How to use AI in marketing campaigns? Explained by Digimagg

Contemporary technology has deeply penetrated our daily lives, impacting how we communicate, entertain ourselves, and make purchasing decisions. As a result of these advancements, the customer experience has undergone significant transformation. Nowadays, individuals can easily research product availability online, receive discount codes through email or text messages, and encounter advertisements for emerging businesses on social media platforms. Recognizing the importance of modern technology and data analytics in customer engagement, corporate marketing teams are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence as a critical component of their marketing strategies.

Introduction to AI marketing

First, let's outline artificial intelligence and discuss its role in marketing.

• Artificial intelligence: Software designed to mimic human cognitive processes. It includes machine learning, analytics, automation, and big data.
• AI marketing: Employing AI tools to personalize content, enhance customer engagement, and derive actionable insights, thereby achieving favorable business results.

AI vs automation

When considering AI, many envision computers emulating human intelligence or robots performing repetitive tasks. However, these examples, often merged into a single concept, represent AI and automation, respectively.

AI involves software crafted to replicate human cognitive processes like perception, inference, synthesis, and analysis. Automation, on the other hand, entails pre-programmed software executing specific tasks as predetermined by individuals.

In the marketing realm, the distinctions are clear:

• AI marketing: Utilizes software to swiftly analyze gathered data without human intervention, facilitating enhanced marketing ROI, personalized customer experiences, and valuable insights.
• Marketing automation: Relies on software to carry out marketing tasks and execute preset campaigns on a set schedule, freeing up time for other responsibilities.

What are the advantages of employing artificial intelligence in marketing campaigns?

Advantages of AI in Marketing

1. Utilize customer data to acquire insights
2. Elevate customer experiences through tailored content
3. Reduce errors stemming from human fallibility
4. Optimize data handling
5. Increase marketing return on investment (ROI)
6. Leverage a business trend anticipated for 2024

Integrating AI into marketing offers numerous advantages, including acquiring AI-driven customer insights and generating personalized content. Digital marketers also leverage artificial intelligence marketing solutions indirectly to minimize human errors and enhance workflow efficiency, further benefiting their businesses.

1. Utilize customer data to acquire insights

Understanding current and potential customers relies heavily on data and its tracking. Artificial intelligence marketing enables the collection of invaluable insights into target audiences and their journey. These insights encompass four types of customer data:

• Foundational data: Including demographic details like name, gender, location, ethnicity, or email address.
• Engagement data: Pertaining to general interactions, such as service usage or social media following.
• Behavioral data: More specific engagement metrics, such as purchase history, subscriptions, or trial sign-ups.
• Attitudinal data: Focusing on customer perceptions and opinions, often obtained through surveys or online reviews.

While all four types are significant, marketers often emphasize engagement and behavioral data to gauge campaign effectiveness. AI solutions are also utilized for basic data collection to facilitate customer segmentation—grouping customers based on shared demographics or preferences.

These insights derived from AI-driven marketing inform content creation and messaging strategies across media channels, enhancing marketing campaign effectiveness.

2. Elevate customer experiences through tailored content

Utilizing marketing AI to thoroughly comprehend their audience is a strategy employed by some of the most impactful advertisements. Once data analysis yields insights, marketing teams can enhance customer experiences through personalized messaging.

Personalized marketing is pivotal for customer retention and acquisition. By delivering content such as targeted ads, tailored emails, and interactive quizzes, businesses can engage their audience in a personalized and significant manner. This approach to content marketing could lead to:

• Enhanced customer satisfaction
• Heightened customer loyalty
• Improved marketing ROI (return on investment)
• Cost savings through a more targeted strategy
• Strengthened connections and relationships with customers

3. Reduce errors stemming from human fallibility

It's common for individuals to occasionally make mistakes, but certain errors can pose risks and negatively affect marketing performance. Artificial intelligence offers a solution for marketing teams to minimize such errors. With AI platforms incorporating features like machine learning, natural language processing, and automation, various tasks can be accomplished without human intervention.

For instance, an AI marketing tool could be tasked with reviewing emails for grammar errors. While a professional editor could perform this task, relying on self-checks by non-professionals might compromise quality.

Additionally, AI marketing tools enable the automation of email or text sending. Rather than manually managing lengthy lists of contacts, AI can automate the timing, recipients, and personalized messages for each communication.

As these AI platforms operate in the background, employees can allocate their focus to human-centric tasks such as writing, strategy development, management, or design. When deployed effectively, AI serves as a powerful and invaluable tool, supporting employees and allowing them to concentrate on tasks best suited to human capabilities.

4. Optimize data handling

Though gathering data is an essential initial phase in understanding your audience, its utility could be compromised if it's not properly inputted, managed, or stored. Leveraging AI can mitigate the risk of erroneous data interpretation and collection.

Certain AI-driven marketing tools offer automation for data entry and ingestion. This ensures thorough analysis of all pertinent data for quality, usability, and validity. Armed with reliable data, your marketing team can devise campaigns that are pertinent, impactful, and beneficial.

