Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the digital world rapidly, and the footprint of AI on consumer experiences continues to amplify every day. As we look to the future, we are going to be able to leverage AI to create deeper opportunities around personalization, automation, and data-driven decisions in order to build deeper and more genuine connections with brands than ever before. One of the biggest opportunities that AI will provide for marketers’ success is hyper-personalized experiences at scale. Traditionally, marketers typically relied upon large audience segments to help develop campaign messaging. AI allows marketers to provide individual experiences based on many factors, including consumer preferences, browsing behavior, purchasing behavior, and even consumer emotional states. Forinstance, if AI allows the algorithms to utilize previous data which represents fast-moving behavior, it would automatically serve up relevant content, products, and advertisements, in real-time which provides consumers with an experience that is tailored to their most recent data. This overall experience of personalization, taht allows consumers to feel understood and valued, raises customer engagement with a brand and often improves consumer satisfaction and loyalty.
Beyond personalizing experiences, AI is transforming the way brands interact with customers through conversational touchpoints such as chatbots and virtual assistants. So much advanced than pre-recorded content, these AI systems engage with customers in real-time, responding to queries, solving problems, and helping customers navigate complex purchase decisions. Brands like Sephora have integrated AI in their customer service plans and now offer virtual beauty consultations and product suggestions that are based off of customer inputs. The beauty of these AI powered conversations can happen on a variety of platforms, from the brand’s website to social media, providing consistency and continuity to the customers regardless of where they interact with the brand. Predictive analytics is also a big category in which AI is innovating. AI analytics can take historical data and predict what customers will do, when and to a reasonably accurate extent. With the ability to look ahead, marketers can create proactive plans based on what the likely wants and needs of customers will be. For instance, if AI can predict some when a customer is likely to purchase or how likely a lead will become a customer this can help marketers shape campaigns to drive a greater ROI.
Additionally, the automation of repetitive tasks through AI is freeing up marketers to work on more strategic tasks. AI tools are getting better at managing social media posts, emails, and even content creation while also maintaining the relevance of the messaging and value to engagement. Marketers are able to do a lot more with the same number of resources and still maintain brand and messaging integrity while simultaneously sending to many consumers. AI-driven programmatic advertising is changing the brand’s approach to budget spend and customer targeting. AI platforms can modify various parameters like targeting, bidding strategies, creative types, and others during the course of the campaign to get the most out of the ad performance. Brands can deliver the right message to the right customers and ensure that their advertising spend is well spent in the process. AI is already impacting programmatic ads, and is additionally starting to impact visual and voice search. Consumers are shifting toward more conversational type searches with voice assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant all growing in prominence.
With the capability of AI, marketers can ensure that their content is optimized for voice search, and their content is ranked high for those spoken queries. Visual search is becoming a trend now as well and with tools like Google Lens, it is possible to upload an image to gather additional information on the product providing a great opportunity for marketers to optimize their content for visual discovery. We will also continue to learn how AI is rapidly changing the marketing landscape and begin to see AR and VR become a more integrated experience for brands to utilize and engage customers. AI will be an essential component for creating these experiences, allowing the consumer to virtually try on products and view products in 3D or visualize how it will look in their home, all with the conveniences of their devices. with all of these, ethical considerations is a fundamental responsibility! Using AI as part of our marketing strategy is exciting but we all have to be cautious and transparent about the gathering and using customer data. Customers are becoming much more aware and considerate about their data privacy and brands can easily lose consumer trust and damage their brands by behaving carelessly by not being transparent and ethical about the personal data collected.
AI in digital marketing has endless possibilities. AI is changing the way businesses communicate with users and allowing for hyper-personalization, predictive analytics, conversational AI and immersive experiences. AI is here to stay as part of Digital Marketing and part of commerce in general. While digital marketing is just beginning to scratch the surface of what can be done with AI and the potential new tools, AI will not only be bringing on new tools, but also a new way of doing AI in Digital Marketing. All businesses need to do is move towards using AI and finally to become a Marketeer in the digital space based on the current paradigm.
