Artificial Intelligence is Changing Marketing, and Here’s What You Need to Do
Without a question, artificial intelligence (AI) is a popular issue right now. Marketing is one of the many industries where technology is making its influence. Nearly all marketing gurus and experts are busy predicting how AI will affect marketing, consumer purchasing patterns, advertising, corporate futures, and other areas.
Thanks to innovations like Alexa, Siri, and other advanced analytics tools based on machine learning, both our personal and professional lives have begun to experience the possibilities of artificial intelligence. Isn’t it sufficient to hint at the fascinating future that AI promises to the marketing industry?
In the past year, the artificial intelligence revolution in marketing has reached its peak. Thanks to the latest data analytics tools, many marketers now have access to them and can afford them. A rising number of marketers are being empowered and encouraged to adopt data-driven approaches to their marketing decision-making processes by the availability of rich and comprehensive datasets, even though they are still noisy.
Almost every marketer is talking and thinking about how AI will affect their work since the winds of development have been flowing in this AI direction — for the time being.
Even though artificial intelligence is still in its early stages, and we are not quite there, it will inevitably continue to advance. Knowing how AI is altering marketing as we currently know it is not enough for marketers; we also need to know what we should do with all of these new AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics capabilities. Let’s look at it.
AI is Reinventing Customer Interactions
By generating more individualised marketing chances, artificial intelligence is enabling new experiences. According to Google research, more than 60% of American tourists “would consider an impulse vacation based on a nice hotel or airline offer.” Even though it sounds incredibly thrilling, it also raises the bar.
According to the same Google poll, “57 per cent of American visitors believe marketers should customise their information based on individual preferences or previous behaviour. Knowing how artificial intelligence is altering marketing as we currently know it is not enough for marketers; we also need to know what we should do with all of these new AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics capabilities. Let’s look at it.
What does this mean for marketers?
They will be able to build new levels of customer interactions that are easier to carry out and more immediate with the help of AI technology and marketing techniques. The increased expectations of consumers will present brands with new difficulties and possibilities.
Marketers can now completely realise personalisation and relevance in terms of opportunity. For instance, search engines, YouTube, and other social media websites have already improved communication between digital ad platforms. Marketers can create campaigns specifically tailored to the current customer intent when they combine this with the “customisation” made available by artificial intelligence.
Eventually, campaigns and client interactions will become more holistically relevant. Marketers may optimise their campaigns in real-time while they are in motion by considering all the data at their disposal, such as contextual relevance and purchase history.
However, this implies that they will have to collaborate with thousands of planners at once. For many, this might be a challenging task.
What You Need to Do?
Put quality of data first. In the era of marketing powered by artificial intelligence, data quality is crucial. Sophisticated AI systems built on neural networks and deep learning require a large amount of data. As a result, gathering a lot of data is crucial. However, marketers cannot sacrifice data quality to gather a lot of data.
If you examine the algorithms that power AI systems, you will see that they are simply more complex forms of data processing. As a result, it becomes challenging for the algorithms to detect significant patterns in noisy or inaccurately measured data. As a result, it will be nearly hard to generate accurate projections on which to build marketing plans. Data quality is so crucial.
Therefore, before using any data in your business decisions, be sure it has been accurately measured and thoroughly documented. Don’t just stop at gathering as many data points as you can. The only way to maximise the potential of artificial intelligence analytical tools is to do this.
Infusion of AI is Taking Automation to A New Level
TensorFlow, an open-source machine learning framework developed by Google, is being used by Instacart to forecast the order in which its customers will make their store purchases. “This strategy has decreased our shopping times by minutes every trip,” the company claims. Every minute saved will equal 618 years of annual shopping time at scale. It’s a lot, that!
The introduction of artificial intelligence is advancing automation, which is essentially excellent news for decision-making CEOs because it will free up their time. Marketers may now intelligently automate routine, easy processes to free up more time for activities that require human concentration and involvement.
Marketers continue to face many challenging, complex, and demanding issues and these issues aren’t going away. Marketers may devote more time to these problems by cleverly automating some of the tedious procedures, which is a good thing.
Additionally, as consumers become even more digital, marketers and sales can devote more time to face-to-face contact with clients, which is actually becoming of the biggest importance. Customers’ own smart AI-powered products and devices are helping them become more accustomed to automation.
Therefore, the human component of a business relationship with a consumer is more significant. Marketers can concentrate on having human contact with their clients and target audiences with the “freed-up” time.
Additionally, marketers today have more time and resources available to them, allowing them to push the limits of inventiveness for their marketing initiatives. They can employ artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to generate fresh concepts, develop new media platforms, discover novel ways to tell brand stories, and so forth. This has the potential to help the quality of creative work in advertising as a whole, which is again a promising possibility.
Here, marketers will need to be more digitally literate and better understand artificial intelligence and machine learning than they have now. Additionally, to build a richer and more meaningful relationship with their customers, marketers must focus more on decisions that need original thought and human interaction.
What You Need to Do?
While it’s fantastic when things can be automated, not everything should be. Since most people do not understand artificial intelligence (AI), automated (driver-less) driving of vehicles, buses, trains, and trucks has already alarmed enough people. A pedestrian was recently murdered in an accident in Arizona by a self-driving Uber. There will probably be more mishaps of similar nature after this one. Things could go wrong, and the bugs would need to be fixed.
Do you believe that people will embrace AI that readily? Even after initial worries about all of these potential and impending events? Robots, autonomous vehicles, and IT giants are the only things that come to mind when people (both consumers and employees) think about artificial intelligence.
The answer is to move slowly. Your customers do not understand predictive analytics and algorithms. Some customers may find it wonderful to see advertisements that are specifically tailored to them (based on their search history and preferences).
Others, though, might regard them as chances for abuse or worse. Consider the confusion and controversy surrounding how Trump advisors used the Facebook data of millions of Americans to their advantage during the 2016 election. Most of these intelligent AI-based solutions are distrusted by consumers in general.
Therefore, it is not a smart idea to automate every step of your marketing process, especially at this very early stage of adoption. How likely are you to believe a new startup’s claims that they employ artificial intelligence (AI) to produce emails, an original copy, or Facebook posts that outperform those written by more seasoned human copywriters? Obviously not. Your marketing strategy should still include some personal interaction. Don’t merely automate to save money; automate when it makes sense and when it has an advantage over humans.
Conclusion
In the realm of marketing, developments involving artificial intelligence and machine learning are numerous. Marketers must look at this technology in a way that goes beyond data analytics. It’s time to consider this technology in terms of consumer demands rather than simply giving in to the onslaught of technological progress.
Investing in artificial intelligence is a good idea, but make sure the innovation is customer-driven, value-driven, and purpose-based. Before investing in artificial intelligence, marketers must first recognise their own awareness of the technology’s immense potential. Then they will be able to influence marketing and win consumers over to this technology.
edited and proofread by nikita sharma
