6 Applications of AI in Digital Marketing

The digital marketing landscape has seen a huge transformation in the last 5 years, and a huge contributor to this has been the prominence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).

Today’s highly competitive and fragmented marketing landscape poses many complex challenges to the modern marketer, such as ways to continue keeping their business relevant and sustainable, retaining brand loyalty as well as build engaging customer relationships.

Both AI and ML based applications have risen to this challenge and have provided valuable inputs to make digital marketing smarter and more effective. In fact, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that AI and digital marketing are inseparable today.

As digital marketing activities give us access to a huge minefield of rich data, AI can help us not only make better sense of the data, faster but also formulate more effective digital strategies and implement them better.

Programmatic advertising, AI driven campaigns and activations, AI enabled campaign management and more are just some examples of the use of AI in digital marketing today. Here is a look at some of the most popular AI applications in the digital marketing space today:

1. Programmatic Advertising

Running any kind of online advertising campaigns used to be a daunting task earlier, requiring intense analysis and research, and also being susceptible to human error. All of this has changed now. Most online advertising today is run by a complex, AI based program known as programmatic advertising. This not only allows ad inventory to be bought and sold within milliseconds, but also takes care of the placement of ads on the right platform, to the right target audience and optimizing the campaign in real time – making the entire process extremely efficient, quick and effective.

2. Personalized Online Experiences

Just like in the offline world, being able to experience personalized content and experiences online makes the difference between earning mind space with your target audience, and getting lost in the crowd. AI makes it possible to create unique, personalized customer journeys online, by customizing content and delivery based on location, likes, dislikes, online behavior, devices and more. This is used to create targeted email marketing, landing pages and even real time ads, creating a differentiated experience and higher relevance, thus increasing chances of conversion.

3. Online Customer Service

Given that creating a stellar customer experience is so paramount today, AI-powered chatbots are increasingly used to have personalized, humanized conversations with your customers, as and when they need one. Unlike regular chatbots that function on specific keyword inputs, AI powered chatbots can replicate the way a human would respond. Think of it as having a 24x7, trained customer service rep available to address multiple customer queries across all time-zones, without an annoying wait time. Yes, this is already in use by many leading brands across the globe, and we can expect to see this gain more popularity.

4. Content Creation

As incredulous as this might sound, AI algorithms can also be roped in to create original content for your website, blogs, products and more. This algorithm works by analyzing huge volumes of existing online data around a specific topic or theme, AI can create content that is both relevant and valuable. This can come in really handy for businesses that require quick turnaround times on original content, like news publications, for instance. Yes, this does have its limitations as well, like it may not be able to write an opinion piece, but if the current capabilities are anything to go by, this does seem very promising.

5. Content Curation

Yes, it gets even better. AI can be employed to curate and serve the most relevant and engaging content for your customers / website visitors based on their past behavior, likes, dislikes, location and more. How is that for creating delight? Given the rising importance of content marketing in customer satisfaction, this is an excellent way to show your customers that you care for them. Most of us would already be familiar with the custom recommendations that we receive on ecommerce sites or video streaming apps. This is an excellent example of AI powered content curation.

6. Strategy Inputs

AI is without a doubt, much better at analyzing huge chunks of marketing data into actionable intelligence. Using complex statistical models and software, AI can not only help us analyze what has worked and what has not, but it can also help predict future customer behavior. All of this arms marketer with data points that are crucial to getting the most out of their digital strategy, and planning their campaigns more effectively.

These applications are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what is possible with AI. But that as it may, there should be no doubt that the complex marketing challenges today can be best tackled with a combination of human and algorithmic intelligence. AI can only make things better, and I am excited to see where this leads us.

By Kunal Shah | Director | Rank My Business