Technology has been steadily increasing in recent years, and it’s changed the way we marketers work. Marketing has had a long history of being focused on “outbound marketing”—companies reaching out to people to see if they’d be interested in a product or service, whether through print advertising or door-to-door sales.
But technology has disrupted this age-old model, with social media platforms putting the power right into the hands of the people, leading to the rise of movements like influencer and affiliate marketing.
With the rise of artificial intelligence, marketers should expect more changes to come. But what will these transformations look like to the world of digital marketing? Let’s take a closer look.
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What is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial intelligence (AI), in its simplest description, is the way in which machines and computers mimic human cognition by performing functions related to learning, problem-solving, image recognition, and more. AI functions by a machine being “taught”—wherein it is programmed to collect, recognize, and understand data in a way similar to the human brain, meaning it is able to perform logic-based tasks after enough function.
For instance, this can include a machine being forced to read volumes and volumes of poetry. After this task is completed, the machine—via a program—can be asked to write an original poem of its own. With the data it learned, it will take its findings (patterns, language usage) and create poetry out of it.
While it’s not human intelligence, the more mature AI gets the closer it will be able to mimic human logic processes.
How AI relates to digital marketing
This mimicry is important for digital marketers, as it spells out a future where menial, data-related tasks can be removed from a marketers workload. How so? Rather than having to pour through volumes of data to understand the effectiveness of a marketing strategy, an AI program can be run on the side which will complete this task for the marketer, allowing them to receive accurate information while saving time which can be devoted to other work.
But the implementations are further than this one example. The benefits and options provided by AI are extensive and deserve notable consideration.
How AI is transforming digital marketing
Marketing Guided by Consumer Behavior
AI as it relates to marketing comes down to how it relies on data-driven approaches. This data integration is integral to AI systems, as it allows for information to be collected about behaviors, which in turn can be utilized to produce information related to potential decisions.
AI programs integrated into your website and analytics will be helpful for the way they can track your customers. By tracking their past purchases, searches, and more, the AI system can predict what future decisions this one customer will make. With this information, you can personalize content specifically meant for them, allowing you to develop a unique outreach strategy that targets people based on their consumer profile.
As this information becomes more integrated, mostly thanks to the Internet of Things, consumer profiles will become more detailed and businesses will be able to market to individuals rather than groups.
Email Marketing
The user behaviors learned by AI become useful when put into practice. In regards to emails, it will allow your business to develop emails relevant to your customers’ inboxes, form product recommendations to personalized subject lines—all of which are informed by information that is available to the AI system.
Furthermore, testing can be done in the development of personalized emails so your AI system can determine the effectiveness of the logic it is working through. The more it analyzes itself, the better it becomes. Soon enough, generated emails will become better and better, targeting individuals on very specific levels, providing them with products, images, language, and information they want to engage with.
Upgrading SEO
As mentioned prior, AI has the ability to learn semantic processes and natural languages, meaning it can construct sentences that it can understand and recognize the things people say and type out. Moreover, more intelligent AI will be able to understand the contextual meaning of these phrases and semantic patterns, seeing how certain keywords relate to one another and are often used.
This is an important thing for search engine optimization (SEO) specialists, as it means that AI systems will be able to learn—on a more nuanced level—the types of keywords customers will be searching as it relates to your business. The matter of understanding the why versus the what becomes useful to SEO specialists, as it means intelligent programs can be used in place of work that often required a great deal of human research, thus saving time while producing clear and helpful results.
Improved Lead Generation
Affiliate marketing strategies just became a whole lot simpler. Rather than a human employee having to sift through an endless log of potential customers, niches, affiliates, and influencers, an AI system can be utilized which completes that work on its own. Better yet, it can provide analytics based on futures modeling which can identify affiliates and leads most likely to produce a high amount of engagement and revenue.
This process of predicting the future is especially important for affiliate marketers, as it will help them narrow marketing choices to ensure that the best choices are being made prior to signing on with a client. And once they’re signed on, their performance statistics can be fed back to the AI to determine the accuracy of the predictions, helping the program enhance all future modeling methods to make predictions more accurate.
While some people reading this might be showing signs of technophobia, the truth is that AI is going to become ever-present in the world of digital marketing, and it’s going to be very useful. Rather than waiting to jump onto the bandwagon at the last minute, you should begin researching how it can help your own company right now.
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