What is AI Marketing and How to Leverage It

There is a lot of noise surrounding the potential impact of AI in marketing. Business owners worldwide are gearing up for the possibility of predictive analysis, marketing automation, and more personalized customer experiences.

From scaling content creation with automated bots to analyzing social media conversations with deep learning, companies that capitalize on AI-driven marketing tools will have a leg up on their competition.

This article is a starting point for enabling your business to understand what resonates with customers on an individual level by using an AI-powered marketing stack.

What are the benefits of AI in marketing?

Here’s how leveraging AI in marketing can be a game-changer for your company’s brand awareness, sales initiatives, and ROI.

1. Enhance data analysis

AI has helped marketers perform a better analysis of the data available to them on the internet. While the data is easily available to understand market trends, it can be frustrating and time-consuming to go through the vast sea of information available.

AI tools can scan the entire internet and return only the requested information. This helps build a database of better customer personas and improves audience targeting.

2. Automate traffic segmentation

Engaging with customers in the past was time-consuming and required a huge customer support team. Today, AI can aid these multi-tenant teams to expedite support functions resulting in a stronger brand image.

A well-trained chatbot can engage with hundreds of customers every hour and thus generate more information than your regular human. This information helps divide the customers into smaller segments that personalized marketing campaigns can target.

AI-led chatbots are helping businesses today by:

• Collecting customer feedback at scale

• Gathering insights from collected feedback

• Using insights to build better customer personas

Chatbot collected information from surveys and feedback from complaints also help to identify their pain points and flaws within your marketing strategy. Identifying them can help you improve your existing marketing strategy or build an improved one from scratch.

3. Build websites and landing pages

AI tools can be extensively used to build websites and landing pages from scratch. These pages can be custom-made based on the user’s preferences and interests. AI website builder tools use machine learning algorithms to make these pages visually appealing and user-friendly.

Wix ADI (Artificial design intelligence) is a good example of a tool that you can use to not just create designs based on your preference but also create content, edit the layout and optimize your website for mobiles and for SEO.

4. Conduct market research

AI tools can help you gather more data and real-time feedback to make faster and better decisions. Tools like Remesh AI allow you to gain better insights into what’s trending online.

You can easily create a conversation guide to cover all the questions and topics you want to cover and invite participants to join the conversation. Remesh AI will then have conversations with 1000s of your customers simultaneously and automatically moderate the conversation so that all the participants have equal opportunity to participate. It will even analyze the data in real time and present it to you in a visual dashboard.

AI can reduce the time required for such research by a lot.

5. Generate marketing qualified leads

Once you have defined your target audience and identified their interests or the pain points you want to resolve. You can easily create high-quality, highly engaging and highly personalized content at scale using an AI tool like Lavender AI’s software.

It improves your current cold email outreach. and gives you insights about the recipients’ email including a bio, personality traits, company details, etc.

It will even track your email opens and replies on your dashboard. This will help you to qualify your leads.

This makes the entire process of targeting leads with cold emails much faster. Combine that with highly optimized and personalized content, and the chances of conversion increase drastically.

6. Get advanced customer insights

Using AI tools you can easily set up a listening stream for specific keywords, hashtags and mentions related to your brand.

For instance, You can use Hootsuite to search for the keywords you want to monitor under Streams > Add stream. On Hootsuite, you can monitor all your social media accounts on one platform.

It allows you to analyze customer feedback and trends on social media to get better insights without having to be active on all the social media places all the time.

7. Generate content at scale

Creating content using AI tools is simple and fast. You can start by choosing the type of content you want, like a blog, a social media post, etc., providing instructions on the tone and style of your content and the topic you want your content to be on and you’re done.

AI tools like Lumen5 and Animoto also help you in digital marketing campaigns. Using an AI tool like Jarvis AI, you can even have a few edits, regenerations and optimizations done to it if you don’t like the outcome. If you don’t like any of the above options, many other AI copywriting tools are available in the market.

