AI can have a great effect in your marketing as it can process a lot of information very quickly, spot patterns, and solve problems. This comes in very useful in marketing where we can use AI to understand our complex human audiences and help serve them the right content.
Did you know you’re probably using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in your marketing right now?
Marketers’ use of AI increased dramatically between 2018 and 2020 – from 29% in 2018 to 84% in 2020 – as AI is now ingrained into so many popular marketing channels such as Facebook, TikTok, and Google Search.
AI is sometimes called Machine Learning, as it has not quite reached the level of human ‘intelligence’ just yet. It learns from the data it’s fed and specific instructions we give it to come to some conclusions. So, luckily it’s nowhere near clever enough to take over the world yet in some kind of Terminator-style apocalypse. Phew.
But, AI can help:
- Understand what platforms your customers are on, what content they like, how they behave on those platforms, and when they visit them.
- Put your content in front of the right people at the right time.
Where Is AI Used In Marketing?
AI is used in more places in marketing than you think. You’ll find it across paid marketing, audience targeting, content creation and curation, personalisation and even social scheduling. Anywhere where you need a lot of data to be analysed and complex decisions to be made.
Some areas that you may have encountered when marketing your business where AI works behind the scenes:
- Content personalisation – website content management systems and plugins can be used to personalise on-page content based on the user’s behaviour on the site such as showing them articles about picking the best golf club if a user has been searching for golf clubs on an eCommerce store. Search engines like Google and voice assistants like Amazon Alexa use AI to personalise the content they display to help ensure it is relevant to the user.
- Social scheduling – some social scheduling tools use AI to help you understand what to post and when to post it based on your audience and topics to write about.
- Paid marketing – advertising platforms work out who to show your ads to and when.
- Marketing automation – some systems like email marketing platforms can intelligently understand when to send nudges and prompt emails to entice customers to take action.
- Audience targeting – platforms can use the information they have to deduce more about the user and whether they’d be a good fit for your ads and content.
- Content curation – social media feeds or TikTok ‘For You’ pages curate content for a user based on their behaviour and interests.
- Channel management – AI can help you understand which channels perform the best for your business so that you can get the best return on investment for your marketing budget.
So Why Has AI Become So Popular In Marketing?
AI has become popular in marketing as it is key to understanding the humans your business interacts with. Without AI it would be far too complex to understand all the nuances of every human being on the internet; there is just too much data for businesses to process manually. So AI takes that workload on for us. It learns about the people it interacts with – their behaviours, interests, and who they are.
Before AI, when trying to target audiences, the selections we were offered were very limited – age, sex, location, industry, and other basic details.
But this barely scratches the surface of what makes up a person; just because two people are the same age, doesn’t mean they have the same things in common. Let me give you an example.
Did you know that Prince Charles and singer Ozzy Osbourne are the same age? They’re both 73 years old, English, male, and financially well off. If we were to take only these very basic demographics, they could both be served the same ad as we’ve put them both in the same group. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? The two men are very different.
AI helps us dig deeper than the basic demographics to understand what makes a person tick – who they are, their interests, behaviours, their wants and needs.
So when you want to create a Facebook ad or post for exclusive, vegan-friendly baby food, AI will understand who might be interested in that product – maybe they follow vegan and baby Facebook pages, maybe they’ve searched on Google for vegan baby food – their activity will give the AI some hints as to what they’re interested in and serve your content to the right people.
How Can You Use AI To Enhance Your Digital Marketing?
AI enhances your digital marketing when it’s used to test out what content your audience responds to and what channels they like to see it on. This insight will help you understand where to put your marketing budget so that it performs at its best.
Without AI, testing content across channels can be time-consuming and often costly, as manual tests take time and need someone to interpret all the data. It’s better to find platforms that use AI that can gather and interpret the data they receive to make clever decisions quickly to enhance your marketing efforts.
One of the simplest ways to work out what the right content and channels are for your audience is through online advertising. With platforms like Google and Facebook, you can reach a large audience and test content out quickly to narrow down what your audience wants.
Did you know 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalised experiences? Serving the right content, to the right people, in the right places, at the right time increases conversions.
For example, Yell’s Smart Performance AI-enhanced advertising platform uses machine learning to optimise ad spend budgets daily across multiple advertising channels to help deliver the best results. In tests compared to standalone PPC campaigns, Smart Performance more than doubled the value returned by reducing the average cost per click by 65% and improving average click-through rates by 230%.
Take time to explore how AI can affect your marketing campaigns and how you can use it to make the most of your marketing budget. It can help you save time and money, plus make sure you’re hitting that all-important audience with the right content.
If you want to learn more about how Yell’s Smart Performance advertising can make the most of your online marketing budget, give the team a call on 0800 777 445.
