Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning are all around us these days. When you ask Alexa to play your favorite song, order an Uber or use the voice-to-text function on your phone, you’re seeing AI at work.
And although AI still sounds futuristic to many of us, it is making a huge impact on digital marketing right now. If your business isn’t yet capitalizing on the power of AI, you’re going to find yourself at a competitive disadvantage as we move into the new year.
In fact, Forrester predicts that by 2020, businesses utilizing AI to gain data insights will gain revenues of $1.2 trillion, while businesses that don’t will be left behind.
The fact is, AI can take a ton of data, make sense of it and act on it immediately – something that would be virtually (Get it?) impossible for us mere human marketers to do.
The results – in traffic, engagement, leads and sales – can be huge. According to McKinsey, Netflix saved $1 billion in lost revenue in 2017 by using machine learning to make personalized recommendations.
What can AI do for you?
AI has the potential to boost rates of profitability by an average of 38% and could lead to an economic boost of $14 trillion in additional gross value added by 2035. --Accenture
Here are a few of the ways you can utilize AI in your digital marketing efforts today to radically ratchet up results.
- AI-Powered Search – Programmatic display advertising uses AI and real-time bidding to purchase top ad placement, targeted towards your personas based on a data-driven strategy. Saving you the time and expense of manual trial and error, programmatic advertising uses behavioral data to determine which ad is best suited to which person at which moment on which device, delivering a personalized, one-on-one experience with your brand. (See Get with the Program.)
- AI-Powered Customer Service – Chatbots use instant messaging to chat with your customers or site visitors in real-time, day or night. Chatbots save businesses money by addressing common issues (without paying for a human to do it). In fact, it’s estimated that by 2022, chatbots will help businesses save over $8 billion a year. On the marketing side, chatbots can also help cross-sell or upsell to customers by making recommendations based on their interests.
- AI-Powered Personalization – AI can take the customer behavior data from people interacting with your website (or email campaigns, social media posts, etc.) and then personalize what they see or receive based on that data. Like the Netflix example mentioned above, personalization techniques have been proven extremely effective for nurturing and retaining customers. (See Take Your Marketing Personally.)
- AI-Powered Analytics & Insights – Perhaps the biggest value of AI in the marketing realm is that it gives businesses the ability to understand exactly who their customers are at a level they’ve never been able to before. Beyond traditional analytics, marketers can now ask advanced questions of their data and make better decisions to help guide their marketing strategies overall. With AI, you can see which customers are most likely to churn and target them with special messaging. You can also learn who exactly your best customers are – and what products and solutions will resonate with them most. Predictive analytics can even help you see how your customers will behave in the future.
It’s Jetson’s type stuff people. The future is now.
Want some help taking advantage of all AI has to offer? Let’s Talk.
Diane Callihan
With more than 20 years of experience writing for some of the country’s top brands, Diane helped to shape Roger West’s content strategy, lead generation, and PR efforts as Director of Marketing. She currently serves as President of Callihan Content Creation.