The fusion of artificial intelligence (AI) and digital marketing in the fast-evolving digital landscape is transforming the way businesses connect with their target markets. For businesses, the most immediate benefit of using AI is its ability to increase productivity.
The term artificial intelligence was coined way back in 1956, however, it has re-emerged and become more popular and feasible for use today thanks to the advancement of computing power and storage. The development of computer hardware made it possible for AI to advance by leaps and bounds, it is now possible to process volumes of data and advanced algorithms at lightning speeds.
Marketing has evolved so much over the past few decades, and we are now in the era of digital revolution where marketing is now dependent on consumers who express what content they want to receive.
Google, Microsoft, and Amazon invest heavily in AI. It’s clear that with these enterprises involved, it will shape the future of digital marketing. For a business owner or marketer, leveraging AI and understanding its role in marketing automation is an important factor to stay ahead in the highly competitive digital landscape.
Accentuate Web Design and Marketing, not only pride ourselves in creating websites that help our clients generate income, and leads and make sales for their businesses. We are also experts in all aspects of digital marketing to help you get found online and guide your prospects to navigate your site towards a sale.
With our marketers’ expertise in SEO and digital marketing, we ensure that your company’s visibility on the first page of search engine results is maximised for the best chance of success.
We are a digital marketing company on the Gold Coast that has the tools and resources, and with our over 16 years in the field, we can tap our years of knowledge and experience to help improve your business.
At Accentuate, we understand the potential of AI and leverage it by combining the opportunities it provides with our skills, to harness its potential and power to achieve remarkable results in developing marketing strategies for our clients.
The Benefits of Using AI for Digital Marketing
Without a doubt, the advent of AI is a game changer. It affects every aspect of running a business today, including the field of digital marketing. AI’s ability to analyse and process large amounts of data, identify patterns, and make intelligent predictions has revolutionised how businesses approach developing their marketing strategies.
The use of AI now allows marketers to further enhance customer experiences, optimise campaigns, and drive business growth. The direct benefits of using AI for digital marketing are:
1. Enhanced Personalisation.
With AI’s ability to process vast amounts of data and patterns, it can analyse customer preferences and purchasing behavioural patterns. Its algorithms can then generate recommendations, and offers, and even produce tailored content for your target audience.
With the level of personalisation it can produce, it can boost customer engagement and improve conversion rates. Keeping audiences interested and engaged boosts brand loyalty.
2. Precise Segmentation and Targeting.
Segmentation and targeting is a time-consuming and tedious process even for the most seasoned of marketers. With AI’s ability to analyse vast amounts of data, it can effectively segment your audience based on interests, behaviours, and demographics.
This is important information for marketers, which they can use to create highly targeted campaigns so that their efforts will reach the right people at the right time. Doing so drives the effectiveness of the campaign, helps in reducing ad spend, and maximises your return on investment (ROI).
3. Customer Insights Improvement.
Not only can AI process and analyse huge amounts of data, but it can also derive its information from multiple sources in the blink of an eye. It can look into a customer’s social media and web interactions, and more importantly, their purchase history.
With the ability of AI to extract insights from data coming from multiple sources, a human marketer can gain a better understanding of their customer’s preferences, their pain points, and their buying behaviour. These insights can help marketers make informed decisions, and allow businesses to develop products and services that cater for customer needs.
4. Ad Optimisation.
Advertising is a powerful way to reach potential customers, but it can be a potential waste of advertising resources if you don’t target the right people. Regardless of the platform you use in creating and managing your online ad campaigns, AI can help you optimise them in real-time by adjusting bidding strategies, targeting parameters, and creative elements.
With its capability to learn and optimise, AI’s algorithms can help you maximise your ad’s performance for less money, yet generate higher conversion rates. AI can also grab large external datasets of prior purchase histories, or buying-based intent keywords and make fast effective decisions to increase conversions, something we have had some amazing results with with our clients.
5. AI Driven Chatbots and Customer Support.
We love chatbots at Accentuate since they can offer customer support 24/7. Customers today are finicky and demand instant responses to their enquiries and resolve their issues.
AI-driven chatbots and customer support can handle a high volume of enquiries simultaneously, saving you time and resources, but also ensuring a positive customer experience.
6. Predictive Analytics and Efficient Data Analysis.
AI is capable of making accurate predictions about future trends by analysing historical data, market dynamics, and customer behaviour. Leveraging these analytics, human marketers will be able to make data-driven decisions to anticipate the needs of customers and help you stay ahead of your competition. Furthermore, it can enable your business to develop proactive marketing strategies.
With the aid of AI, marketers can automate their data analysis processes to uncover valuable insights and trends promptly and with efficiency. This streamlines your operations and frees up resources for other critical tasks.
The Downside of Using AI for Digital Marketing
Despite the obvious advantages of using AI for digital marketing, it has its share of downsides you have to consider with leveraging AI in your marketing strategies. Let’s explore some of them below:
1. The Initial Cost and Implementation.
Implementing AI technology does come with a significant investment to put up its infrastructure, tools, and IT talents. Small to medium-sized businesses with limited resources may face challenges with affordability and the difficulty of integrating AI into their existing systems.
Moreover, it would require training staff members on how to effectively use AI and interpret AI-generated insights. It can be a time-consuming and costly process.
2. Data Privacy and Security.
Since AI relies heavily on customer data to work efficiently, data privacy and security are critical concerns. This can add to your expense to ensure you comply with data protection regulations to implement tough security measures to safeguard customer information.
