AI & Marketing: Building amazing ROI

Talk about AI seems to be everywhere these days, with future visions ranging from a relaxed utopia, all the way down to the apocalypse vision of the terminator movies… the eventual truth though will probably be somewhere in the middle.

Some professions will certainly lose out… with a background in accountancy I can certainly see that industry being hit hard, after all the basic tech already exists to completely automate accounts production, but it is not particularly commercially viable at the moment…

Marketing however is an industry that can only benefit.

The old adage that says “half of our marketing works, but we don’t know which half” is something that comes down solely to data. It is just not humanly possible (even now) to monitor ad results in real time (or near real time) across multiple marketing channels and ad providers without having a large team of people working 24/7, so how do you know what is getting the best results?

The iconic Cadbury’s advert with the drumming gorilla is, years later, still viewed regularly on YouTube, but it has been reported that the advert itself did not actually lift sales… of course it is a great brand awareness ad, but Cadbury’s was already a household name so no brand awareness advertising was really needed.

Where AI comes into the picture is in it’s ability to monitor and react, both to real time results and also to learn from the mass of data collected over numerous campaigns. This reduces man hours (and therefore underlying costs) and allows the marketing department to identify those ad channels that are delivering results and those that are not delivering, so that ad spend can be targeted for maximum efficiency

AI however, is still quite new to marketing and, as far as I am aware, there is currently only one system with AI that integrates multiple ad outlets (94% at last count) into one simple dashboard that allows precision targeting (with the AI monitoring, reporting and optimising campaigns) and that is SeeLocal.

So how does AI operate, and why does it beat the usual methods of using an agency or your own marketing team?

1.  Most ad servers have different times and days when they update your ad statistics, and are mainly outside of the UK timezone, so unless you have a team of dedicated staff working 24/7 you will always be “behind” the game.

2.  Different ad servers (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn etc) provide the information in different ways, so it is difficult to simply pull off and compare side to side… making effective control and monitoring time consuming

3.  The different servers also have different ways when it comes to setting up a campaign and ad-spend etc… if doing it manually (even if you are an agency) you don’t have to learn the in’s and out’s of just one system, but more likely a dozen or so (unless you want to miss out on possible revenue)

The SeeLocal AI seamlessly completes 1 and 2 above for you, and the simple to use dashboard will take your ad campaign and automatically adapt it to suit all those servers in point 3, plus a number of ad locations not normally accessible to you, such as a range of .gov sites. 

A further advantage of this is the ability (if required) to pinpoint precise locations (down to a single postcode) and to specify a radius from those points for the campaign. This is perfect for those businesses that want to drive business to a new branch/store etc., and has been successfully used by a number of our national brand clients.

The proof of course is “in the pudding” and we regularly have clients reporting ROI in the thousands of % (that’s ￡50, ￡60, ￡70 etc coming back for every ￡1 spent)

AI of course is constantly developing, as is the SeeLocal AI. One of our development aims is to bring it to the point where a client simply has to enter in their campaign aims, their industry and the AI will be able to offer a “default” set up that automatically puts your campaign into the ad channels that have shown the best results… so you start out getting great results and the AI then works on making them even better. 

Our (unofficial) target is to get campaigns to normally exceed 10,000% ROI… maybe that could be your next marketing campaign?

Finally… the ingredients of SeeLocal — Experienced marketeers (including ex-Google), years of data from an award winning marketing agency + a team of clever programmers, backed by investors with a vision of the future.

Regards

Leslie Robinson