Why You Should Learn the Role of AI in Digital Marketing?

Introduction

Have you heard about “Rococo’s Basilisk”?

It is the AI joke that brought the power couple billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk and Canadian musician Grimes together. When Elon Musk poked fun at AI in one of his famous cryptic tweets. he found out that the punk musician Claire Boucher had already created a character called Rococo Basilisk in one of her music videos. The two bonded over their mutual geekiness and the rest is history. You can call it love at first AI pun!

Nerdy jokes and celebrity gossip apart, Artificial Intelligence has become an intrinsic part of our daily lives. While mainstream media continues to focus on popular conspiracy theories of robots ruling over humanity, the world is embracing AI and reaping all kinds of benefits. Consumers are letting go of their initial awkwardness and embarking on a journey to bond with humanity’s greatest invention in the 21st century. The slower you are on the uptake to harness the power of AI, the faster will be your descent to irrelevance.

Keeping in mind changing consumer habits, marketers must also evolve their strategies. AI is here to stay and it’s time digital marketers integrate AI into their business strategy and rule over their competitors. Let us begin with a brief explanation of what the big AI hype is all about!

What is Artificial intelligence or Machine Learning?

Artificial Intelligence refers to computers, computer-controlled robots, softwares or machines that can perform “cognitive” tasks. The ability to mimic cognitive functions that are considered at par to humans is tested through the Turing Test. AI technology and tools use data to identify patterns and trends, to “think” like humans. Naturally, machines that have the ability to learn on the basis of data being fed into it can act as repositories of human wisdom and sometimes even outperform humans. Therefore, AI applications are highly specialized and technical tasks such as speech and image recognition, natural language processing, robotics, problem-solving etc.

The branch of computer science that deals with the nature of intelligence is undergoing rapid expansion and development. With more detailed algorithms, AI systems are becoming more mature, efficient and quicker at adapting.

How is AI useful in Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing and AI are forming a special bond and revolutionizing the way brands conduct their businesses. For example, Amazon and Spotify have successfully adopted AI systems by showing items based on customers’ previous searches. AI is now being widely used in digital marketing due to its ability to make quick and intelligent decisions based on data.

Let us see in brief, how AI can prove to be beneficial for Digital Marketing:

• Automated Content Creation

Brands spend a huge part of their resources on creating and curating content. Content marketing can become a part of AI integrated source of ROI for brands. Although the first attempts at AI generated content were quite messy, their accuracy has since then increased manifold. Global brands like Stylist, The Washington Post and Forbes are publishing content partly created through AI technology such as Heliograph, Aarticoolo, etc.

Automated content software can assist in optimizing content creation by generating smaller tasks like churning out social media posts, news stories, reports, etc. AI is also highly skilled at searching and choosing content for your audience and scaling up your content curating process through automation. This way brands can save time and resources to focus on other aspects of their business plan.

• Customer Service Chatbots

One of the most popular trends adopted by brands is using chatbots to communicate to customers. By automating responses to frequently asked questions helps potential buyers look for products and services. Bots use machine learning, semantic recognition, language processing and voice conversion technology to respond correctly to customers to address their queries and grievances.

Manual customer support has many humane restrictions in real time as they cannot offer support outside of office hours. On the other hand, chatbot can provide services 24/7 as they don’t  need to eat, sleep or rest. There are also language barriers that AI can overcome easily. AI bots can also provide one-to-all service, while utilizing a personalized approach. This way, brands can streamline their customer service using chatbots through applications like Messenger, Whatsapp, Slack, etc.

• Search Engine Optimization

Digital markers are integrating AI to enhance SEO in order to interpret misspellings, speech patterns and voice searches. One of the most attractive aspects of using AI for SEO is its capability of comprehending both text and voice searches. In a digital world, as more and more customers are using voice search, AI has become more relevant. AI can also pick up the past shopping history and browsing history to work out what a searcher wants!

AI can help in optimizing existing content to rank higher and lessening the huge workload that marketers have to otherwise do manually. E-commerce sites, search engines, and international brands are optimizing their site traffic by integrating AI into their systems. Since, AI can extract data insights at scale in real time; it is finally getting the due it deserves in terms of SEO.

• User Experience (UX)

Building user friendly websites is one of the top-priorities of any brand. Using AI can help analysing, understanding and predicting customer behaviour. Customer services are built to tackle transforming consumer habits on the internet. AI can provide content personalization and predictive models in real time. In other words, AI can easily spot patterns in consumer behaviour by analysing user’s information and show them relevant ads according to their preference.

Therefore, using intelligent algorithms to analyze data on a single user AI can enhance personalization for your customers leading to better experience. When the user experience is good, customers will naturally spend more time on your website and the conversion rate will inevitably rise.

Conclusion

AI in simple terms is the science of making machines intelligent. However, a lot of digital marketers have huge misgivings about using AI. While the reasons for their apprehension differ from lack of understanding to a fear of loss of human labour requirement as the machines keep getting smarter.

Understanding AI and how it works for your business is very important in order to stay relevant with your customers who are already adopting AI. AI is an integral part of Martech and is becoming more accessible every day with increasing research and development in this field.

No AI can ever take over human creativity and intelligence. Experts like Sundar Pichai and Neil Patel have made statements about how AI is here to support and optimize human efforts.  Internationally recognized writer Nail Gaiman, laughed at the possibility of AI ever taking over humans in a candid interview. So, it is high time you let go of Hollywood’s version of AI, in movies like Terminator and Matrix.

Don’t let anything keep you from adopting this great scientific boon and risk lagging behind. Welcome AI into your digital marketing strategy and let the techno-magic unfold.