James
A recent major development has managed to shake up the marketing scene – AI applications in digital marketing. That’s right, artificial intelligence is no longer science fiction. Marketers have actually managed to evoke the help of artificial intelligence to bolster the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.
Revolutionary changes can sometimes be hard to embrace – especially the high-caliber evolution of artificial intelligence. Feeling of uncertainty and skepticism always arise from businesses who are looking to adopt new technology, though it can lead to attaining the competitive edge.
Knowledge and information comes in handy when looking to introduce contemporary methods in your business operations – marketing is no different. Being able to absorb valuable insights from experts that have braved the waters first will help ease the transition and may get you to board the AI marketing train.
What are the benefits of artificial intelligence in digital marketing? How will AI enhance your promotional efforts? Is all this commotion justified? These are very relevant questions that need answering prior to AI adoption.
I have managed to accrue some valuable insights pertaining to AI applications in digital marketing from experts in the field. See what thoughts and first-hand experience they have regarding AI and digital marketing.
Lionel Valdellon, Content Marketing Manager at Clever Trap
clevertrap.com | 
@WriterLionel
AI is a tremendous help in segmenting customers (or prospects) so you can personalize your marketing messages to them.
Segments are merely groupings of people in your CRM based on criteria you pick (e.g., power users who use your app 5x a week, or prospects who have subscribed to your blog). Setting up these segments is usually a time consuming task best left to interns.
Without AI, setting up personalized marketing campaigns for hundreds of segments would be impossible. But with the power of AI, you can make a million mundane and repetitive tasks doable.
Even better, effective AI can build these segments for you and even predict which segments are most likely to convert into paying customers based on criteria you feed it and past data in your system. Suddenly, you can focus your time and resources on marketing to the groups that are most likely to buy, instead of those who likely won’t.
Sangram Sabat, Chief Growth Officer at Saarthi.ai
www.saarthi.ai | 
SangramSabat
With AI being leveraged by Enterprises, Digital Marketing is transforming rapidly.
- Research, Generation and Curation of Content is more in-depth and fast. Machines process eons of data and compare with past states, to optimize information, context and voice of articles, in a matter of seconds. Besides, AI checks what your audiences love by analyzing your content, and that of publications in the same niche. Example tools – Wordsmith, Articoolo, and Quill.
- The success of Email Marketing is so conditional on subject, great content and personalization. AI can not only help in augmenting these, but also help you in determining optimum time to contact and frequency, based on the contact’s stage in the funnel. Also, there are Integrated Virtual Assistants carrying out conversations till a specific goal is achieved.
- Enterprises are leveraging chatbots and virtual assistants for User Engagement. We, at Saarthi.ai, help out businesses engage better on websites, Messenger, Twitter, native apps and even IVR, in multiple languages.
- The Ad network, as we know, is run through AI (Read – FB, Google). That said, platforms like Adext help out marketers by testing different audiences on ads and optimizing budgets by the hour, to ensure a high RoI in terms of CTRs and conversions.
Debarshi Chaudhury, CEO at Quantilus Innovation Inc.
Most companies and websites spend a tremendous amount of time and money on determining the right structure and look for their websites. They are all essentially trying to find the right balance that satisfies 80%+ of their visitors. However, the aesthetics and navigation will never be satisfactory for all the visitors.
AI can help change that by tracking a user’s preferences to change the entire experience on the site or app. This goes beyond just serving personalized content – this is personalized menus, navigation options, themes, palettes and even branding, depending on the profile of the user.
On the content creation side, AI can be very simply used to analyze the types and categories of content preferred by users and point creators to the most high-value or high-traffic topics. Going beyond that, it can even be used to look at the stylistic nature of content – patterns of words used, colorfulness (or otherwise) of the language, usage of quotes, etc. – to determine what works best for a specific site or app.
We use Natural Language Processing technologies for this kind of analysis.
Kim Smith, Content Consultant at Goodfirms
With Artificial Intelligence, the SEO logics are changing for efficient and more personalized search experiences. Machine learning enables a new search algorithm that can combine user-search-history and linguistic similarities with keyword ranking algorithms to guess and present a more contextual search experience. This not only empowers semantic searching for users but ensures an increased conversation ratio for digital marketers.
Also as a bonus point, with such a technology available, digital marketers would get more insights into what consumers want and why – which aids in customization and adding a personal touch to products.
The AI power has given rise to unconventional search platforms such as Voice User Interface. Motivated by ideas of IoT and supported by the technology of Natural Language Processing, VUI is bridging the gap between machines and users like never before. With the voice as an instrument, digital marketers are coming up with creative and attractive methods to reach and maintain customers.
Claire Whittaker, CEO at Artificially Intelligent Claire
artificiallyintelligentclaire.com | @ElizabetClaire
Artificial Intelligence has many applications in digital marketing but perhaps the most impactful is the opportunity to create personalized campaigns at scale.
You start by using AI to understand and group potential Customers with similar interests. Unsupervised clustering algorithms do this – the types used to group together news articles on similar topics in search engines.
Once you understand these buckets of Customers, you can then create and serve personalized content to them that meets their specific need. This in turn increases the likelihood that they will click through to view your product.
When you run advertising campaigns through Facebook or Google you can ask the algorithm to optimize the campaign for Click Through Rate. Over time, the ad server will learn which type of Customers are more likely to click and therefore surfaces it to people with the same characteristics more often to improve the campaign performance.
Essentially, AI allows you to show the perfect campaign just as your customer wants to find it.
Nate Masterson, CMO at Maple Holistics
mapleholistics.com| @mapleholistics
One of AI’s biggest contributions to marketing has been connecting the right customers to the right advertisements. This huge step forward in marketing has ensured that there’s less waste in your marketing budget than ever before.
AI is now able to collect and record data, analyze consumer feedback, and predict trends. Consequently, advertisers are tapping into AI to effectively boost conversion rates and create more engaging campaigns. In practice, these agencies are using machine learning and artificial intelligence to create relevant ads catered to your interests and habits. However, AI is also hurting advertisers by contributing non-human traffic to the web. This causes major skews in data collection on popular sites, though anti-fraud detection is making waves more and more each year.
Joo Ann Lee, Data Scientist at Witmer Group
What makes something beautiful? According to research, what we perceive as beautiful has a lot to do with our innate preference for biological survival, learned social representation, and familiarity to the object or message. And in digital marketing, “beauty” in the eye of the beholder, helps attract the right customers to the brand.
Here, AI acts as the human (only that it never sleeps and eats) to systematically learn aspects of beauty that are important to the customers and present them in a way that pleases each and every one of the customers. So, everything from the font to content can be personalized in a way that matches the preference of that particular customer, making their experience with the brand the best it can be.
That’s what AI can do for digital marketing, and that’s only just the beginning of what’s to come.
Pierre de Braux, Content Strategist at Spiralytics Inc.
spiralytics.com | @pierredebraux
One of the new developments in AI that I’m particularly excited about is natural language processing for content creation. This basically involves programming AI to extract information from the web on a particular keyword/concept and compile ideas into a coherent piece of content.
For example, you could ask the AI “What is the most effective content marketing strategy?” and it would search the internet for the most relevant information available to consolidate into an answer. When AI and NLP technology become more advanced, they’ll effectively be able to create valuable content on their own.
That’s a bit of a scary prospect for some, myself included. We could be out of a job soon enough… But the reassuring thing is that current systems aren’t complex enough to execute content creation without human assistance, At this point, NLP is only able to assist with summarizing and content research assistance. We still need content creators to actually build the content, but AI can definitely help optimize the creation process.
Irakli
