8 Ways Artificial Intelligence Is Supercharging Marketing

Artificial Intelligence is the science of making machines solve problems or perform tasks that imitate intelligent human behaviour.

Today’s numerous AI applications for marketing can be categorised two ways: advisory AI and autonomous AI.

• Advisory AI provides people with information to make better decisions. Every day use cases of advisory AI include route optimisation by Google Maps or product recommendations from Amazon. Using advisory AI technologies such as predictive analytics, sentiment analysis, and customer insights enable marketers to create personalised and relevant campaigns.
• Autonomous AI goes several steps further than advisory AI, by executing the recommended action without any human involvement. Notable examples of autonomous AI include the self-driving car, or in the case of marketing, programmatic advertising, lead engagement, and even content generation and curation. 

Marketeers are quickly adopting both advisory and autonomous AI, putting it to work across a variety of functions to:

• Create personalised campaigns and content to better engage audiences
• Facilitate the buyer journey with relevant, timely, and customised information
• Automate lead engagement and qualification to drive sales efficiency

According to Salesforce’s Annual State of Marketing report, marketing has embraced the AI revolution, with more than 50% of marketing leaders already using AI and nearly 75% of those using it for product recommendations and predictive lead scoring. In addition, the report states that efficiencies driven by AI in CRM will increase global revenues by $1.1 trillion and ultimately lead to more than 800,000 net-new jobs, well surpassing those lost to automation.

We at Conversica have compiled an eBook examining eight key areas where AI significantly impacts the way marketeers work, enabling them to leverage mass amounts of data to automate specific tasks, improve the customer experience, and ultimately yield more profit from revenues. I've summarised the eBook's eight key areas below:

1. Predictive Analytics identifies the likelihood of future outcomes by combining vast amounts of data and applying statistical algorithms and machine learning techniques. Or to put it another way, predictive analytics aims to provide an assessment of what will happen in the future, based on historical and contextual information. 
2. AI-driven Customer Insights enable companies to distill the behaviours that lead a customer to make a purchasing decision. This type of critical intelligence can be used by businesses to better understand and respond to customer wants and needs via relevant and hyper-personalised messaging, targeted advertising, and enhanced product fit.
3. Do people really mean what they say, and if not, how do they really feel? This is the essence of Sentiment Analysis, which is also known as opinion mining. Sentiment analysis uses algorithms and natural language processing (NLP) to determine consumer attitude toward a product, service, or brand. 
4. Programmatic Advertising refers to the automation of buying and selling advertising inventory, typically done through an exchange that connects publishers and advertisers. AI is at the core of this industry because it “can analyse the complexity of media buying via programmatic in a way that is not humanly possible or not possible by human media buyers and planners. Artificial intelligence gives marketers the ability to take control of their data to monetise their campaigns and deliver the best possible return on investment. 
5. With AI-powered Account-based Marketing companies can target the most high-value accounts, tailor specific content for them, run automated campaigns, and analyse results — and do all of that far more quickly than if done manually. According to MarTech Today, modern AI technology has the ability to ingest unstructured data and deliver relevant information about your target accounts — what they care about, who their competitors are, what they’re reading, talking, and writing about and more.
6. Artificial intelligence is helping marketers supercharge their Content Marketing and Curation strategy by analysing massive amounts of user data, interpreting intent, and automatically generating content. For example, the AP went from publishing 300 earnings reports per quarter written by humans to 3,000 per quarter written 100% by machines using Automated Insights technology. 
7. The use of chatbots — computer programs that simulate human conversation — can have a tremendous impact on Customer Experience. Chatbot services are a type of autonomous AI, which although simplistic compared to Intelligent Virtual Assistants, enable customers to interact with your company and complete transactions without the need for human intervention. 
8. Companies with large lead volumes are increasingly relying on AI to automate the Lead Engagement process and maximise their ROI on generated leads. Conversational AI technology, which incorporates machine learning, natural language processing, and natural language generation, has the ability to contact and engage leads in human-like two-way conversations. 

As manual tasks are automated intelligently and optimised with the power of huge data sets, marketing transforms itself into a smarter and more efficient function, able to deliver higher conversion rates and revenue to the business. Want to learn more? You can read the full eBook for free at the Conversica resource centre.

If you are looking to supercharge your lead engagement efforts with artificial intelligence, I'd be delighted to chat about how our market-leader Intelligent Virtual Assistants can help your business.