Artificial intelligence has recently become the talk of the town. While experts like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are arguing about a possible Skynet situation, AI is finding more practical applications everyday. In fact, there is a good probability that almost all your consumers are using the technology in one form or another. In such a scenario, it is only fair that as marketers, we try to keep up with the trend.

While we are waiting for the AI technology to give us driverless vehicles, it has already found its way in the marketing landscape. In the online world, data is the most valuable asset. With new machine learning and AI algorithms surfacing almost every week, marketers and data scientists have found numerous innovative ways to leverage data to drive conversions.

With more businesses turning to AI to optimize their marketing results, there are speculations about AI taking over the marketing arena completely. In addition, AI powered marketing tools, that were previously scarcely available to small businesses, have now become more affordable and user friendly.

As a result, a number of businesses have seen some serious growth in their conversions. There are a number of ways a business can leverage AI to optimize their marketing results. This blog post is going to talk about some of the most noteworthy developments in the AI technology (in relevance to the marketing landscape), as a result of which, it has found applications in some of the most prominent parts of online marketing.

Personalized user experience through Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence has completely revolutionized the in-app experience. By analyzing real time data on numerous metrics like age, interests, online interactions, and much more, AI powered apps are capable of offering a highly personalized experience to consumers.

The best part is, this isn’t just limited to mobile applications. Artificial Intelligence can now be integrated in your website, or even in your web push notifications, to deliver the right kind of personalized communication to each visitor.

In a survey conducted by Evergage, it was found that over 60% marketers noticed an improvement in the user experience and in their conversions after they started employing Artificial Intelligence in their website communications.[clickToTweet tweet=”Over 60% of marketers saw better conversions after they started using Artificial Intelligence.” quote=”Over 60% of marketers saw better conversions after they started using Artificial Intelligence.” theme=”style2″]

With more technologies being developed everyday, and machine learning gaining invaluable popularity, there are tools available to make CRO more effective. For instance, Optimizely allows businesses to A/B test multiple variations of the same page, and allows users to experiment with the a website’s interface to suit their unique needs and wants.

Similarly, Hunch, which is another AI powered tool, analyses your Google Analytics data to reveal insights relating to the performance and changes in your PPC campaigns. Their website offers a more concise explanation. It says “The fastest way to check on all PPC campaigns across Facebook and Adwords at once.”

Another AI, called Sentient Ascend allows for extremely efficient multivariate testing of your website and respective landing pages. The algorithm simultaneously test multiple website features, constantly adapting to the results, and suggesting effective changes that drive results.

The bottom line is, consumers these days are expecting a highly personalized experience from their favorite brands. With Artificial Intelligence, automation of personalization has become possible, as a result of which, each visitor is offered content which is more relevant to them.

Intelligent content creation

While AI bots are still far from writing long form content like whitepapers and ebooks, they have become capable of writing human-sounding content based on a clearly defined set of rules.

Algorithms are now capable of creating personalized content, like emails by analyzing individual consumer data,  interacting with websites, and other Internet surfing patterns. This knowledge enables the AI algorithms to pinpoint exactly what the consumer is looking for and create a personalized message for them.

For instance, a tool called Phrasee claims it can outperform human beings when it comes to writing small taglines or email subject lines. The bot analyses thousands of emotions, phrases, and sentiments to structure a subject line that your target audience is most likely to respond to.

Similarly, another tool called Rocco is an AI powered digital social media assistant. By analyzing thousands of conversations and sentiments on social media, Rocco suggests possible social media posts that your audience is most likely to engage with.

Every AI generated communication is designed to sound like an human. The language, tone, and information contained in each communication is dependent on the rules set by you, to best serve your audience. Gartner predicts that by 2018, 20% of business content is going to be generated by “robo-writers”.

AI driven customer insights

From identifying appropriate and detailed buyer personas by analyzing terabytes of data, to helping you create products, or position services that best match customer behavioral patterns, AI has the power of giving some truly amazing customer insights.

While it might seem like something that any data scientist can achieve, AI does the job in literally a fraction of the time it would take a human to analyze the numbers and identify customer behavioral patterns from it. Machine learning algorithms can:

  • Identify the right buyer personas to include in certain marketing campaigns.
  • Display relevant products and personalized recommendations to each visitor.

Conclusion

With billions of pieces of content being published online everyday, AI has evolved from being something that is nice to have, and turned into a critical necessity for modern businesses.

Effective marketing is all about inducing emotion in your target audience. While AI has been beating the humans at a number of things, it is still quite incapable of inducing emotions in human beings.

That simply means that AI is not going to replace humans in the marketing domain any time soon. Smart marketers are going to remain critical to the success of marketing campaigns and products. That is the reason why supercomputers that are capable of beating any human when it comes to writing have not successfully published content that anyone wants to read.

While AI is going to add a lot of insight in our thinking, the idea of it being capable of thinking creatively and critically is still very much science-fiction.

About the Author: Sahil is the CEO and Founder of RankWatch and thrives to make it into one of the leading technology companies in India. Gifted with unlimited ambition and drive you will generally find Sahil with his head down completely isolated from the world, plugged into his own world of coding.