AI In Digital Marketing

Machine learning technology has revolutionised the field of technology, bringing about significant advancements.

Its immense versatility has led to its rapid adoption across various sectors of the economy, including marketing. These include education, healthcare, defence, and of course, marketing. AI finds closer integration with digital marketing, although it has both traditional and digital marketing applications, enhancing areas like CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

In this guide, we will explore the ways in which artificial intelligence enhances the effectiveness of digital marketing, focusing on social media marketing, its advantages, and challenges.

Understanding What Is Artificial Intelligence

Search engine optimisation (SEO) plays a vital role in digital marketing, and AI, a branch of computer science, focuses on developing machines and tools that mimic human behaviour. It revolves around technologies that allow machines to perform tasks usually undertaken by humans.

AI-powered machines have a distinguishing characteristic that sets them apart from other technologies—they continuously improve themselves based on new information, enabling marketing professionals to enhance their strategies and tactics. Such machines can have interactions identical to humans and are generally used for highly specialised tasks.

AI finds application in various areas today, such as natural language processing, problem-solving, visual and speech recognition, and automation, all of which involve collecting valuable data. There are quite a few reasons why AI has become so popular in recent years, such as:

1. High Precision

AI-powered machines exhibit greater precision and lower error rates than humans when executing tasks, including creating and optimising social media ads. This ensures greater reliability, increased efficiency, and lower costs.

2. Relevant Insights

AI-powered machines excel at efficiently analysing vast amounts of data, surpassing human capabilities, thereby streamlining marketing tasks. This helps provide beneficial insights that can help businesses make better decisions.

3. Improved Performance

Google Ads, a widely used digital advertising platform, leverages Artificial Intelligence to optimise campaign performance using advanced algorithms. So, AI-powered devices and gadgets like virtual assistants, tracking devices, and home security systems deliver better performance than regular ones.

4. Adaptability

Machine learning empowers AI machines to adapt and improve based on new data, making it an invaluable tool for content writing and creation. This is one of the factors that make this such a powerful technology. Marketing is among those fields witnessing the highest integration of AI technologies and is most affected by it.

The evolution of AI is significantly transforming online marketing, including website designing, for the better.

How Is AI Changing Digital Marketing?

You may already have encountered instances where AI is used to enhance digital marketing. Popular tools like tailored suggestions from Amazon and Voice Search from Google both use AI technology. It is useful in this field because it can understand and analyse different types of data and information better and more quickly.

Additionally, AI can be used for predicting and recognising trends in the field of marketing, helping a business adapt its strategies more quickly. This results in greater efficiency and helps in saving time and resources.

Businesses can utilise AI in two ways to make their marketing strategy more effective. The first is to use artificial Intelligence on the backend for tasks like creating customer profiles using customer data, programmatic purchasing and forecasting the demand for various products.

Another way AI is being used is on the customer-facing end, where digital marketers can use Artificial Intelligence to ensure higher customer satisfaction. This can help strengthen the brand reputation and lead to improved business-customer relations.

Benefits Of Using AI For Digital Marketing

1. Helping A Business Better Understand Its Audience

With the help of artificial Intelligence, it is possible to analyse a huge amount of data relating to the target customers. This can be very useful in predicting how customers will make decisions regarding products and services, helping devise effective marketing campaigns.

Such targeted marketing campaigns can help a business interact with its customers more effectively, increasing customer satisfaction.

With AI technology, lead conversion becomes easier since a business can deliver the right experience at the right time to its potential customers. Thus, marketing efforts are boosted, and sales are increased.

2. Enhanced Productivity

AI can help automate routine tasks employees perform, allowing them to focus on more critical activities. Additionally, other resources can be freed up since AI-powered machines can perform the tasks much more efficiently, conserving the resources to be used elsewhere.

Digital marketers can focus on developing the best digital marketing strategies without dealing with other tedious tasks. This results in a higher level of productivity and prevents waste of time and resources. Thus, the day-to-day operations of a business are performed more quickly and efficiently.

3. More Effective Marketing

A good strategy requires making decisions based on different types of data. Marketers must make certain assumptions regarding customers’ tastes, preferences and buying habits without accurate data.

But using AI in digital marketing helps eliminate the need for assumptions since the required data is readily available and properly analysed. This helps in devising marketing campaigns that are more accurate and can target prospective customers more effectively. Such campaigns have a higher chance of resulting in profits for the business.

4. Higher ROI

Another benefit of AI in marketing is that it can help you enjoy higher investment returns. This is possible since marketers have more easily available information regarding customers’ needs. Marketers can focus more on content creation, ensuring higher quality content attracts and convinces customers more effectively.

With a better understanding of its customers and clients, a business can invest in areas bound to deliver results. Its marketing teams can use targeted marketing campaigns to ensure a higher ROI.

AI In Digital Marketing — Case Studies

1. Vanguard Uses AI To Increase Conversion Rates

Vanguard, a leading name among investment firms, was looking to grow its business, but this took time as the investment industry is very strictly regulated regarding advertising. The business needed a way by which it could stand out from the competition while using similar advertisement strategies.

