10 Real-World Examples of How Artificial Intelligence (AI) is Transforming the Digital Marketing Landscape

It’s 2020 and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer a new vocabulary for digital marketers. Some of marketers are already using AI, and 27% more are planning on incorporating this technology in 2020.

AI is transforming digital marketing strategies and valuable customer insights for companies. From better user experience, predictive customer behavior to real-time customer support, AI is becoming the new pillar to drive productivity, efficiency, profitability, and ROI.

In this blog, we will tell you the most surprising real-world examples of how artificial intelligence is transforming the digital marketing arena. But before that let’s first understand what is artificial intelligence.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence is nothing but a computer that could achieve human-level performance in everyday tasks. We use SIRI, Google, Facebook, Alexa, Instagram, Netflix, and countless new technologies. All these technologies rely heavily on AI and machine learning.So you will find AI everywhere!

When it comes to digital marketing using AI, it could help us in many ways. From predictive and targeted content creation, customer behavior analysis, recommendation to customer support through chatbots, AI can change the face of marketing and make everything easier for us.

For instance, National Australia Bank (NAB) launched a chatbot as a digital virtual banker. It answers customer questions 24 hours a day, every day. It is capable of answering more than 13,000 variations on more than 200 questions. Below are some examples of companies that are enhancing advertising and marketing tactics by data- and artificial intelligence-driven platforms. 

Companies That Are Already Using AI in Marketing

From banks, IT service providers to advertising companies, leading companies across hundreds of industries are harnessing the power of AI.

1. GumGum, which is an advertising services provider and works with Fortune 100 companies like L’Oreal. T-Mobile, and Johnson & Johnson, has developed a computer vision technology that advertisers can use to place ads more strategically in order to increase engagement and brand recall.

2. Sizmek's demand-side platform (DSP) provides clients with new workflows for added transparency, control and efficiency when managing programmatic spending on adverts.

3. Invoca’s call data tracking and analytics services has helped Microsoft to analyze the resulting revenue from inbound calls. This as a result helped Microsoft optimize specific digital campaigns and increase revenue by 30%.

4. Many companies are using Google’s Smart Shopping tool for ad campaign management. For instance, Ebay brand GittiGidiyor used Google’s tool to increase its return on ad spend by 28%.

5. eCommerce company Bonobos uses AI audience behavior platform “Q” by Quantcast to target potential new customers. The platform creates brand-specific predictive models and shows similar browsing behavior to audience.

6. Harley-Davidson NYC made use of Albert Technologies’ AI solution across various marketing channels and saw an increase of 566% in website views and 40% increase in sales.

In this blog, we will tell you real-world examples of Artificial Intelligence applications in digital marketing. 

 Real-World Examples of AI in Marketing

 1.   Content Creation and Marketing

Content creation according to the target audience requires a lot of time and efforts from marketers. 47% of marketers say content production on time and efficiently is their biggest challenge. AI can solve this problem and enhance the way you market them to your audience.

Brands often face difficulties in producing enough content to provide personalized experiences to their potential customers. There is an AI tool called Concured that can help you identify your best performing content and plan future content creation. You can then repurpose these existing contents and scheduled them for marketing. Big publishing companies like Forbes uses AI tools to generate some of their contents.

OpenAI, backed by Elon Musk, has announced that it has created an AI text generator called GPT2. This tool is so accurate that the company is holding back from releasing until it founds out how the technology might be abused. However, there are many AI content creators that you can use in marketing.

If you can generate content with the help of these tools, then why not to use them? This will surely streamline the work and save the efforts of the company. Here are the 10 AI content creation tools that you can try today:

I.   Quill

II.  Wordsmith

III.  Articoolo

IV. Article Forge

V.  Canva

VI. Word AI

VII. scoop.it

VIII. Wordlife

IX. TubeBuddy

X.  Quuu Promote

2.   Social Sentiment Analysis

Today, having a social media presence is critical for the success of any business. By the end of 2020, 3-billion people are expected to have at least one social account. With so many customers using these platforms, it is essential that you utilize these social media channels to engage and convert customers.