8. Automate marketing processes

Automation of repetitive tasks such as email marketing campaigns, social media posting and ad targeting can be done via AI tools such as Hubspot. Hubspot has a lot of tools on offer that can be checked out on their website.

• Social media posting: AI tools allow you to schedule and publish content across multiple social media platforms. They also help determine the best time and channel to post your content. You can start by connecting your social media accounts to on of such AI tools like Hootsuite and manage your social media posting right from their dashboard.

• Ad targeting - Google Ads is one of the many advertising platforms that uses AI to help your ads reach the right audience. It has much data to fall back on. AI tools using advertisement platforms use customer data like demography, age, gender, interest and past customer behavior to optimize your ad campaigns.

• Creating and sending emails - Mailmodo is an email marketing platform that allows you to create, send and manage interactive email marketing campaigns. The free trial allows you to try out an email marketing platform before committing to the paid plan.

  Chatgpt, on the other hand, can also generate high-quality and SEO-optimized email copies. Pair it up with an email marketing campaign management platform like Mailchimp, and you’re good to go.

6 use cases of AI in marketing

From personalized recommendations to predictive analysis, marketers have found AI to be useful in any kind of marketing. Below we talk about the 6 use cases where marketers leverage AI to drive growth and engagement.

1. AI content marketing

AI plays an important role in content marketing by automating tasks. It allows marketers to generate highly personalized content, research and analyze the preferences of their target audience, and improve SEO.

This results in better performance, engagement and ROI. AI tools also provide better insights to marketers, allowing them to make data-driven decisions.

2. AI email marketing

AI benefits email marketers by enabling them to offer more personalization and improve targeting, resulting in a better-optimized campaign and higher engagement. AI tools can analyze large data sets to understand customer behavior and preferences, which helps marketers in audience segmentation and delivering dynamic content based on the audience's interest. AI also allows email marketers to generate highly optimized email copies and subject lines on a large scale very quickly.

3. AI affiliate marketing

AI allows both brands and affiliate marketers when it comes to affiliate marketing. Brands have found AI tools to be useful when it comes to discovering and researching affiliate marketers for their affiliate programs. AI tools have also helped brands to manage affiliates and their payout, track the progress of different affiliates and maintain a good relationship with them.

Affiliate marketers, on the other hand, use AI to understand their audience better, segment them and predict future market trends. AI also helps affiliate marketers to deliver highly optimized and more relevant content, which increases their chances of conversion. AI tools also allow marketers to generate content at scale like blog posts, social media posts, images and even videos.

4. AI influencer marketing

AI helps brands to streamline their process of influencer selection. It allows them to discover relevant influencers for their campaigns considering audience demographics and engagement metrics. AI tools also allow for maintaining authenticity by detecting and preventing influencer fraud.

Influencers use AI to research their target audience and generate highly optimized content that resonates with their audience for better reach and engagement. AI has also given birth to a new genre of influencers, AI influencers, that are gaining in popularity and provide brands with a lot of benefits over human influencers.

5. AI in advertising

AI has also helped advertisers by allowing them to enhance audience targeting, improve personalization and ultimately optimize their campaigns. AI tools analyze vast data sets to identify patterns and deliver ads to the right audience.

AI also allows real-time optimization of ad placement and bidding. It also allows advertisers to generate ad creatives as well as their variations for various channels and audience segments.

6. AI in social media marketing

AI helps in social media marketing by allowing marketers to analyze user behavior, trends and sentiments to improve their social media strategy. AI’s predictive analytics also allows marketers to predict and be ready for future trends.

Social media management platforms also allow marketers to determine the best day and time to post content and also the kind of content that performs well with a certain kind of audience. AI tools even allow marketers to generate personalized captions and posts.

Best AI marketing tools

There is a wide range of AI tools available today that allow marketers to automate tasks and streamline their processes. What’s important is to choose the right AI tool for the right tasks and one which suits your business needs best. Take a look at some of the different kinds of tools available.

