Adopting AI Into Your Digital Marketing Strategies

By Ben Allen, Guest Contributor
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Artificial intelligence is one of the next big steps in the world of technology. Already, AI is being put to work finding new solar systems, finding cures for diseases, beating professionals in a variety of games, doing legal case research, and more. ​

AI can play a huge part in many aspects of marketing.

​It’s only natural that AI is going to become a key part of running a business, and that includes marketing. Those who learn about and embrace AI into their marketing sooner are going to see significant growth over their competitors. AI can play a huge part in most parts of marketing, from identifying data trends, improving workflows, coming up with content ideas, and interacting with leads and customers.

Helping Identify Data Trends
One major use for AI currently is analyzing massive amounts of data. Every second, tons of data is being created, too much for a single individual or even a team of humans to get through. But an AI can work with and analyze your data.

That data can include website analytics, keyword trends, purchase data, demographics, and more. By providing it with data, AI can find trends, correlation, and connections in your data, especially if you help it connect different types of data.

After AI points out trends, it falls to the marketer to make sense of it all. Just because AI says there is a correlation or pattern in the data doesn’t mean causation. For example, if your website gets more traffic at noon from a specific country, and birds are more active at noon in that country, it doesn’t mean birds are the cause for the increased traffic. Marketers need to be very careful to not just accept every trend an AI points out. Anytime big data involving humans is being analyzed, it’s a good idea to have a human look at it from a psychology angle to try and understand the trend, not just rely on AI.

Improved Automation
For the modern marketer, automation can either be a blessing or a curse. Some love how it frees up their time from busy work and is able to create workflows for leads and customers that handle a lot of the work. Others hate its complexity or feel like often huge groups of leads get forgotten or missed because they don’t perfectly fit the automation conditions.

With AI, though, automation becomes a constantly improving process. It can identify gaps in the automation that leads are falling through, create new workflows and edit existing ones based off of analytic feedback to get better results, and manage lead nurturing processes.

Producing and Curating Content
AI is capable of producing very believable content. With enough training in writing and research, AI can produce entire articles, both in reporting the news and relaying opinions. From taking what’s trending or popular to create an idea, to putting words on a page, AI can do it all.

Now, that doesn’t mean you should use AI for all of your content needs. One big difference between AI and a human writer is the ability to reliably differentiate between truth and lies. If your AI starts getting into the wrong kinds of information (like racism or trolls) it could spell trouble. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be helpful. AI can come up with topics and subjects for human writers to cover based on what is trending and popular with their audience.

AI could also be useful in helping curate content for leads and visitors on your website. This goes hand in hand with automation, but AI could analyze how a person interacts with a blog post or webpage and then suggest where they should go next. For example, if you have a long post with many different parts, but a reader only spends time looking at one specific section, an AI could then suggest a new post covering that section more in detail.

Customer and Lead Support
Chatbots are one AI function many businesses are very excited about. It can lessen the burden on sales and customer support teams by chatting directly with both leads and customers. Then, if the chatbot can’t help, the case would get forwarded to a human.

Chatbots are also becoming so complex that many people won’t ever notice they aren’t talking with a real human unless they do something unpredictable. This can allow businesses to focus on different tasks and free up resources away from expensive customer support teams and get more customers the help they need.

Similarly, chatbots can help marketing and sales teams push leads towards making a purchase and then pass them on to a human being when they are really ready for a sales pitch. That way, marketing and sales are chasing dead leads and focusing on ones that are ready.

Smartly Implementing AI
When looking to bring AI into your business or marketing, make sure it’s worth the cost. Right now, AI is not cheap, and if you want one to analyze your data, but you don’t have a lot of data on hand, you won’t get much out of the investment. Similarly, if you want to improve on your automation, but the extent of your automation is a single email nurturing workflow, you don’t need it. Identify needs the AI could solve and investigate if the investment is worth it.
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