To do that, Vanguard utilised Persado, an AI language platform that could help create personalised ads for the target audience. This helped the business to increase its conversion rates by 15%.

2. Tomorrow Sleep Increases Web Traffic Using AI

Tomorrow Sleep, a startup offering innovative sleep products, could not increase the number of website visitors even after publishing high-quality content and using the best tracking and analysis tools. The average number of visitors to the website was around 4000 per month.

But to compete with other firms in the same space, increasing the number of website visitors was crucial. That’s where artificial Intelligence came in handy. Tomorrow Sleep started using MarketMuse, an AI tool for creating and optimising the content on topics prospective customers found interesting.

It also used the analytics tool offered by MarketMuse to track the ranking of competitors for such topics, which helped identify potential opportunities. This resulted in a tremendous increase in the number of website visitors (400,000 per month). Additionally, it allowed the business to rank for multiple positions for a single search result.

AI And Marketing Automation Software

Understanding Marketing Automation

One of the most common ways AI is used in digital marketing is through marketing automation. It involves automating repetitive tasks such as sending reminder emails to customers about forgotten shopping carts and managing subscriber lists.

With the help of AI tools, automating such tasks is easy, and many of the tools can be easily integrated into various platforms and applications. AI digital marketing tools can help businesses create advertising campaigns, find high-quality leads, and keep track of their sales funnel.

Let’s look at some of the best AI-powered digital marketing software currently used by businesses.

AI Marketing Automation Tools

1. Phrasee

Phrasee is an AI-powered platform that specialises in brand language optimisation and is used to create copies for social media pages, push notifications, and emails. It uses machine learning and natural language processing to make highly effective copies in tune with the company’s marketing efforts.

2. Smartwriter.ai

Businesses that need to automate their email outreach rely on Smartwriter.ai, a powerful AI tool that can help create personalised emails that attract customers’ attention. It can even be used in e-commerce to generate product titles and descriptions and offer backlink generation.

Smartwriter.ai can be integrated with third-party platforms and tools for improving the email outreach process.

3. Optimove

Optimove helps collect customer information efficiently thanks to its powerful AI capabilities. Businesses can collect data from several platforms using Optimove and get all the required information for data-driven marketing strategies.

This data can also be shared with others, and the platform comes with an AI tool called Optibot that can be used for digital marketing analytics.

4. MarketMuse

MarketMuse is among the most popular digital marketing automation tools for creating high-quality content. It is used by businesses that need to create highly optimised long-form content like sales copies, articles, landing pages and emails.

The marketing tool works by conducting in-depth research on the topic on which content has to be created. It can help create a draft, including a content brief with key performance indicators (KPIs).

5. Acrolinx

Another powerful tool that digital marketers use to create good-quality content is Acrolinx. Large companies like Amazon and Google also use it to ensure their content fits their marketing strategy.

This marketing automation software allows adjusting the grammar, tone, and even specific words, leading to more effective advertising and email marketing campaigns.

AI In Digital Marketing Vs. Traditional Marketing

Artificial Intelligence has transformed digital marketing in many ways, making it more effective. It has also created an even greater distinction between digital marketing and traditional marketing. But AI can be used in both traditional and digital marketing for similar purposes.

1. Better Understanding Of Customers

Both traditional marketing and digital marketing require customer data to make important decisions. Traditional marketing methods use direct mail, handouts, and printed ads to attract customers. Understanding what the target customers are looking for is important for creating such ads and handouts.

Traditional data collection methods generally include surveys, interviews, and information from books and articles. With the help of AI tools, it is possible to create more effective surveys while covering a larger demographic. The data collected can also be analysed more easily and quickly, thus helping businesses make quicker decisions.

In digital marketing, data is collected with the help of search engines like Google and social platforms like Facebook. Artificial Intelligence makes extracting the required data from such platforms easy to use, with powerful algorithms created explicitly.

2. Resource Conservation

AI can be very effective in helping a business save resources in various ways. Whether a business utilises traditional or digital marketing, it tries to accomplish its objectives most efficiently. Thus, it will minimise resource use as far as possible to get the desired results.

In traditional marketing, AI tools can help identify trends and analyse customer habits. And businesses can adjust their marketing strategy to focus only on areas with higher chances of success. This helps prevent the wastage of resources and time.

AI works similarly regarding resource conservation in marketing but has a much larger scope. This is because, in this case, it can even be used for creating good content without needing as much time and resources.

Additionally, it can help identify areas where resources are being wasted and help eliminate such wastage to get maximum returns. That is why AI in marketing for small businesses and startups can be extremely useful.

3. Better Advertising

Advertising is the most powerful marketing tool for both traditional and digital marketing campaigns. In the case of traditional marketing, AI can be integrated with electronic billboards to display selected ads to customers at the most appropriate time.

In digital marketing, artificial Intelligence can be integrated with various interactive tools, audio and video, to make them more engaging and attractive. And it can even be used for B2B digital marketing.

