Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the way businesses and consumers interact. While some people have concerns about the integration of AI into different sectors like social media and finances, the truth of the matter is that it is already heavily integrated into our daily lives. The assistance AI provides is unparalleled and will continue to grow in most industries, including digital marketing.
Digital marketing has relied on AI to interpret data and process information in order to be able to cater toward specific target audiences’ needs. This personalization has made online browsing and shopping experiences more enjoyable for consumers, while also humanizing digital marketing practices.
AI has come a long way in the past few years, and its evolution is not slowing down. AI’s future advancements will shape how professionals market on digital platforms, in order to create even better experiences for users.
Here are some of the ways in which AI has fundamentally changed the digital marketing industry and what’s still to come:
Tracking Consumer Behavior
Tracking consumers’ preferences is one of the top functions of AI for digital marketing. Companies like Amazon have perfected this AI function in order to effectively recommend related products or purchases, specific to each buyer’s past purchases. It allows Amazon to display alternative items that the consumer might like, ultimately driving more sales for the company.
Thanks to AI, digital marketers have the opportunity to serve consumers targeted advertisements and related products based on their browsing behavior, across multiple platforms. For example, if you click a certain product on Facebook, you might start to see Instagram advertisements for that specific product from a variety of different companies. This may seem invasive, but it allows for a more customized and efficient browsing experience.
As AI and all its capabilities spread across more industries and more data is collected, digital marketers will have the opportunity to create extremely targeted ads to niche groups that might not have been a target audience initially considered. With this advanced tracking ability, specific consumer behavior is learned by AI and helps marketers develop cutting-edge marketing ideas in order to reach audiences as effectively as possible and reduce any potential waste.
Content
Creating and curating tailored content is a major advantage and we have AI to thank. AI has the ability to gather insights about certain demographics, like age and region, which shows what kind of content a certain demographic might gravitate toward. According to Smart Insights, 40% of millennials trust video content the most, so by knowing this information, digital marketers who want to target millennials can make informed decisions on what type of content to create.
Having robust information on target audiences is incredibly valuable to digital marketers. As AI progresses, digital marketers will be able to create variations of content with similar messages and send them directly to these target audiences, based on the type of content they prefer. This fosters a mutually beneficial relationship between marketers and audiences because there will be less wastage for marketers and a more pleasurable browsing experience for consumers.
Voice Search
Voice search has already become a staple in many people’s lives with Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, but further advancements will only continue in years to come. AI has the ability to not only recognize whose voice is speaking, but customize the types of results based on that person. There is already a very marginal error rate for AI’s misrecognition of certain voices, and we can all be assured that it will continue to get more and more precise and pull from a specific person’s search history on another device of theirs to gather a more comprehensive list of results.
Digital marketers can use voice recognition and search to be able to target audiences directly based on how they search. This will take time to develop due to differences in SEO searches between text and speech, but once marketers can use AI to gather this data, digital marketing through voice search will become an integral part of any marketing strategy.
Chatbots
Chatbots have become a staple for many customer service departments due to the ability to assist customers 24 hours a day and juggle multiple customers at once. Companies of various industries and sizes have been able to easily integrate chatbots due to AI’s capabilities. Not only will companies who offer ecommerce be able to implement chatbots to assist consumers, but digital marketers will also be able to utilize chatbots through social media in the future in order to better gauge target audiences’ perceptions.
Affordability
AI is becoming a more affordable service for businesses. With its growing popularity, these technologies are becoming easy to replicate and become inexpensive. It is more available in every sense. Given the fact that AI systems are efficient and scalable, it can be easily trained and deployed into many systems, and can complete certain tasks more quickly and cheaply than humans could. In many ways AI systems can exceed human capabilities. This will greatly benefit the digital marketing industry because it means that businesses can continue to develop more specific and personalized messages to efficiently target consumers and stay ahead of the curve.
AI has transformed how companies conduct business, people interact with their devices and digital marketing practices to name a few. The reliance on AI is evident in today’s world, and it will continue to evolve into more advanced and knowledgeable technology. Better availability of data, software and the way it can be sewn together have given rise to artificial intelligence being implemented in our lives like never before. Digital marketers need to stay up to date on all the future AI trends and functions in order to employ effective marketing practices.