There’s no denying that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly advancing the marketing landscape. Giving marketers a keen competitive edge, AI can help with automation, data analysis, hyper-personalisation, campaign optimisation and even assist in forecasting future trends, which all help to enhance the overall customer experience. According to a recent McKinsey report, estimates show that AI has the potential to contribute up to $4.4 trillion in annual global productivity – so it’s safe to say that the time has come to start thinking about integrating AI tools into your marketing mix going forward.
You may find, however, that your marketing team are already experimenting with AI. From social media scheduling tools to chatbots and A/B testing in email campaigns, AI has been silently improving the way we market to customers for some time now, under the radar. Studies from Twilio found that 83% of businesses are actively incorporating AI into their daily routines, so read on as Wordsmith delves deeper into AI tools you could be using to skyrocket your marketing efforts.
How Successful Marketers View AI
One of the main benefits of adopting AI-powered tools is that it gives your marketing team more time for strategic thinking and creative thought – it should never replace these two vital functions. A successful marketing team has a diversified strategy, that utilises both human capabilities and AI in order to be creatively agile and fast at reacting to marketing and technology shifts in your industry. CEO of Movable Ink, Vivek Sharma, explains, “AI is much broader than what you read in the news. The technology provides advantages in a myriad of marketing functions, including data insights, personalisation, campaign optimisation, SEO, and idea generation. Marketers who channel AI’s full power will redefine customer engagement, create memorable experiences, and deliver ROI.”
Competitive Analysis
For decades, conducting competitor analysis has been key for brands to stay ahead of the curve. Monitoring online conversations about brands, industries and competitors in your space gives you crucial insight into how to respond to emerging new trends and identify what potential gaps your brand could fill. Regularly tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) and using data-driven insights to refine your marketing strategies ensures that continuous improvements are made, which ultimately results in increased brand visibility and higher conversion rates.
Predictive AI has proved to be a game-changer for marketers, by automating mundane research tasks, giving you and your team vital time back for strategising and creative thinking. For sales and marketing teams, HubSpot predictive analytics and Salesforce Einstein tools are great for identifying competitors while also forecasting customer behaviours and needs so your teams can tweak your strategies for more successful, targeted outcomes. Predictive AI tools like these can also suggest optimal models for lead acquisition, by identifying your marketing team’s most valuable channels while saving time and resources by omitting less feasible ones.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
AI tools are also fantastic for supercharging your team’s SEO capabilities. Marketers can leverage AI for in-depth keyword research, backlink analysis and overall website content optimisation. AI can also conduct SEO audits where it can identify technical issues, such as broken links on your website, slow page speeds and mobile optimisation issues, that could be deterring your customers and contributing to high bounce rates. Some AI tools even have the capability to enhance local SEO efforts, like helping businesses optimise their Google My Business listings and suggesting strategies to help improve visibility in local searches.
AI tools can even help marketers create content briefs faster, as they can help analyse thousands of pages online to suggest ways you can boost your SEO before you publish blogs, for example. AI tools have the capability to suggest optimised SEO blog titles, recommended word counts for your audiences, structured subheadings, and even suggest questions to answer that would meet your audiences’ needs.
Marketers that need to do in-depth keyword research, should think about using AI tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush, which offer comprehensive analysis of your customer’s search volumes and help suggest long-tail keywords you can intersperse in your website copy to increase audience session time on your website. For brands who are looking to boost their local SEO, BrightLocal is a popular AI tool that specialises in local SEO tracking and reporting so you can rank higher on search results for Google My Business listings, allowing you to increase awareness and visibility in your local vicinity. When it comes to blog writing, tools like Yoast SEO (for WordPress users) can provide real-time analysis of your heading usage, keyword density and readability scores, which all help to optimise blog posts for SEO, while enhancing the overall user experience.
Enhanced Personalisation And Targeted Advertising
By analysing vast amounts of data, AI tools can help give marketers key insight into customers’ behaviours and buyer journeys to offer enhanced personalisation and hyper-targeted advertising. Research from McKinsey, states that 70% of buyers expect personalised interactions, and a whopping 98% of marketers who took the survey agree AI technology will help deliver more tailored customer experiences, with more than half saying that they already use it for this exact purpose.
Past traditional marketing research methods often overlooked the complex individual journey a customer might take from the initial exposure to the brand to the point of the first purchase or that moment when they become loyal to the brand – but AI doesn’t suffer from the same limitations. Offering real-time analytics, engagement metrics and sentiment tracking, AI can go beyond simple segmentation to provide an in-depth understanding of customers on an individual level. This allows marketers to create hyper-personalised content and targeted advertising campaigns that cater to specific preferences and enables copywriters to craft messages that not only capture the attention but keep them engaging with the brand.
One great AI tool for creating hyper-personalised content is 6Sense. This AI-powered sales and marketing platform is designed to help enhance audience engagement. It does this by collecting data from multiple sources, including, webpage visits, social media interactions and third-party databases in order to create a comprehensive overview of potential buyers. The AI tool also helps marketers identify “intent signals”, which indicate where prospects are on the buying journey, and if they’re ready to engage.
When it comes to targeted advertising campaigns, new AI tools like Pattern89 have arrived to take the guesswork out of your digital marketing budget allocation. Connecting to your brand’s add account, the tool claims to analyse over 350 billion data points across nearly 50,000 creative dimensions and past creative campaigns, helping to predict a winning ad combination that boasts over 95% accuracy. The platform also offers real-time recommendations for creative adjustments, so quick iterations of design and copy can be made based on performance metrics so you can maximise ROI and reach the right people.
Email Marketing
Another way AI tools can be used to your advantage is with your email marketing campaigns. Before AI, email automation had to be hard-coded, but now marketers can make data-driven decisions based on past email campaigns and customer’s individual preferences which has proven to boost open rates, audience engagement and purchases.
AI can help marketers segment their email lists, based on identifying patterns, which allows marketing teams to group subscribers based on niche interests and behaviours, encouraging more targeted messaging. AI can also give you brilliant suggestions on how to nurture your email audience, like triggering a promotional email if it’s been a while since their customer’s last purchase or sending them helpful guides on how to use the products they’ve already bought.
Savvy AI tools like HubSpot’s email marketing tool and Constant Contact can optimise, subject lines, send times and even offer recommendations of what type of content marketers should put in the body copy of their emails, including products they think that particular customer might like, or links to content on the website the customer could be interested in reading to enhance the overall experience with their brand. These tweaks may seem minor, but email marketing should be about surprising and delighting your current customers, encouraging them to engage further with your brand and stimulating future sales, otherwise, your emails will be forever resigned to your audience’s spam folder.
While AI may be changing the game in how we engage with customers, drive conversions and foster meaningful connections – strategic thinking and creativity is still paramount to the success of any brand. The true magic happens when AI, strategic thinking and creativity work in unison. Content marketers and award-winning copywriters still set the direction and define the rules, but use AI to enhance research capabilities and team productivity in ways traditional methods could never achieve.
Automated data analysis tools can deliver accurate insights quickly, which saves valuable time and provides intelligence that informs creative thinking. Predictive AI analysis gives marketers the opportunity to anticipate their customers’ next moves, so marketing teams can proactively adjust their advertising strategies at a moment’s notice, which has the potential to improve conversion rates. But AI in marketing still remains largely untapped. We believe, the most successful marketers out there, are those who can harness the power of AI, without sacrificing thought and creativity to create truly exceptional experiences.