4. Content Creation

For a business to be successful, it has to create content that its target customers find engaging. In both traditional and digital strategies, AI can help create such content by identifying topics in which such customers are interested. It can be used for research and data collection to improve the content creation process.

Artificial Intelligence can also ensure that the right type of language is used to communicate with clients and customers.

AI In Digital Strategies — Challenges

While there is no doubt AI can be very useful for all types of businesses engaged in digital campaigns, a few challenges come with it.

1. Requires Considerable Investment

AI requires a huge amount of investment, at least initially, as a relatively new technology. While huge businesses can afford such investments, smaller ones cannot. That is one of the biggest challenges when using AI for online marketing for startups.

Additionally, like most technological tools, it requires regular updates and maintenance. Such investments are necessary for the possibility of data loss. In the long run, artificial Intelligence can help save resources, especially those allocated for repetitive tasks.

2. Frequently Changing Trends

Many businesses use machine learning and AI to develop marketing messages and campaigns. But they do not consider the rapidly changing trends in the realm of AI. With newer technologies come newer challenges, and the faster technology evolves, the more quickly new challenges appear.

This makes their implemented campaigns ineffective when trends change in a few months. That is why it is important for those using AI in marketing to consider future developments when developing marketing campaigns and strategies.

3. Regulations And Privacy

As AI becomes more popular for data collection, more people are concerned about privacy. The reason is that AI is much more in-depth and powerful than manual or traditional data-gathering methods. They can find out each crucial aspect of the target customer to improve their marketing strategy.

That is why regulations are being implemented to restrict how Artificial Intelligence can be used and why businesses are not allowed to use such tools in many areas.

4. Lack Of Good Quality Data

Data quality is a major challenge in using AI for digital marketing for beginners. Various artificial intelligence technologies are trained using good-quality data. For digital marketing purposes, specific types of data are required.

AI tools cannot provide the desired results if the business does not have such data. That is why companies spend billions of dollars on data collection, which may be challenging for new businesses.

AI In Online Marketing — Statistics

Businesses are adopting Artificial Intelligence across all sectors of the economy with great results. Some important statistics show how AI is becoming increasingly popular in digital marketing.

49% of leading businesses rely on AI to help them stand out from the competition regarding customer interaction. Similarly, of the businesses involved in e-commerce, 51% use AI-powered tools to provide their customers with a better experience.

But artificial Intelligence is even used for B2B marketing, and 64% of B2B marketers say it has been a game-changing technology for marketing purposes.

The Future Of AI In Digital Marketing

While AI has been one of the biggest technological developments in recent years, it is still nascent. Just as many businesses are adopting AI-powered tools for digital marketing, others still have concerns regarding what the technology has in store for the future.

A major concern is whether artificial Intelligence will completely replace marketers in the future. While such tools can help automate many tasks marketers perform, the technology still has a long way to go before it can completely replace marketers.

On a positive note, it will help make digital marketing more targeted and accurate by helping optimise campaigns with machine learning. Businesses can expect better results through faster search engine optimisation and better content marketing.

AI In Digital Strategies — Ethics

The potential of artificial Intelligence is unparalleled in any sphere where it is used, but especially in the field of online marketing. This leads to the question — what are the ethical implications of using such technologies?

As mentioned before, people are becoming increasingly concerned about how AI is used to collect data for marketing purposes. And such concerns are valid when businesses do not provide information about how they intend to use such information.

Additionally, being such a powerful technology, AI can be used to spread incorrect or misleading information. AI-based platforms learn from existing data, exposing them to false information can lead to serious problems.

The only way to prevent the misuse of AI technologies is to adhere to the regulations to safeguard customers’ interests.

AI In Online Marketing — Success Stories

When used responsibly, AI can help a business become highly successful, and here are some examples that showcase that.

1. Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola is a brand that has been able to utilise AI effectively for analysing customer data, allowing it to offer personalised experiences to customers. The most famous example is its Share A Coke campaign, in which Artificial Intelligence was used to create personalised labels.

2. Netflix

Netflix, the famous content streaming brand, provides another excellent example of how AI can improve customer experience. Customers are provided viewing recommendations through AI algorithms that use their viewing history. This provides a highly customised experience that customers love.

Using AI in Digital Marketing

Artificial Intelligence is the most powerful factor currently transforming the digital marketing landscape. Being immensely powerful, it has the potential to help businesses achieve their goals in a shorter span of time than ever before.

However, as with any technology, a few challenges and concerns must be addressed when implementing it. Most important among these are the ethical concerns, as the technology has enormous potential to be misused.

But when proper regulations are followed, it can help provide customers with a fantastic experience and businesses with higher returns.

Brodey Sheppard

Brodey is the CEO of sitecentre®, leading his distinguished Australian digital marketing agency using data analytics and Artificial Intelligence in SEO and Paid Advertising. His adept use of machine learning and AI has gained industry-wide recognition, Brodey has received several industry awards for SEO, Web Design and business, including the Young Small Business Champion Entrepreneur 2023 award. With 15 years under his belt, Brodey is amongst Australia’s most influential digital marketers.

Find them on their website: sitecentre®.