AI’s Role in Marketing

With the new digital age upon us, AI, or artificial intelligence, isn’t just relevant within tech teams. In fact, companies are finding increasing uses for it across teams, including where you might not expect it, in your marketing efforts.

Marketers are typically very creative, and it’s strange to think of machine learning becoming part of the customer experience. Yet, it can be such an effective tool that this new technology is becoming integral to global marketing strategies, from CRM to customer relationship management.

The most obvious way AI is used in digital marketing, to customers at least,  is in the form of eCommerce chatbots. You’ll likely have seen these little messaging bots popping up in corners of sites, offering real-time assistance. 

These are a facet of AI marketing and allow businesses to enhance the customer experience without expending too much of a human representative’s time answering questions. Typically, if the AI technology can’t handle the request, it’s passed along to someone who can.

They often use algorithms like natural language processing (NLP) to understand exactly what a customer is asking – making it just like talking to a real person. 

Chatbots are just the tip of the AI iceberg, though. Content marketing can be enhanced by AI leveraging big data to discover trends. You can personalise interactions with customers and curate target audiences in seconds through extensive customer data collection, demographics and organisation.

Some AI can even use predictive analytics to suggest products or pages based on past browsing or purchasing behaviour. This can feed into email marketing as it lets you know when you should be dangling the incentive of lower pricing in targeted emails.

Possibly best of all? It takes away some of the monotonous tasks of digital marketing, like data analysis, and lets your marketing team focus on interesting things. For example, marketing automation means they could streamline the customer journey, perfect your social media offering, or develop marketing campaigns based on that consumer data.

AI marketing is a fast-growing area, so your current digital training offering might not be up to date.

Ensure that your training program covers the basic uses of AI marketing and relevant AI tools your business uses. A course such as the CIM Specialist Award in AI Marketing would cover most of the important areas. It might also be prudent to encourage your team to look into other uses for AI and think about how they could be applied to marketing campaigns and the customer experience.

Whilst AI is a complicated topic to grasp in full, many of the uses for AI are already rooted in digital marketing, website strategy, and data analytics.

This means that your marketing team is likely already quite up to date with many of its functions. They just need to be taught how to use specific AI tools.

Plus, most AI marketing software offers user-friendly interfaces. The real difficulty is knowing where they can most benefit your business and taking a leap of faith!

If you’re worried that your employees might not get up to speed all that quickly, it might be worth putting some employees on a digital skills course before moving onto AI. That way, they’ll be more comfortable using technology to enhance their workday.

Using AI in your marketing strategy can offer a world of benefits. It can help to make your marketing team more efficient, focusing wholly on the tasks that machines can’t do. 

It can also produce more accurate predictions for things like ROI and more precise data analysis. This can lead to better targeting and segmentation and customers who are more likely to engage with your brand. 

This kind of technology is the future of marketing and can give you an edge over other brands. One of the key advantages of AI in marketing is that it is reasonably affordable – so without too much extra expense you’ll have increased your marketing power. 

After upskilling your employees, there are 5 ways to measure development that could be useful if you’re keen to see the long term benefits of your training.