Twitter uses AI and machine learning to monitor the trending topics and determine the ranking of tags. Facebook uses AI to track the comments on various posts and use them to rank the top posts before presenting them on the news feed of the user. Instagram has recently come up with AI features to help visually impaired people.

These examples show that social media channels are already using AI tools and we need to do social sentiment analysis to interact with customers effectively and design campaigns accordingly. So why do you need social sentiment analysis tools?

Social sentiment analysis is important because it provides audience insight, supports customer service, and improves brand messaging. There are AI-powered sentiment analysis tools that use natural language processing (NLP) to analyze online conversations and determine deeper meanings in the form of positive, negative, and neutral. Here’re some awesome sentiment analysis tools. Take them for a spin!

I.    Quick Search

II.   Hootsuite Insights

III.  RapidMiner

IV. MeaningCloud

V.  Sentiment Analyzer

VI. SentiStrength

VII. Sentigem

VIII. Social Searcher

3. Audience Targeting

Today, marketers are required to reach their customers with certain level of personalization as people want brands to meet their expectations and needs. For that, they need AI tools to target increasingly granular segments.

AI helps in dynamic segmentation by taking into account the behaviors of customers using real-time data. Segmenting your customers into appropriate groups is important as you can prepare your brand messages accordingly. This helps in product personalization. With greater personalization, response rates are likely to increase than your non-personalized campaign.

In a recent survey conducted by Winterberry Group and the Data & Marketing Association (DMA), 62% of marketers have said that audience targeting through segmentation is their top priority.  

Cloud companies including IBM and Salesforce have invested millions in AI products to automate the process of creation of custom audience segments for marketing purposes.

Affectiva, a startup formed at MIT Lab, has developed an emotion detection technology, Emotion AI, that analyzes human emotions from their facial expressions and voice. Artificial Intelligence company, Magnetic, has created Magnetic Live Audiences that allow marketers to do AI-optimized audience segmentation using new data, campaign performance, and machine learning.

 3.   Voice Search

If you are using Siri, Amazon Echo, and Google Home at home, then probably you already know about voice search. These are AI-powered virtual assistants. They have become a hot thing in our homes, cars, and wherever we go. According to TheeDesigns, people perform 3.5 billion searches on Google every day, and out of them 1/3 are voice searches.

People are quite busy these days; with voice search, they can get their answers quickly and save their precious time. In digital marketing, voice search has a great significance. Instead of using keywords, they have to optimize content with long queries as used by people in voice search devices. Marketeres need to use more conversational keywords based on the way users would say something on Siri, Google Home or Echo.

4.   Programmatic Advertising

Advertisers can make use of AI-based programmatic advertising to improve efficiency and make better budget decisions. AI algorithms are continuously learning; they can modify their actions via their learned ‘experiences.’

The first use of AI in programmatic advertising is into the decision-making process and how well your money is spent. Adext AI audience management tool manages budgets for over 20 demographic groups. With daily adjustments per ad, you can bring more leads with the same investment.

The second use of AI is dynamic ad creative optimization. Using AI tools, you can create and send a variety of answers based on the users’ unique characteristics.

The third use of AI in programmtic advertising is customer analytics and marketing insights. These insights are taken from the history of the latest ads, how a user has interacted with them, web pages history, lists of items purchased, etc. Advertisers can incorporate these insights while creating ads for the best outcomes.

The social media giant Facebook is reportedly using its FBLearner Flow technology for advertising. FB is using it to create captions for what people are saying in the video ads, filter out ads and posts that lead to content that’s not correct, and determine the best ads to show to users.

5.   Visual Search

Visual search is an emerging development in the world of Artificial Intelligence. The future of search will be about pictures rather than keywords. 62% of millennials say they would like to search something visually over other new technologies.

