5 AI Marketing Trends To Watch For In 2018

Artificial intelligence is no longer a far-fetched concept in a sci-fi movie; it is what’s happening now. News feeds are chock full of reports of companies and business leaders using AI from Elon Musk to IBM to Uber. Artificial intelligence has also had an impact on marketing. While most of us might not be ready to implement artificial intelligence into our marketing mix, it is worth keeping an eye on AI marketing trends that are gaining traction.

Everything You Need To Know About Top AI Marketing Trends:

1. Image Recognition – Also referred to as visual search, AI image recognition is when a machine identifies and detect an object or attribute in a digital video or image. While this type of AI has been used in security applications, industrial automation and in the medical field, the level of adoption is the highest in e-commerce. Using open source databases of images, AI automates the process of “seeing” images and allows marketers to gain insights into what images are resonating with their audiences and serve up targeted ads and search results based on these insights. Tools from Google and IBM along with a few tech startups are paving the way for this AI marketing trend that we’re sure to hear (and see) more about in 2018.
2. Machine-moderated Customer Interaction – Customer experience is the Holy Grail for marketers looking for a competitive edge in their respective marketplaces. AI technology can help companies provide personalized interactions to customers on-the-fly, taking the customer experience to the next level. IBM with the powerful Watson platform, says that by 2020, 85% of all customer interaction will be handled without human interaction. From automated social media monitoring to machine-responsive live chat on your website to in-app assistance at key parts of the buying funnel, the level of responsiveness a machine can offer customers is near impossible to reproduce with humans. The technology is so advanced that it can match your company’s brand and tone, target the message and provide engagement insights to businesses can drill deeper on their customer’s needs.
3. Recommendation Engines – Recommendation engines are tops on most lists of AI marketing trends. They typically work in one of two ways – by using the items that a user likes or the likes and dislikes of other users to compute a similarity index between users and recommend products and/or relevant content to them accordingly.
4. Website Personalization – Consumers crave deeper and more targeted levels of personalization, but even the most powerful brands in the world have struggled to gain a single view of their customer. Powerful AI software tools can analyze multiple data points about a user (including location, demographics, device, interaction with the website, etc.) and then use that information to tailor the offers and content it serves up online, creating a huge lift to CRO metrics.
5. Intelligent Content Curation – Artificial intelligence does not (yet) have the ability to write a blog post for you or create your next whitepaper, but it can utilize data to produce emails, social media topic suggestions or targeted push notifications.

Artificial intelligence is soon-to-be permeating nearly every aspect of our lives and the future of marketing as we know it is set to change with these powerful technologies. Keeping track of the latest AI marketing trends and how they may affect your marketing goals will be the key to staying competitive in the fast-changing landscape. Count on Valve+Meter to help you assess what makes sense for your organization and walk you through the execution of your campaigns.