How to Build an AI Marketing Strategy From Scratch

Given the rising adoption rate of AI into marketing processes by businesses, It is impossible to survive in the market without using an AI marketing strategy. This article gives you insights on developing your marketing strategy integrated with AI from scratch and implementing it for your business’s growth.

Why should you integrate AI into your marketing strategy

The marketing sector has been flooded with AI tools. AI is used to create content, analyze data, target audiences and many more such tasks. Here are a few reasons why you should also use integrate AI into your marketing strategy.

The competition is doing it

High-performing marketers claim to have a fully developed AI marketing strategy in 70% of the cases. Similar is the case for bigger companies like Amazon and Google, which integrate AI into their own marketing strategies.

This gives an unfair advantage to the marketers who have adopted AI into their marketing strategy over the ones who haven’t. Pair that up with the scale of the tech giants, and it becomes near impossible to compete with them while sticking to your generic marketing strategy.

AI offers insane productivity in lesser time

The tasks that would normally require hours and a large team now require only an AI marketing tool and a few minutes.

According to a survey, 61% of employees say that AI helps to improve their productivity and efficiency. Repetitive tasks can be done by an AI, and need to be counter-checked by humans only where needed.

For instance, creating personalized email copies for a set of audiences based on their preferences can be time-consuming for humans but an AI tool can expedite the task.

AI can save you lots of money

While the cost of maintaining large teams can consume a chunk of your marketing budget, AI marketing tools for similar tasks can be much more cost-effective.

You can invest in an AI tool subscription that will cost you a fraction of the hiring cost or even be free for a trial period.

For instance, instead of hiring a team of content writers to produce and publish long-form, SEO-friendly content that ranks, you can use Copy.ai for free to create high-quality drafts based on the right keywords. This gives a boost to your content marketing strategy.

AI can simplify complex marketing tasks

AI has the potential to do tasks that may be too complex for humans or just too time-consuming. This could include finding patterns in large data sets, predicting future trends while keeping the past trends in mind or simply creating personalized subject lines for individual customers.

1. Analyzing large amounts of data: Humans have a limitation on the number of things they can focus on simultaneously. Also, the larger the data set is, the more difficult it is to analyze for us.

AI pushes these limits and makes it much easier to analyze large data sets to get better insights. Also, it can provide insights into trends that a human can easily miss out on.

For instance, companies like Myntra can have a fairly large database. It may become too complex for a human to find a pattern in the kind of clothing purchased by individual customers with several attributes recorded in the database.

2. Predictive analysis: Another very helpful use case that marketers use AI for is predictive analysis. AI can learn from previous business data. For instance, AI can analyze sales data to determine which products perform best for a certain age group. It can also analyze the behaviour of the customers. AI can then use this data to predict which products would perform better or what customers would like to buy in the future.

3. Personalization at scale: Creating personalized email copies, landing pages or recommendations for individual customers can be time-consuming and nearly impossible for humans to do if the target audience is too big or disparate.

AI can cater to a much larger audience with personalized content. It does this by making sense of all the data on the customer like their interests, browsing history, past purchases, age, demography and so on and tweaking the content to the customer’s liking.

How to build your AI-integrated marketing strategy

Building an AI-integrated marketing strategy is a little different. Here’s the list of steps to build a successful marketing strategy with AI integrated into it.

1. List and analyze your current projects - You must start by listing and analyzing your current marketing processes. This involves identifying the current marketing tactics that you are using, the channels in use, etc. and how they are performing.

For example, if I wanted to start a new email marketing campaign for Mailmodo, the first step of my email marketing strategy would be to list the current and past email campaigns and how they have performed with what kind of audiences. Mailmodo itself helps analyze the metrics such as open rates, click-through rates and conversion rates.

2. Figure out processes that you would like to automate - Generally, a process that can be automated are as follows

• Is repetitive in nature and has an interactive set of steps
• Requires working with large amounts of datasets
• Falls under the ability of an AI tool at present

You must identify such tasks and determine how to automate them. For instance, Mailmodo allows you to automate your email campaigns.

Also, you need to consider the feasibility of automation, the ROI of automation versus doing it manually, etc.

For instance, if creating hyper-personalized email copies for my email marketing campaign is taking a lot of time and slowing down my campaign, I need to determine which aspects of it can be automated, like creating the first drafts or optimizing the subject lines, etc.