It has been found that brands which will redesign their websites to support visual and voice search will increase their revenue by 30%.

Search engine giant, Google has already started using AI image recognition for visual searchers. Google Lens has vast user data which helps it to identify objects in a given image and match them to retailers and provide customers reviews.

Pinterest has also incorporated AI technology onto its platform. Image-based Pinterest Ads have an 8.5% conversion rate. ASOS Style Match is an AI-based tool that allows shoppers to purchase using images.

Levi’s and Disney are experimenting with visual search marketing on Snapchat. EasyJet and Salesforce have already launched visual search tool. Argos recently launched AI-powered visual search to connect offline stores with online catalogue.

Walmart is testing an in-house visual search technology. IKEA revamped its app to allow shoppable visual search at home.

Companies have understood that visual search can affect the everyday lives of consumers and so they are building their proprietary visual search tools. When are you going to adopt this trending technology to change the way you market your services or products?

 6.   Better User Experience

User experience (UX) is how people interact with your website, application, or device. In this customer-centric era, companies are required to provide personalized experiences based on audience’s interest and needs. With AI and machine learning, you can deliver a better UX.

 Machine learning-based systems can track and evaluate a vast array of crucial UX metrics, such as: device users are using when they visit a website, location of users, session time and length, pages visited, categories/products viewed, bounce rates, exit pages, and user flow. These user behaviors can help marketers optimize websites, apps, and ad campaigns according to the needs of customers.

 Segmentify specializes in using AI on consumer data to enhance eCommerce personalization. Indian retail brand Goto used Segmentify which helped it boost their average order values by 33%.

 Netflix uses AI to improve UX by analyzing data for different graphic layouts and program banners. This helps the company to determine the most compelling imagery for its TV shows.

 Most businesses are already aware of chatbots and many have started using this feature on their site. Chatbots can assist customers 24×7, handle several customer requests simultaneously, and are friendly and never lose patience.

 AI helps in making deeper connections with people. The Concept-I car from Toyota and Tesla are not cars but they act as people’s partners. The AI technology in these cars improves UX by helping them connect with the family on a personal level.

 7.   Product Categorization and Pricing

Online retailers are now using machine learning to tag and categorize products more efficiently. For instance, LoveTheSales.com uses a text-based classification tool to train various models with positive and negative examples. The AI algorithm correctly identifies a product based on context.

 Machine learning can also be used for dynamic pricing of products by online stores. With AI tools, you can analyze customer’s data patterns to predict what they are likely to buy. You can calculate the next discount to covert these customers. AirBnB uses AI technology in its dynamic pricing system to enable property owners determine the price for their property.

 8.   Email Marketing

Applying AI technology in email marketing has proven to be one of the most successful venture for companies. Boomtrain, Phrasee, and Persado are the email marketing AI tools that can generate subject lines and content based on audience interests and behaviors.

Email marketing takes a lot of human time and efforts. Analysis of email open rates and conversions take even more time. With AI like these, you can determine the best times and days of the week to send emails to the users, automate email frequency, write the content that catches their attention and much more.

 10. Web Design

Website design has a direct impact on the SEO results. 95% of customers leave a website if it is not optimized or responsive. A user takes 2-3 seconds to make an impression about a site. So designing a great website is essential if you want good ranking, page views, traffic, and leads.

You can make use of AI tools like Grid to design a website based on user-provided information. This way you can build the website in a less time and at an unbeatable price. With a good website design in hand, you can optimize it further for better SEO results.

Wrapping Up

AI technology is now accessible to all businesses. If you’re not on the AI bandwagon yet, then consider investing in the AI technology soon to hyper-personalize the customer experience, speed up production of certain types of content, make accurate predictions based on behaviors and patterns, and predict customer behavior. To put it simply, AI is going to help marketers increase their productivity, efficiency, and profitability. It’s time for you to embark on AI paradigm.