Best PracticesMarTech

How does AI change digital marketing strategies?

The landscape of digital marketing is changing swiftly and profoundly, but one notable factor is driving that change: artificial intelligence.

More specifically, the question that arises from the appearance of AI is, how does it alter marketing strategies? The use of AI is helping businesses make fresher connections with consumers. Its ability to process and understand the almost unfathomable amounts of data we’re generating daily is enabling a kind of revolution in truly engaging with the customer.

Today, customers want unique experiences. A report from Epsilon showed that 80% of consumers are more likely to buy something when a brand offers personalized. AI can analyze consumer behavior and preferences, which lets marketers craft messages and special offers just for them. Amazon, for example, uses this technology to suggest products based on your purchase and browsing history. This kind of personalization also happens in real-time, so marketing messages hit home with the intended targets. To top it all off, AI also helps businesses segment their audiences better than ever. By getting the data from various sources and using it to find the entities and appearance of new trends among certain demographics, companies can serve up campaigns that go right to the heart of the matter.

One more key way that AI affects digital marketing is by enabling automation. This is vital because in today’s fast-paced marketing environment, teams already stretched thin sometimes struggle just to keep up. And yet, all too often what we’re doing “just to keep up” ends up not being done effectively. But what if we had something that could help us with not just one, but several of our most common tasks, allowing us to focus more on the work that needs our brains (and not our fingers) to be in gear? 63% of marketers who participated in a HubSpot survey said their productivity increased “significantly” after they started using AI to help with their marketing. A good way to look at it is: If you’re going to do something you always do in a way that doesn’t require you to be at your desk for three hours, that might be a good time to use AI.

The digital marketing arena runs on data, and artificial intelligence is the key to understanding it. Marketers can now gain predictive insights from large datasets thanks to AI. These predictive capabilities enable businesses to forecast not just what consumers will do in the immediate future but also what kinds of things will trend over a certain period. For example, Netflix utilizes predictive analytics to not only recommend “content” (the euphemism used in the industry for shows) but also to make decisions around what kinds of original series or movies to greenlight. In other words, AI is not just good at telling businesses what kinds of leads are worth their time and attention. Its true power lies in its ability to help refine the data into something much more usable and valuable: meaningful consumer insights.

Although the advantages of artificial intelligence in digital marketing are very large, there are still some challenges. The most significant is consumer privacy. Today, people are more concerned than ever about how their personal data is used. Businesses must take these concerns seriously and communicate transparently with consumers about their data practices. Another challenge is the potential over-reliance on AI. If we always let AI do the thinking for us, then we might as well be using a digital marketing strategy that assumes we’re all identical. With AI, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of making a strategy that’s efficient but not scalable in terms of the range of human experiences and emotions that it hits.

The future evolution of AI promises even more sophisticated tools for marketers. But while these sophisticated tools may allow us to better engage with our consumers, they also raise an important question: How does AI change digital marketing strategies? Or, perhaps, a more fundamental question: Is AI a tool, or is it really an engine that will evolve into something big? Digital marketers have to think about this. And while we’re thinking, we might as well do the awesome thing and figure out how to use AI to change our digital marketing strategies. That’s what I plan to do, after readily agreeing with the proposition that AI is really, really powerful for digital marketing.