured product catalogs based on user intent or browsing behavior, AI can bring the same dynamism to website content or personalized messaging.
AI-enabled automation in Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
AI by automating the vast majority of routine tasks can improve customer interactions. Besides personalized messaging based on customer data, AI can completely eradicate human errors and bring agility to the CRM processes through auto-scheduling and auto-adjustment of communication based on customer interactions and preferences. AI tools can also help marketers detect unhappy customers and corresponding pain points and ensure proactive actions for enhanced customer retention.
Last but not least, AI-enablement can help businesses garner more relevant customer insights for creating more effective strategies. AI by analyzing all facets of customer interactions across touchpoints like web browsing, in-app interactions, emails, chats, and calls, can provide a detailed view of customer intents, sentiments, and preferences.
AI-enabled customer support
Conversational AI, particularly customer support chatbots and virtual assistants has helped countless organizations to deliver prompt assistance to customers. Built with natural language processing (NLP) and neural network systems, these bots are capable of deciphering human language nuances to understand customer intent, pain points, and preferences more precisely to deliver more personalized and context-aware support and assistance.
AI-enabled content marketing
Let’s be honest about the fact that we all use AI tools to various degrees for content creation. Though fully AI-generated content still lacks the strength of human storytelling and interactive narrative,
AI tools still can reduce the burden of writers for creating outlines, doing quick research, and pulling out a lot of relevant information together. Human skills coupled with this heavy-loading capability of AI can help scale up content outreach initiatives.
Besides content generation, AI can also make your content rank higher in search engine results. There are AI tools like Zyro that can detect areas where your content lacks SEO attributes and can help you with remedies. HubSpot offers AI tools that can write the most compelling blog titles and meta descriptions for the best search engine ranking results.
Media purchase and Ad placement
Knowing media channels where your ads can generate the highest traction is key to the success of ad campaigns. Now AI-enabled programmatic advertising by leveraging machine learning algorithms is making this happen. Advertisers in real time can now buy or sell ads through auctions based on their target audience and ad spending budget. The AI-enabled auction system places their bids automatically when these criteria are met. This streamlines the media buying and ad placement processes ensuring more accuracy.
AI tools are also helping advertisers to dynamically adjust their ad spending based on audience behavior, engagement, and interactions. These tools are also helping marketers and advertisers to segment audiences more accurately based on demographic, financial, cultural, and behavioral data and individual user engagement data.
Conclusion
Just as the invention of electric bulbs not only offered an innovative way to dispel darkness but almost paved the way for all forthcoming scientific milestones, AI is going to transform almost every human endeavor. The digital marketing space remains at the forefront of encountering AI-enabled transformation. As a marketer, you simply have no option but to leverage the AI for all your campaigns and tasks.