One of the most intriguing things about the entire digital marketing industry is how quickly it is always changing and innovating. Some of the strategies that worked a few of years ago are now completely obsolete. Social media platform algorithm changes come faster than the speed of light, and it's important for digital marketing agencies to always be at the forefront of these new changes and ideas.
And what's more new and innovative than artificial intelligence?
You've heard of it plenty of times in sci-fi books and movies, but now we're getting to the point that it's becoming real life. In fact, an AI robot named Sophia has been making the rounds at various speaking events and even has her own Twitter.
But what does a robot have to do with marketing?
The robot itself may not have anything to do with marketing your business, but the technology behind it certainly does. Artificial intelligence comes in many shapes and sizes, and is much more than creating talking robots.
Here are a few ways that your brand can (and in some cases already does) utilize artificial intelligence in your digital marketing.
1. Creating a personalized user experience
The point of AI in digital marketing is for it to learn more and more about your target audience. As more knowledge about your brand and your customers is acrrued, AI technology is able to personalize the user experience and cater advertising messages to each segment.
In fact, many big brands are already using AI in their marketing to increase sales. Harley Davidson has exponentially increased their sales leads while working with an AI named Albert. Albert's job is to analyze existing customer data to determine characteristics, then create a lookalike audience and create segments to test advertising.
Essentially, it's what an ad specialist on staff would do, but it's automated, predictive, and more specific. Your ad specialist couldn't even brush the surface of what Albert can do.
IBM is another big brand that is using AI technology to create digital ads for them. Their AI Watson is available for many companies to utilize in different ways, like giving advice or recommendations to customers over the phone based on their past habits and behavior.
2. Communicating with customers
Chatbots are already a minor form of AI that will only continue to grow and get smarter in conversations. Although you may have programmed all of the potential responses for your current Facebook Messenger bot, one day you'll be able to rely on the bot itself to know what step to take next.
Imagine how satisfied people would be with your customer service if you were able to rely on an AI to understand the issues or concerns and then take the necessary steps to fix it. Or at least get the remedy in motion.
Just like IBM's Watson, who is able to communicate with people over the phones, AI will be able to have voices of their own to converse with your customers about each situation.
3. Predict the search queries for your business
One of the biggest strengths of an AI is its predictive abilities. AIs are able to anticipate future behavior based on past events. So utilizing a tool like this to predict things like search queries for your business is a great way to integrate artificial intelligence with your content marketing and search engine optimization.
Called recommendation engines, these AI use both past customer search data and consumer browsing patterns to identify the top keywords you should be utilizing. So basically all of your keyword research is made extremely easy.
4. Find content faster with image recognition
Whether you're searching for user-generated content or gathering buyer information from the photos they're sharing, there is a lot that can be learned from the photos shared on Facebook. And there is a lot of content that you're otherwise missing when searching for text-only keywords.
What about all of those photos of people using your product that don't have your business tagged or your business name mentioned? They're simply lost in the abyss.
But image recognition AI can help fix all of that. By recognizing your product in photos and turning them up in search results, you're able to find and share content much more quickly (and have a larger library of it) than before.
5. Integrating AI on your business website
In the future, there will be many different ways to use an AI on your website. But right now, there's the Grid. The Grid is essentially a self-designing website AI that could be absolutely perfect for all the business owners out there who aren't savvy enough to create their own website. Designers may someday have to be concerned that robots are taking over all of their jobs.
But that's not the only way to utilize AI on your website. Including a chatbot on your website is another way to allow customers to communicate with you via an AI and learn more information about your website. AIs can analyze your website visitor data to create lookalike audiences for more targeted ads.
Although artificial intelligence is in its infant stage right now, there are so many places for it to go from here. And the AIs that have already been created are minuscule to the amount of intelligence they will have in the future. Artificial intelligence and digital marketing will go hand in hand in promoting businesses in the future, so staying on the cutting edge of AI is essential for a successful digital marketing agency.
If you're interested in what AI could do for your business, let's chat. We love putting together new strategies for the different ways we can increase sales and traffic in your business. Contact us today to get started.
Written By: David Carpenter