While on the topic, it is important to answer an important question: Will AI automation bring down the quality of the output work?

Well, yes and no. AI has the potential to produce high-quality work but it doesn’t necessarily do that all the time. We need to understand that it still lacks the kind of reason that humans are capable of. So while the outwork can match up and exceed the quality of work in terms of repetitive and tasks, it doesn’t fare very well against a human where a lot creativity and thinking is required.

3. Look for the right AI tool as a replacement - Once you have identified your needs, you can start looking for ways to automate tasks to make your marketing process more fluid. This can involve using AI tools to perform repetitive tasks like social media listening, sending emails, writing personalized email copies, etc.

Once you have identified that you want to automate the creation of hyper-personalized copies, you would need to look for an AI tool for it.

4. Determine requirements for human in the loop - AI tools may not always generate the most desirable results. So it is important to test the output of the tools and determine if human intervention is required for best results. You will read below about why human intervention is important.

So, if I want to actually automate my email marketing campaign here at Mailmodo, I must determine whether my supervision is required for the smooth running of the processes and outcomes. This is to ensure the email copies and subject lines align with my campaign goals.

5. Replace and roll out the plan - Once you have checked everything, you can put the responsibility of the task on the AI tool.

After this, I can simply set the process rolling to go ahead with my email marketing campaign.

6. Check and measure the impact - It is important to understand how implementing AI into your marketing strategy has affected your KPIs. This can be done by defining your key performance indicators (KPIs) for AI-based processes and how they fit into the overall business objectives.

Why is human intervention needed in an AI marketing strategy

AI has taken a lot of work out of the hands of humans. Not to mention, it has succeeded in doing it more efficiently and cost-effectively too. However, you must still check and verify many things to keep everything working perfectly.

To check the quality of work

Every copy created needs to be checked for quality purposes to see if it matches your brand guidelines and is in line with campaign goals. It is important to know that AI may create content, but it isn’t creative or thoughtful like a human.

For fact-checking

AI basically relies on whatever information is available on the internet. So if some misinformation has been produced a couple of times on a few websites, AI regards it as true.

It cannot follow a piece of information to its source and check for its legitimacy like a human can. Hence, the intervention of humans in this is crucial.

Take risky decisions

While AI has the potential to work faster and more efficiently, it does not fare well when it comes to taking decisions. What humans normally use AI for are repetitive and well-defined tasks.

In an ideal scenario, the use case of AI is to assist humans in taking decisions by providing them with the results of their requests for analyzed data so that they can weigh the pros and cons and make a call.

AI needs to be guided in the right direction

While AI can be a great asset in many ways, it does not know how to execute a strategy. It only knows how to do a task that it has been assigned.

So human intervention is required to assign tasks and point AI to the right path. For example, AI must also be trained for tasks like customer interaction.

AI marketing strategy of top brands

Every other company today uses AI in some way or another in their marketing strategy. Below we take a look at some of the tech giants who have integrated AI into the day-to-day marketing of their services and products.

Amazon

Amazon uses machine learning algorithms to personalize product recommendations based on the purchase history, searches and browsing history of their customers on their website.

Amazon even personalizes its homepage based on such data and shows the recently searched products and offers on the products that they have shown interest in on the homepage itself. Read the case study here.

Netflix

Netflix uses machine learning algorithms to offer personalized recommendations and watchlists for the viewers based on their viewing history, search history and interactions on the platform. Read the case study here.

Spotify

With the help of AI, Spotify builds a profile to understand what kind of music you like and your listening habit. It then personalizes music, podcasts and playlist recommendations based on the collected data. Read the case study here.

Starbucks

Starbucks stores customer data such as the order you placed, the location of the store the order was placed at, the time of order, etc. Through machine learning, AI then uses this data to predict future orders from you and provides personalized messages to boost sales. Read the case study here.

Wrap up

Integrating AI into your marketing strategy is crucial to stay in the competition. AI offers increased productivity and cost-effectiveness and can be a marketer’s best friend if used correctly.

While there are still reasons for keeping a human in the loop, it cannot be denied that the harmonious collaboration of creative humans and the functionalities of AI is the key to a successful marketing strategy.