Artificial Intelligence (AI): The secrets of effective marketing with AI

Marketing is a huddle that many who haven’t done it may underestimate. Often times, sophisticated technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) are associated with departments that are technical in nature, e.g., tech, finance, agriculture, and so forth. As a matter of fact, most people think that only tasks that have less to no human interaction are the only ones at risk of being automated. But the truth is that AI has started to disrupt “people” and “creative” departments such as HR, operations, and marketing. 

Many marketers typically don’t have an engineering or technical background and yet are tasked with the challenge of understanding and fully conveying the message about a product or service in the simplest and most digestible way to technical and nontechnical audiences. Bridging the technical and non-technical worlds is a daunting task that only marketers can comprehend. 

  As a marketer, you are the ears, eyes, and spokesperson of your company and industry. You have to stay up to date with the latest innovations and engage your audience with the right content at the right moment. Understanding your audience and timing are crucial to effective marketing because if you lose your audience’s attention, it may take a while to get it back. To stay in the game, you thus have to be a quick thinker, process information faster, understand your audience’s interests and give them the information they need when they need it.

Effective marketing can be overwhelming, but I have good news. AI is changing how we market and is allowing marketers to do things faster and smarter. This article highlights 3 ways AI is disrupting the marketing landscape.

 3 Top Ways Marketers are Utilizing AI to their advantage

1. Tailored content recommendation: Marketers like to be on top of their game, and this means having the most engaging content. The goal is always to create content that is relatable, insightful, and digestible. AI is making it easier for marketers to understand the kind of content that’s engaging to their audience. AI algorithms can also easily detect patterns in the reader’s behavior and recommend relevant content. 

“I can go to a site and interact with a piece about Kigali, but the site may not have enough content and because of the cookies, the algorithm will suggest other content curated to my interests,” said Peter Brooks VP of Growth Marketing at VMGROUPE / LBCVMG. “Content can now be created on the fly by doing dynamic keywords and recognizing trends on social media,” he added.  

For example, every time I am on LinkedIn, it knows that I have read a piece about AI and data analytics, and the next time I visit, they suggest a piece of content that’s similar to what I read earlier. The machine gets better at understanding my behavior and thus its recommendations are increasingly accurate over time. This is a tool that many marketers can utilize to better understand their audience and recommend the right content. 

Takeaway: AI is making it easier for marketers to create content that is relatable, insightful and digestible.

2. Audience prediction and selection for events: A marketer’s worst nightmare is organizing an event and have zero attendees or the wrong audience. This is true to event planners too, but as a marketer, everyone in the organization is counting on your ability to reach more people and to bring in the right audience. AI and machine learning tools can help select the best audience to invite based on other events they have attended in the past and interest in similar topics. Using AI-powered tools you can forecast attendance and recommend adjustments to meet the audience’s needs. An excellent example of a company using AI algorithms for marketing is Marketo. This is not a special case that is meant for others only, it is actually something every company and organization looking to draw insights should be taking advantage of, in a company tailored specific ways to drive engagement and revenue.

“Now you have banner ads and targeted ads. The technology gives the ability to find the right people and not just the right people but at the right time,” said Jimmy Marsanico a Data Scientist at Bloomberg LP. 

Takeaway: AI and machine learning tools can help select the best audience to invite to your events.

3. Data-driven social media targeting: Using AI, marketers can understand historical data on social media and understand their audience's engagement and the best time to engage with them. Recently, we have been trying to understand how our audience engages with our content, what time they are likely to click and read our LinkedIn post, and when they read and engage with the article that we published. After carefully collecting the data, we understood a lot about our followers and audience and their behavior. We learned that most of our audience open our posts on Monday mornings, for example, they read our published articles on Saturdays and that they usually engage with video and photo content slightly more than other content. These are all things that would be nearly impossible for a human to notice on their own, but it only takes a matter of seconds for a machine algorithm to do the same amount of work and spit out insights that drive businesses. Based on the information generated from AI systems, we’re able to better curate content and share it at the time when we know that we have most of our audience’s attention.

“AI feeds on data and has enabled marketers to hyper-personalized messaging to customers and provide recommendations according to their preferences. Stitching data from various sources allows tailored content. Advertising is a space where this is very prominent,” said Preeti Adhikary VP of Marketing at Fusemachines.

Takeaway: Using AI, marketers can understand historical data on social media and understand their audience's engagement and the best time to engage with them.

The 3 ways in which AI can help marketers that I covered herein are just the tip of the iceberg, there are many more ways in which AI is and will impact marketing. AI-powered machines have the capacity to perform sophisticated and cognitive tasks but faster and on a larger scale than humans. With so much data available today, it is nearly impossible for humans to identify patterns on thousands of data points, but AI tools can mine, process, and analyze millions of data points in a short amount of time. With AI, you can personalize your content and engage your audience in a more precise and effective way.