5. Leverage a business trend anticipated for 2024

AI is expected to become increasingly vital for marketing teams in 2024, making it opportune to consider investing in an AI marketing strategy. Currently, businesses are exploring AI utilization to capitalize on the aforementioned benefits and effectively target their messaging to the appropriate audience.

Different types of AI marketing solutions and their application

There exist numerous AI platforms and software types capable of influencing your marketing endeavors. However, to maximize the utility of your AI marketing tools, it's imperative to begin by identifying your objectives.

Artificial intelligence marketing and proficient data analysis rely on the information provided, hence having precise queries prepared is essential. These may include:

• What are the seasonal preferences of our customers?
• Is it optimal to initiate a marketing campaign presently or defer it for six months?
• Are our customers informed about our upcoming product? Should we develop educational content?
• Will our customers engage with a social media post featuring a video or image carousel?
• How can we reclaim customers lost to competitors?
• What is the ideal budget allocation for this campaign?

Once you have formulated questions requiring answers, you can gather data and utilize your AI marketing tools to devise strategic initiatives and make informed business decisions.

Predictive analytics

Marketing teams utilize predictive analysis to develop optimized marketing strategies for achieving improved business outcomes. This involves employing data, algorithms, and machine learning to recognize patterns in historical big data and forecast future events or trends.

For instance, suppose you aim to employ predictive analytics to gain insight into upcoming preferences within a fashion retail environment. In that case, you could utilize a predictive analytics algorithm to gather historical data concerning your audience's demographics, purchasing histories, and past preferences. Subsequently, leveraging your AI marketing platform, you can evaluate and implement a model capable of identifying the trends and experiences customers will seek in a retail setting.

Machine learning

Machine learning constitutes a significant component of digital marketing, wherein marketing teams utilize algorithms to progressively "learn" and swiftly make informed decisions. It falls within the realm of artificial intelligence and data science, leveraging deep learning—a layered, artificial neural network—to establish connections, simulate human thought processes, and enable users to respond promptly to large-scale data in real-time.

Machine learning empowers businesses to swiftly analyze vast datasets, facilitating real-time adjustments and the delivery of more personalized experiences to customers. Here are some examples of machine learning solutions:

Recommendation systems: These systems, a subset of machine learning, propose relevant items to users. For instance, in an online shop, a recommendation system can analyze a customer's behavior and suggest similar products they may find appealing, thereby potentially enhancing sales and improving the user experience.

Churn rate forecasting: This entails analyzing data to determine the percentage of customers who have ceased purchasing from a business. Detecting a high churn rate through machine learning platforms allows businesses to discern customer dissatisfaction factors and pivot accordingly, while also considering customer feedback to enhance retention.

Dynamic pricing algorithms: Dynamic pricing involves adjusting prices in response to supply and demand fluctuations. With an AI marketing tool, businesses can analyze customer purchase behaviors, product prices, and market trends to dynamically adjust prices in real-time. Such algorithms can also consider additional factors like fixed costs, variable costs, competitor prices, employee wages, and customer satisfaction/dissatisfaction before implementing price adjustments.

Before adjusting product prices, a dynamic pricing algorithm can factor in various other elements such as fixed costs, variable costs, competitor prices, employee wages, and levels of customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction.

Programmatic advertising

Marketing teams employ programmatic advertising to automate the creation of content, purchase of ad space, and placement of ads to optimize marketing efforts.

This advertising method automates the process of discovering, purchasing, creating, and positioning digital advertisements on websites, applications, and social media platforms.

Through programmatic advertising, businesses can access real-time insights, monitor ad performance, and gain a clearer understanding of budget allocations based on each ad's effectiveness. For instance, AI tools can be deployed to autonomously bid on digital ad spaces and negotiate in real-time.

Here are common online ad formats, along with additional resources to learn more about leveraging each one for your digital marketing campaigns:

• Display ads
• Video ads
• Social ads
• Native ads
• Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) advertising

Additional AI marketing solutions

• AI-driven push notifications: Utilizing an AI marketing platform to manage push notifications enables the delivery of relevant content to customers at optimal times. Various types of push notifications can inform customers about diverse topics, including upcoming sales, subscribed contacts, or abandoned items in online shopping carts.
• Automated image recognition: This AI marketing solution involves analyzing images to provide data that can enhance effectiveness or automate tasks. For instance, it can assess the effectiveness of campaign images, automatically generate alt text after image scanning/classification, or identify specific places, individuals, or objects within selected images.
• AI-powered PPC advertising: PPC, or pay-per-click advertising, is enhanced with AI capabilities, allowing digital marketers to modify existing ads or bid on ad space in real-time. This solution also enables the prediction of customer behavior, removal of outdated or ineffective ads, and insertion of dynamic ads based on user browsing history.

Investing in AI is crucial for achieving success. The adage "knowledge is power" holds especially true in digital marketing. Artificial intelligence, big data, and analytics play a vital role in comprehending the customer journey, enhancing daily business operations, and optimizing workflows.