How Businesses Are Leveraging AI for Digital Marketing
Artificial Intelligence, or AI, might seem like a contradiction initially, but it's making our world brighter by automating tasks, solving problems, and boosting efficiency. What was once the stuff of science fiction is now a reality, quietly integrating into our lives in ways we might not even notice.
Take your daily commute, for instance. If you drive to work, you may be stuck in traffic. AI works behind the scenes, feeding real-time data to mapping apps and helping them adjust routes to avoid congestion, construction, and accidents. If you take public transport, AI optimizes schedules to ensure smooth service. And if you use a ride-sharing app like Uber or Lyft, AI predicts pick-up times, ride durations, and even when and where you'll likely need a ride.
But commuting is just one example. AI is woven into the fabric of our daily routines, whether you're using Siri, Google, Facebook, Alexa, Amazon, Instagram, Netflix, or Pandora. AI is everywhere!
It's also making a big impact in digital marketing. AI quietly works in the background, enhancing pay-per-click ads, personalizing websites, creating content, and predicting customer behavior. According to Forbes, marketers are quickly catching on to its potential—84% of marketing organizations were implementing or expanding their use of AI and machine learning in 2018.
Businesses can leverage AI in two main ways to improve their digital marketing efforts. First, on the backend, where AI helps forecast product demand, build customer profiles, and manage programmatic ad buying. Second, on the customer-facing side, where AI enhances the customer experience, strengthens the brand, and ultimately drives sales. 75% of organizations using AI and machine learning report a more than 10% boost in customer satisfaction.
In short, AI is no longer just a futuristic concept—it's a powerful tool shaping how we live and do business every day.
4 Ways Businesses Are Leveraging AI in Digital Marketing to Boost Customer Satisfaction
AI is transforming the customer experience in several impactful ways, with four key innovations leading the charge: chatbots, predictive and targeted content, content creation, and image recognition technology. These advancements are enhancing customer service, providing more personalized interactions, and delivering content that's both relevant and engaging. Here’s a closer look at how these technologies can improve your customer relationships and positively impact your bottom line.
Chatbots
A chatbot is an AI-powered software designed to engage in conversations, either through text or voice. You've likely interacted with one when seeking answers on a website, often appearing as a chat window on your screen. Known as messenger bots, chatbots were hailed as one of the best new marketing tools in 2017.
While a chatbot doesn’t actively market your business like traditional channels such as ads or emails, it serves as a powerful marketing tool, particularly on social media. Chatbots excel in customer service, helping your customers while strengthening your brand. They gather valuable data on customer preferences, enabling you to tailor your messaging, and can even deliver those personalized messages on your behalf. Chatbots also guide customers through the sales process, asking targeted questions to help them find exactly what they’re looking for.
For instance, National Australia Bank (NAB) introduced a chatbot as a digital virtual banker specifically for their business customers. This chatbot saves time on administrative tasks by being available 24/7 to answer customer questions. It can handle over 13,000 variations of more than 200 different inquiries, using real customer interactions to provide accurate responses.
Predictive and Targeted Content
Beyond just answering questions through chatbots, AI plays a crucial role in gathering and analyzing data about prospects and customers. This data allows AI to predict future behavior and craft more targeted messaging. Whether it's through a chatbot, dynamic content on a website, or an email, AI ensures that the right message reaches the right person at the right time.
For example, AI can track which web pages a customer visits, the blog posts they read, and the emails they interact with. Based on this behavior, AI can intelligently select the content that’s most likely to resonate with that customer and automatically insert it into an email. AI can also predict when a customer is losing interest in a brand—a technique known as "churn prediction"—and respond by delivering personalized content designed to re-engage them and keep them connected to the brand.
Content Creation
Content creation has always been a significant challenge for marketers. Ever since content marketing became a key strategy, producing enough high-quality content has been a time-consuming task. This is where AI steps in to help. AI can generate content that reads just like it was written by a human—whether it’s a full-length article or something more specific like email subject lines or social media ads.
For instance, AI-powered tools like Persado create language tailored to customer needs, crafting messages that are both engaging and relevant. The result is content that serves its purpose—whether providing information or capturing attention on social media—without requiring endless hours from your team or freelancers. With AI, you can produce the vast amount of content needed for effective marketing, all while saving time and resources.
Image Recognition Technology
Another powerful AI tool that businesses are using to enhance the customer experience is image recognition software. This technology has been around for a while, and you’ve likely encountered it on platforms like Facebook, where a friend is automatically tagged in a photo you upload. But image recognition goes beyond just tagging photos—it’s also a game-changer for personalizing customer experiences.
Take Macy’s, for example. They introduced Macy’s Image Search, an app that allows customers to upload a photo of an item they like. The app then finds similar products in Macy’s inventory, making it easier for customers to find exactly what they’re looking for. This kind of personalized shopping experience not only improves customer satisfaction but also helps businesses connect more effectively with their audience.
