It’s 2018, and the robots are here to enhance your marketing strategy.
If you haven’t yet added Artificial Intelligence (AI) to your marketing strategy, you should at least by now be aware of what it is. In a nutshell, AI is data-driven. It arms you with more information about your customers than you could have dreamed of, and it allows you to make a more personalised experience for them that boosts your conversions.
Customers love it — even if they aren’t aware that you’re using it!
It’s easy to get to grips with, and there’s nothing scary about it. In fact, the scariest thing is that your rivals have probably already made a start with it.
Let’s take a look at why you should use AI in your marketing strategy this year.
AI Helps You Understand Your Individual Customers More
Polls and surveys help us to understand our customers a bit more, but your customers are a diverse, nuanced bunch of people.
For example, let’s imagine that you run a survey and it turns out that 77% of your customers want to see more emails from you about a particular subject. Since that accounts for the majority of your customers, you decide to send out more emails about said subject to everyone.
This irks the remaining 23% who didn’t want that email.
AI is different. It uses machine learning to understand individual customers more, offering deeper insights into their buying habits, wants and needs. This means you can ramp up your marketing efforts by segmenting your audience and emailing the right content to the right people — as opposed to sending the same email to everyone because “that’s what most people want to see.”
Personalisation is a key marketing trend in 2018, and this is what AI helps you with. Although the message you send to all your customers about your brand will be the same, the way you frame it will be different.
AI Improves Real-Time Interactions With Your Customers
There are a few reasons why you need to use AI to improve your real-time interactions with your customers. For one thing, customers don’t like to be kept waiting for an online response to their query. If they come to you with a question/problem, they typically want it answered within 60 minutes. If you leave it too long — and this can easily happen if you have a lot of customers asking questions and an overworked and stressed social media team — the customer might take their custom elsewhere.
Secondly, the faster you respond to a customer query online, the more you can influence their decision-making for the better.
For example, if a buyer has been suitably “warmed up” by your landing page copy and is almost ready to buy from you, they might have one quick concern to clear up first. If you can’t respond fast enough, their interest might wane, or they might find a better deal elsewhere in the meantime.
Chatbots — a form of AI — respond to customer queries instantly. They provide satisfactory answers and can increase your conversions and sales.
AI Boosts Your Mobile App’s Performance
Mobile apps are a great way to introduce customers to our brand and, when done right, they can really boost engagement.
AI is now powering a number of mobile apps and enhancing the user experience even more. For example, Spotify uses AI to offer the user better recommendations based on their listening and searching habits.
Period and Ovulation Tracker Flo, meanwhile, uses AI to better predict a woman’s cycles and ovulation dates.
AI Saves You Money on Advertising
As you know, ads can cost a lot of money. The good news is that AI can help you put the right ads in front of the right people so that you’re spending less.
For example, Google AdWords has already adopted an automatic auction-based system so that advertisers just like you are now paying the lowest possible cost-per-conversion.
Then there’s Adext, an Audience Management as a Service that uses AI to help you optimise your ads on Facebook and Google. It can test as many as 480 different audiences each day on each ad to find which prospects are more likely to respond better to certain ads on certain channels.
This means you no longer need to play a guessing game with your ads, and it also means that your A/B test practices will be smoother than ever.
AI is Voice Search — and Voice Search Will Soon Dominate
50% of all searches will be voice by 2020. That isn’t too far away at all, and more and more of us are now speaking directly into our phones when we want to find something on Google or elsewhere.
The time to adapt to the wants of your customers is now — and AI can help you.
Apple’s Siri, Google Home, and Amazon’s Alexa are all AI-backed, as is Google’s RankBrain, a machine learning algorithm that’s further changing the way we search. To make sure you don’t lag behind the competition, consider optimizing your site for voice search.
But how will voice search affect your marketing strategy? The way you optimise your content will begin to change. Keywords will become more conversational, and long-tail keywords will almost make short-tail ones obsolete.
Final thoughts
Take it or leave it, but AI is here, and if you get it right, it will sky-rocket your marketing efforts, sales, and productivity.
With the little help of AI, you can not only learn more about your customers but also improve the interactions’ speed and efficiency in general. AI boosts engagement by placing right content in front of the right people in apps and ads, thus saving you tons of money. And most importantly, AI is here for you when it comes to voice search.
All in all, it’s much better that you work with the robots rather than against them. AI will make your marketing strategy more productive, more efficient, more personal — and more profitable.
If you’d like to learn more about AI in marketing, check out Are Human’s Being Phased Out of Customer Service?