1. Copywriting tools: AI copywriting tools allow marketers to generate high-quality content like long-form blog posts quickly, social media posts and more by providing minimal suggestions. They allow for automating repetitive tasks while preserving consistency in tone and style.

2. Design tools: AI design tools enhance productivity and help marketers create visually appealing and highly engaging content at scale for their marketing campaigns. They simplify the process by generating high-quality images and videos from text inputs and even allow for image, video and audio editing.

3. Conversational AI tools: Conversational AI tools enable interactive and personalized customer communication through chatbots and virtual assistants. They provide instant support and gather valuable data for targeted marketing and improved customer experiences.

4. AI email marketing tools: AI email marketing tools help marketers optimize their email marketing campaigns by analyzing user behavior, segmenting audiences, and personalizing content. They automate email workflows, optimize send times and provide insights for improved engagement and higher conversion rates.

5. AI affiliate marketing tools: AI affiliate marketing tools help brands manage and optimize their affiliate programs. AI tools can track the performance of affiliates and manage payout. They also help in affiliate recruitment and fraud detection, enabling marketers to manage and grow their affiliate networks effectively.

Examples of AI in marketing

Big brands have actively adopted AI to enhance their integrated marketing efforts, cut costs and save time. Companies like Nutella, Casobella, Volkswagen and Tomorrow Sleep have used AI to get results varying from personalized customer experiences to gain a competitive advantage. This trend of AI in marketing is catching up very fast. We can see many examples of use cases in our daily lives. Some of them are:

1. Nutella uses AI to create packaging

2. Cyber Inc uses AI to create video courses at scale

3. Cosabella uses AI for ad creation

4. Volkswagen uses AI to forecast buying decisions

5. Tomorrow Sleep uses AI to generate content at scale

Role of AI marketing in industries

1. B2B Marketing

By leveraging the power of AI tools, businesses can gain valuable insights into the B2B audiences ad create targeted campaigns. AI has impacted customer segmentation and organic and inorganic marketing alike.

AI tools help in data analysis, predictive analytics, lookalike modeling, strategic optimization and more. AI also helps create successful inorganic campaigns like affiliate marketing and influencer marketing by providing valuable insights into the performance of the campaigns and more.

2. Recruitment marketing

AI has helped streamline and enhance various aspects of the hiring process. AI tools enable recruiters to automate candidate sourcing and screening, saving time and effort. AI can analyze resumes and assess candidates on their skills to predict if they are the right fit for the job. It also enables personalized candidate experiences, data-driven decisions and enhanced talent acquisition strategies. In addition to the mentioned tools, AI tools for meetings are pivotal in recruiting as well as they save time and alleviate interview-related stress by enabling remote interactions.

Will AI take over digital marketing?

Humans seem to be falling prey to the success of AI tools, or so it seems. Will machines become more intelligent than humans?

1. Lack of originality

While AI tools can analyze all the data on the internet, they can only provide you with what is already available. Due to its inability to yet infuse meaning into its creations, AI is unable to engage in independent creativity.

It is limited by the algorithms and training data used to generate it, so you can’t expect it to exhibit social intelligence.

2. Inability to separate the truths from the lies

AI relies on whatever is available over the internet. If there is a statement that has been posted several times without any background check, AI does not disregard it. It takes it as true and produces the same information for the person who’s requested it.

3. Data privacy concerns

The world has seen a rise in the digitalization of data. Almost all the information about you can be found online. Companies with millions of customers store thousands of terabytes of data, including information from something as general as their age to something as sensitive as their credit card details.

Giving AI access to such data surely exposes the personal information of millions of users worldwide. Thus, it seems unlikely that the human touch can be eliminated completely from marketing.

So, let's just say that it isn’t AI vs. humans, but AI for the humans in this AI marketing industry.

Takeaway

AI is revolutionizing the marketing field by enabling marketers to make data-driven decisions and automate key processes. The knowledge of AI marketing tools and their uses is necessary to survive in the digital marketing world.

If this resource helps you incorporate AI marketing into your strategy on a budget, share it with another marketer who’d find it useful.