Artificial Intelligence, or AI, might sound like an oxymoron, but it is making our world smarter by automating tasks, computing solutions, and improving efficiencies. Once the stuff of science fiction, AI is increasingly playing a role in our lives in some very subtle ways.?
Let’s take commuting as an example. If you drive a car to work, you probably spend some time in traffic. AI is helping to reduce your commute time by feeding real-time data to mapping software to adjust for congestion, construction, and accidents. If you use mass transit, AI is helping to ensure optimal service. And if you rely on a ride-sharing app like Uber or Lyft for the last part of your commute, AI enables that service by predicting pick-up times, ride times, and ride-sharing.?
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Your commute is only one everyday example. AI is also prevalent in your daily world if you use SIRI, Google, email, Facebook, Alexa, Amazon, Instagram, Netflix, Pandora, and countless other technologies we have come to rely on. Yes, AI is everywhere!
AI is now also prevalent in the digital marketing domain as well, working in the background while making pay-per-click advertising more effective, personalizing websites, creating content, predicting behavior and more. Marketers are quickly realizing the benefits of the technology, and 84 percent of marketing organizations are implementing or expanding their use of AI and machine learning in 2018, according to Forbes.
There are two ways businesses can use AI to improve their digital marketing. One is on the backend when marketers use AI to forecast demand for products, develop customer profiles, do programmatic ad buying, and the like. The other is the customer-facing side, as marketers use AI to improve the customer experience, thereby strengthening the brand and making more sales. In fact, 75 percent of organizations using AI and machine learning say it enhances customer satisfaction by more than 10 percent.
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4 Ways Companies Are Using AI in Digital Marketing to Improve Customer Satisfaction
When it comes to improving the customer experience using AI, four significant developments stand out: chatbots, predictive and targeted content, content creation, and image recognition technology. Each of these can help to improve customer service and support, as well as deliver more targeted and relevant content. Here’s what you need to know about these technologies and how they can benefit your bottom line. ??
Chatbots
A chatbot is software that can have conversations (or “chat”) using AI to determine responses. You might have used a chatbot while on a website looking for answers to a question. Chatbots can conduct either auditory or textual conversations, the latter usually appearing as chat windows on your computer screen. Also called messenger bots, chatbots have been called 2017’s best new marketing channel.?
Obviously, a chatbot is not going out into the world to market your business. It’s nothing like the kind of marketing channel you’ve used in the past, like ads or emails. But chatbots are effective marketing tools—especially in social media—because they can provide customer service, which helps both your customer and your brand, gather data on customers, which helps you target your messaging, and deliver those targeted messages on your behalf. Chatbots can even move customers through the sales funnel by asking more specific questions to help customers find the products they’re looking for.?
National Australia Bank (NAB) launched a chatbot as a digital virtual banker for their business customers, to save those customers time on administrative tasks. The chatbot is available to answer customer questions 24 hours a day, and every day. The software is capable of answering more than 13,000 variations on more than 200 questions, drawing on real-life customer inquiries for answers.?
Predictive and Targeted Content
In addition to answering questions via chatbots, AI can be used to gather more data about prospects and customers, and then AI can use that data to predict future behavior and develop more targeted messaging. That content might be delivered by a chatbot, as described above, via dynamic content on a web page, or by email. That’s because AI can help deliver the right email message at the right time by using dynamic content and determining that content based on past customer behavior. By knowing which web pages a customer visited, which blog posts they read, which emails they’ve interacted with and more, AI can intelligently select the content most likely to appeal to a specific customer and automatically populate an email with that content. Using what’s called “churn prediction,” AI can also predict when customers are disengaging from a brand; it helps to provide personalized content that’s most likely to appeal to and re-engage them.?
Content Creation
And then there’s the need for vast quantities of content… Ever since the dawn of content marketing, marketers have listed content creation as one of the biggest challenges they face. Creating quality content takes time, and effective marketing requires a lot of it. AI can help by generating some of that content for you. The content can be articles consisting of hundreds of words and read as if a live human being wrote it. Or the content generated can be more specific, such as the email subject lines and social media ads written in the AI-generated language developed by Persado. In either case, the content created is customer-focused and purposeful, intended to be useful to that customer seeking information or scanning their inbox or social media pages—without requiring countless hours on the part of an employee or freelancer to generate that content.?
Image Recognition Technology
Lastly, we have image recognition software as an AI tool businesses can use to improve the customer experience. Image recognition has been around for a while, and you’ve probably experienced it on a platform like Facebook when a friend was automatically tagged in a photo you posted. Image recognition software also helps to personalize customer experiences. For example, major retailer Macy’s launched Macy’s Image Search, an app that lets customers upload a photo of an item in order to find something similar within Macy’s inventory.?
Intelligent Marketers Stay on Top of All Trends
Artificial Intelligence is now deeply woven into the fabric of our daily lives, making it easier for us as consumers to enjoy its benefits. However, for marketers, the challenge is to harness the power of AI to enhance customer experiences, build stronger brand loyalty, and boost revenue. And while AI is a powerful tool, it’s just one of many new trends and technologies that marketers need to master to stay ahead in the game.