3. The Lack of Emotional Understanding and Human Touch.
Aspects, crucial to marketing, do require elements of human behaviours that can’t be easily simulated by AI. Intuition, empathy, and creativity are essential aspects of human behaviour to create and develop meaningful connections with customers.
While AI can offer unparalleled scalability and efficiency, its inability to replicate the human touch is a drawback, since it’s one quality some customers place high value on. Striking a balance between AI and human interaction can be a challenge for it to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
4. The Risk of Inaccurate Insights and Bias.
Artificial Intelligence learns to make decisions based on what they digest from training data. It will exhibit bias if the training data include biased human decisions, including historical or social inequities. It may not be that easily resolved, even if sensitive variables involving gender, race, creed, or sexual orientation are removed.
Flawed data sampling can also be a source of bias. It can potentially hurt your customers and your business if it reduces its potential to improve on positive human-like decision-making, favouring only groups or individuals based on what it learned from its training data. It becomes more problematic today with the ever-increasing diversity and representation.
5. Handling Complex Scenarios.
Even with AI’s capability to analyse structured data and pattern identification, it still struggles when it comes to handling complex scenarios or making sense of unstructured data like nuanced text, videos, or images. When dealing with complex marketing challenges, marketers should be aware of these limitations and supplement AI analysis with human judgment.
Tips for Using AI for Digital Marketing
AI has become an integral part of our daily lives, think of Siri, Alexa, and Hey Google for instance. AI usage is at an all-time high, and it is still growing.
With AI’s assistance, 71 percent of consumers now prefer using their voice to conduct search queries over typing them in. Efficiency, speed, and personalisation play a big part in today’s customer journey.
Now that you have a fair idea about how AI can be advantageous for digital marketing, perhaps it’s time to start integrating AI into your marketing plan. Here are some tips on how you can integrate it into your marketing plan.
1. Enhancing the User Experience
User experience greatly impacts how audiences feel and perceive your business. By creating a positive and personalised experience for your audience, you can ensure they have an enjoyable time while interacting and exploring your site.
AI can then help you display the best offers and content for them by analysing your user’s data points based on demographics, location, the devices they are using, and various other factors.
Let’s cite a relatable example. When you search Netflix, their AI enables users to discover new videos by presenting users with videos they might like based on data collected from their previous searches. Netflix’s AI generates a personalised homepage with content relevant to the user.
2. Aid in Your Email Campaigns
AI can help you in creating a more efficient and effective email campaign. Ordinarily, when your marketers run an email campaign, they take the time to create and schedule emails to reach different customers to provide a personalised experience.
AI can help you take personalisation even further by mapping out your visitor’s website experience and leveraging their email browsing data to better understand how users interact with your email content.
The AI algorithm can identify which emails garner the best response based on their content. It then analyses this data and provides you with insights, which you can then use to help you create a better campaign.
3. Help in Improving Your PPC Campaigns
Pay-per-click (PPC) are paid ads that appear at the top of search results when users do searches. They are extremely effective in attracting leads for your business.
The use of AI can help you improve them by helping you discover new advertising channels your competition may not be using. This opportunity allows you to reach customers where your competition isn’t.
More than that, AI can help you in other areas of your PPC campaign, too. It will help you analyse, manage, and optimise your campaign, namely with:
- The ad layout.
- Copywriting.
- Identifying your target audience.
- Your bid amount.
4. Content Creation
The use of AI technology will allow you to generate various types of content. All you have to do is set the proper parameters to ensure the content it generates is consistent with your branding across the board.
5. AI in SEO
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) covers a seemingly infinite number of requirements. AI helps in improving SEO and allows you to create adaptive strategies and better content development for your business.
AI Best Practices.
While AI’s future in marketing looks promising, we believe it may not necessarily take over the entirety of digital marketing. Human creativity, intuition, and emotion still play a crucial role in striking a balance between cutting-edge technology and human innovation to unlock success.
Businesses considering exploring the use of AI in digital marketing may find it initially daunting. Consider the following best practices before diving in and exploring the power of artificial intelligence in your digital marketing efforts:
Set clear goals
It’s important to define clear goals that align with your overall business objectives before implementing AI in your digital marketing strategy.
Use only high-quality data
AI algorithms rely heavily on data to make accurate predictions and generate personalised recommendations. For the best results, ensure you are using only high-quality data that’s relevant to your target market.
Test, measure, refine, and test some more
It’s a given to continually test and measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, it goes if you’re doing AI-powered campaigns. Use A/B testing and other techniques to see what’s working and what’s not. Make necessary adjustments, and test some more.
AI enhances human expertise, not replace it
Remember that AI is a powerful tool you can use to automate routine tasks and generate personalised recommendations, however, it still lacks the human element needed to appeal to your customers. It is powerful, but it is not a replacement for human expertise.
Be ethical and transparent
It’s important to approach AI technology with caution and use it in an ethically responsible manner. Likewise, it’s important to be transparent with your customers and ensure they are aware their data is being used to generate personalised recommendations. Additionally, be clear about how you are using their data.
In Conclusion
The digital marketing landscape is undergoing a profound transformation with the development of AI technology. By incorporating AI into your digital marketing strategy, you can unlock and/or enhance benefits, such as enhanced personalisation, streamlined automation, and advanced data analysis.
As with any new technology, it does come with its share of challenges. However, taking into consideration that AI’s evolution is still ongoing and getting better. Regardless of its impressive development, it still needs human intervention to fill in gaps it can’t like exhibiting intuition, empathy, and creativity.
Our marketing experts are committed to guiding your business with digital marketing strategies your customers will be able to relate to.
Book a time to speak with our team, let’s discuss and explore possibilities in tapping your digital marketing opportunities towards success.
