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When you hear of artificial intelligence, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Maybe it’s Terminator for the older crowd or Wall-E for the younger generation. Depending on how you’ve seen AI, you might see it as a beautiful or scary thing.
I’m here to tell you it’s the former, especially in marketing. In fact, marketing and sales prioritize AI 40% higher than any other department.
It’s easy to see why.
Marketing takes a ton of effort: planning campaigns, launching them, measuring, and making small tweaks. You know what I’m talking about.
However, artificial intelligence automates many of these tasks, improves performance, and lets you get back to work that makes a difference.
Want to see how? Here are four ways you can begin applying AI to your organization’s marketing today.
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1. Customer targeting and developing buyer personas
Every customer segment is different. Wildly different, in fact. They have distinct values, beliefs, feelings, and experiences.
Sending all of your customers the same campaigns and messages is a definite way to flush budget down the drain. As a matter of fact, 78.6% of consumers will only engage with a brand that’s sent personalized offers in the past according to Marketo.
Personalized marketing has become extremely important for this reason. Otherwise, it’s like trying to fit the same tire on several different cars. It might work on a couple, but it won’t fit all of them.
Artificial intelligence is capable of discovering which customer profiles generate the highest engagement and conversions. This includes their location, age, device, consumer behavior, etc. You can use this data to re-target audiences that resonate the most with your brand’s product and messages.
On the flip side, how have we done this in the past? Typically it involves going into analytics or ad platforms by hand, picking through data and spending hours doing the same thing AI does automatically. (Don’t worry, I’ve been there, too!)
2. Campaign monitoring
Do you ever hover over marketing campaigns like a worried parent? Most of us marketers do this regularly. It’s good to keep tabs on things, but it’s taking away from important things like nurturing relationships and managing your team.
According to a HubSpot study, the average marketer spends 16 hours per week on routine tasks. That’s nearly half of a full work week! What’s a marketer ought to do? Take advantage of artificial intelligence.
AI software scans marketing and advertising campaigns to learn a company’s normal behavior. It then alerts companies if there are spikes in data or other unusual activity. These can be both positive or negative: ads driving more revenue than forecasted or declining click-through rates, for instance.
Your organization can use this information to allocate more time and budget to campaigns moving the needle. Perhaps more importantly, you don’t have to play whack-a-mole with bad campaigns.
3. Sales forecasting
Wouldn’t it be nice to look into the future to see how your campaigns perform? While it seems like something out of a sci-fi movie, it’s available to us right now.
AI marketing software has the ability to use technology like predictive analytics to forecast sales, ROI, and other key metrics of marketing efforts. This supports teams to work as usual while getting a glimpse of what their activities will return to them.
Predictive analytics uses machine learning to train models with historic and real-time data. It then predicts how sales, budgets, marketing, and other assets are going to behave. This also prevents spending weeks to months before you determine that something is (or isn’t) worth scaling.
4. Chatbots
Have you ever landed on a website and a chat immediately opened up? They probably asked if you needed help with anything, right?
I’m sure you had a great conversion, but I’m sorry to tell you that probably wasn’t a real person. It was a chatbot developed with artificial intelligence.
These chatbots are designed with human-like scripts and are able to answer questions before handing interactions off to actual sales reps. Many times you honestly can’t tell the difference or where the swap happens.
Chatbots also automate lead generation and sales funnels for this reason. Instead of manually waiting to talk to users, use a chatbot to initiate conversation, answer questions, and screen users. If customers ask specific questions or use keywords, send them links to product pages, demos, or contact forms.
Wrapping up AI for marketing
If you’re a marketer, you know the amount of effort put into creating, measuring, and growing campaigns can seem like the size of Mount Everest. It doesn’t necessarily have to be that way.
Artificial intelligence takes a lot of the daily pains away we face as marketers. These include optimizing campaigns, finding bugs, and making tweaks. In sum, you and your team can get back to important projects and satisfying clients.
