AI and data are powerful tools to create a memorable and engaging brand experience for your customers. By using them strategically, you can tailor your content, offers, and interactions to each customer's preferences, needs, and behavior. In this article, we'll show you how to use AI and data to personalize and enhance your brand experience in six steps.
The first step is to define what you want to achieve with your brand experience. Do you want to increase awareness, loyalty, conversions, or referrals? How do you measure your success? What are the key touchpoints and channels where you interact with your customers? Having clear and specific goals will help you align your AI and data strategy with your brand vision and values.
In the face of ever evolving and alluring AI tools - I constantly remind myself that end-to-end we are humans talking to humans. I believe this stage of 'defining goals' should be solely human strategized with a team to retain the human essence and consideration in how we commune with our audiences and demographics all over the world, over different age and gender maps. Humans talking to humans, leaning on 'AI' or machines for the math and factual reporting data, would be my route here.
One thing I found helpful is to create a customer journey map that outlines each touchpoint of the brand experience. This can help you identify opportunities to improve the customer experience and ensure consistency across all channels. By mapping out the customer journey, you can also identify areas where AI and data can be integrated to enhance the customer experience and achieve your brand goals.
The next step is to collect and analyze data from various sources, such as your website, social media, email, CRM, and analytics platforms. You want to understand who your customers are, what they want, how they behave, and what they think of your brand. You can use AI tools, such as natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and predictive analytics, to extract insights and patterns from your data. You can also segment your customers based on their demographics, psychographics, and behavior.
I believe this is a very sensitive phase where I don't yet trust machine learning to synthesize who my customers / my audience is. I would not want the 'soul' of a brand or marketing campaign to feel mechanic in messaging or tone deaf in the creative. Rather, treating the AI-generated analyses as an additive perspective to amalgamate with, could be beneficial.
One thing I found helpful is using AI-powered chatbots to enhance the brand experience. Chatbots can help you provide quick and personalized responses to your customers' inquiries, 24/7, without the need for human intervention. You can use AI to train your chatbot to understand and respond to common questions, concerns, and requests, and escalate more complex issues to human agents. By using chatbots, you can improve your customer satisfaction, reduce response time, and scale your customer support more efficiently. An example I've seen is H&M's chatbot on Kik, which helps customers find the right outfit and accessories based on their preferences, and provides shoppable links to their products.
Based on your data analysis, you can create customer personas that represent your ideal and typical customers. Customer personas are fictional profiles that describe your customers' characteristics, motivations, pain points, and goals. They help you empathize with your customers and tailor your brand experience to their needs and expectations. You can use AI tools, such as chatbots, surveys, and quizzes, to validate and enrich your personas with feedback and data.
I would still be leery to entrust AI to create and interface on its own with my audiences. Again, 'humans talking to humans' is the end-to-end essence I aim for. For persona creation, I would lean on AI-created math, metrics and data to help identify the core deltas and differences. I would embark on using AI art tools to create the visual profile(s) for the personas, whether as stylized caricatures or actual people (which AI art can do) to help give personality to personas and create relatable visual representations to unify my teams towards understanding and feedbacking on.
One thing I found helpful when creating customer personas is to involve real customers in the process. Conducting interviews, surveys, or focus groups with your existing or potential customers can provide you with valuable insights and perspectives that you might have missed otherwise. You can use AI-powered chatbots to automate this process and collect feedback from a larger audience. By involving customers in creating personas, you can build a more accurate and relatable representation of your target audience and improve your brand experience accordingly.
Once you have your customer personas, you can map their journeys from the first contact to the post-purchase stage. Customer journeys are visual representations of the steps, actions, and emotions that your customers go through when interacting with your brand. They help you identify the opportunities and challenges that affect your customer experience and satisfaction. You can use AI tools, such as heatmaps, eye-tracking, and video analysis, to track and optimize your customer journeys.
One of the most effective ways to use AI and data to personalize and enhance your brand experience is to create relevant and valuable content and offers for your customers. You can use AI tools, such as content recommendation engines, dynamic pricing, and email marketing automation, to deliver personalized and timely content and offers to your customers based on their personas, journeys, and behavior. You can also use AI tools, such as A/B testing, multivariate testing, and personalization platforms, to test and improve your content and offers.
The final step is to engage your customers with your brand and build lasting relationships. You can use AI tools, such as social media listening, chatbots, and voice assistants, to monitor and respond to your customers' feedback, queries, and complaints. You can also use AI tools, such as gamification, loyalty programs, and referral marketing, to reward and incentivize your customers to stay loyal, repeat purchases, and advocate for your brand.
One real-world example of using AI and data analysis to improve brand experience is Netflix. They use customer data to personalize the user experience, from recommending movies and shows based on viewing history to creating custom thumbnails for each user. By analyzing data from millions of subscribers, Netflix can predict which shows will be popular and invest in producing them. They can also optimize their pricing, messaging, and promotions based on customer segments and behaviour. This AI-driven approach has helped Netflix become one of the most successful and beloved brands in the entertainment industry.
The strongest and most compelling use of 'AI' that I utilize is Midjourney artwork to unlock the many myriad stories and visuals in my imagination that I previously could not even come close to personifying with my hands or without a team of 10 patient artists. If used responsibly, 'amalgamated art' (AA) tools will power a whole new world of expression. In the face of ever evolving and alluring AI tools - I constantly remind myself that end-to-end we are humans talking to humans. If we can retain that essence and consideration in how we commune with our audiences and demographics all over the world, over different age and gender maps; we can use AI as a tool to amalgamate how we talk to our audiences, and to each other deliberately.