Businesses will have noticed how digital marketing strategies have become more and more diverse over the past decade. Starting off with a focus on social media, digital marketing has moved towards SEO, content marketing, visual marketing, and now, artificial intelligence (AI).

AI has gone through a few peaks and troughs, but it seems that, for all intents and purposes, reaching your business goals in 2019 and beyond will require you to focus your attention on AI. 

How does AI work in the sphere of marketing and how can you use it to boost your strategies? Read on to find out.

1. Understanding Customers

Example of the buyer/ customer journey. Source: Venngage

Digital marketing is a haven for data and analytics. Social media, in particular, gives businesses a wealth of information about the audience they are engaging with. You can extract data regarding demographics, income ranges, general interests, and even information about customers’ careers and personal lives.

But as marketers know, data on its own only gives you half the story. You also want to understand how this data can be used to improve audience engagement and to reach new target markets.

That is where AI comes in. One of the major ways that AI is positively affecting marketing strategies across the board is by efficiently extrapolating and processing data to improve your understanding of customers.

And this understanding is of key importance to businesses. Personalization in marketing automation has seen a steady growth since 2014, and this trend is set to continue until 2025, according to Hinge Marketing.

Machine learning AI techniques and tools have vastly improved the ability to personalize messages over the last few years—marketers only need to include the data they have and allow the AI to do the rest.

Your AI will then process the data it’s been given and create a useful profile of the customer that you can customize your marketing messages to. 

AI also helps you create static and dynamic audience segmentations to help you track and cater to their potential buyer journey.

You can see examples of this AI at work in HubSpot’s email marketing, which is making use of AI systems to personalize marketing processes with great success.

2. Search and Recommendations

The marketing strategies that are being prioritized 2019-onwards. Source: Venngage

Have you noticed how the search experience has changed over the course of the last 4-5 years? There’s a reason for this—AI.

Google began experimenting with the use of AI in the way it laid out its search way back in 2015. The experiment was a success—Google’s AI algorithm improved its semantic understanding of search terms. 

As a result, you no longer have to type in an exact phrase or term to find a site or solution. You can use adjacent terms, or ask questions that don’t even use the keywords of a webpage to reach your intended target.

This is once again possible through machine learning AI. The more search terms Google’s AI is given, the more it extrapolates and understands the user’s intention, which is why you don’t need to look for specific keywords to get to a page.

However, for marketers, it means working on ranking your page or site for a variety of semantic and long-tail keywords. 

Because another result of Google’s AI is its recommendation engine—which you also see on eCommerce and entertainment sites like Amazon and Netflix.

The AI in use on such websites isn’t only trying to answer your questions—it is also trying to recommend related products and services. 

You would have seen how, after browsing for a certain kind of product, Amazon recommends more products from the same seller, in the same line, or accessories for the product. The same can be seen with Netflix, which recommends movies and TV shows based on what you have seen and ranked.

All of these searches and recommendations are being powered by AI. For businesses trying to reach audiences indirectly, AI is the best way forward.

3. Customer Service

While understanding buyers and search enhancements are more backend uses of AI, there is one area where AI’s impact is far more visible—in the area of customer service. 

Chatbots and AI messengers have become all the rage in the current digital marketing sphere. This is despite dire predictions that chatbots would fail barely a few years ago.

Forget dying a quick death, chatbots have come back stronger than ever. Anyone who has visited a website recently will have encountered a chatbot, generally waving ‘hello’ from one corner of the screen.

G2 has a thorough guide to creating and using chatbots. According to them, chatbots are generally of two kinds:

  • Rule-based
  • Social Media

The rule-based chatbots are fed a set of questions and answers but can’t handle complex conversations.

Social media chatbots are being incorporated primarily on Facebook Messenger and on Twitter. These chatbots work in a similar fashion to the rule-based website chatbots.

These kinds of chatbots are good for initial conversations that engage visitors. But they need a segue to a customer service representative when questions become more complicated.

However, the more sophisticated chatbots available to businesses now lean towards natural language processing (NLP). These chatbots have the ability to learn through their interactions with customers, thus improving the experience for customers, and increasing their own databanks.

These NLP chatbots can hold complex conversations with customers. Not only will the customer have a more fluid and natural experience—similar to speaking to a real human being—but the AI will also learn more for future interactions.

The AI customer service experience is fast becoming crucial to marketing operations now. Not only does it limit the need for external customer service parties, but it also smooths the user’s experience with the business, thus improving the overall customer-business relationship.

4. Social Listening

There are a number of tools for monitoring your social media presence but they still rely on the human touch to parse together the data they provide.

The reason for this is that human beings have varied ways of speaking and writing. Particularly in the written form, it can be confusing to understand what a person means. 

With traditional social listening tools, even innocuous posts could be flagged, requiring a marketer or analyst to comb through endless posts to understand what action is required to appease customers.

On the other hand, AI takes social listening further than ever before. Social listening AI tools study the internet, beyond your immediate region, to collate data and examine it.

Thanks to machine-learning AI, businesses are notified about what is being said around their brand and industry. AI is also able to understand the context of social media posts and extrapolate whether or not the sentiment in the posts is negative or positive.

For the AI to do this, it needs to be fed a significant amount of data. But once that part of the process is done, the AI can be allowed to do its work.

Sophisticated machine-learning AI can easily segment posts according to the segments you are looking to address—thank users for positive comments, appease negative users, offer solutions to those struggling with an aspect of your product or industry.

With AI, you can be there for your customers when and how they need you.

5. Video Marketing

Video marketing leads to sales. Source: Venngage

Videos have been taking over the digital marketing sphere in the past few years. Influencers and businesses are leveraging their YouTube channels and native video on other social platforms and websites to engage and interact with audiences.

But what many marketers don’t know is that AI can play an important part in video marketing. AI has the ability to bring in the personalization element that has become so vital in digital marketing.

AI systems can study customer behavior to offer relevant content to their interests. Businesses can also use AI to tailor their advertising to the needs of each individual, instead of towards an audience segment.

Forthcoming AI systems could also help businesses optimize video search. 

Thus far, AI has been using the text associated with videos to suggest them for searches. But new AI can be used to glean data directly from videos—the text embedded in the videos, images, and sounds—to improve search results for customers. 

With video marketing taking off, AI is the gradual next step in enhancing video marketing and engagement.

Key Takeaways

Artificial intelligence has been improving in the last few years and is set to make a massive difference to how businesses market themselves in the coming years.

While still not completely foolproof, AI is becoming more sophisticated and practical to use. 

With AI providing better understanding of customers, brand sentiment, and its integration into search engines and video marketing, plus its uses in customer service, AI is undoubtedly the future of digital marketing.

About the Author: Ronita Mohan is a content marketer at Venngage, the online infographic and design platform. Ronita writes about a number of subjects, including digital marketing, pop culture, workplace productivity, and diversity. Twitter: @Venngage

Featured image photo credit: Hitesh Choudhary.