Why AI Can Be Your Savior

Worried that Artificial Intelligence is going to take away your work? Embrace it and it can give you a competitive advantage!

When you think of AI, do you think of science fiction movies showing robots as scary imitations of humans? While that's one small aspect of AI, another, much more exciting part, is the science behind teaching machines to be intelligent.

It’s already in your mobile phone, helping find the cheapest route to your destination, showing where your photos were taken and answering questions. Movie-streaming services, such as Netflix, suggest other titles for you to watch after learning what kind of movies you like.

The machine's capabilities revolve around very narrow, data-driven tasks, such as what time to send an e-mail, what content to write about, which elements to use for your next video and predicting conversions, to name a few.

AI excels at tasks that are often difficult or time-consuming for humans to do. When it's is used in data driven areas within marketing, AI helps agencies to make better, smarter decisions.

Paul Roetzer, author and founder of the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute, predicts that 80 percent of what marketing agencies do will be intelligently automated within five years. In fact, content marketing has already started to adapt. Check out the five ways AI is changing content marketing right now.

So, what should you do?

As overwhelming as it might seem, we can't sit back and ignore it. Instead, start by learning about what AI can do. Then look for ways you can apply it to your business and use it to grow. Why not start with letting chatbots engage with your customers, so you can focus more time on strategy?

Most (modern) email services can learn about your subscribers' opening habits and use this to optimize open rates. As more data comes in from the email blasts, the AI tool gets smarter on its own and sends emails out at the best time. If a subscriber usually opens their emails at 11am, there's no sense in sending it at 2am - the AI will learn this and optimise email send times.

Phrasee is an AI-powered tool that generates marketing text, writing subject lines that perform better than ones written by humans. Phrasee "reads" your brand's emails, then uses the data to write high-performance subject lines. Gumtree got a whopping 35-50% increase in open rates after split testing 10 AI-generated subject lines, as well as seeing a 44% increase in clicks.

Gartner predicts that 20 percent of all business content created this year will be authored by machines. But, they will have trouble with understanding a brand’s tone of voice and creating content that demonstrates expertise and creativity. So, don’t worry about the machines taking your job. Instead, be forward-thinking and embrace what they can do. If you can find a way to integrate it into your work so it can enhance results, you'll be using it to your marketing advantage.

3 Ways AI May Already Help You 

1. Recommendation Engines

Consumers love the marketing technology of recommendation engines. A great example of this is Spotify. The music streaming software knows your taste in music and can recommend songs from among the millions available, so you don't have to. And Netflix doesn't only take into account which movies you've watched, it also analyzes which of them you've watched multiple times, rewound or fast-forwarded, as well as much more. These behaviors, when correlated and assessed against the behaviours of its millions of users, help to identify the best movie recommendations just for you.

2. Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic ads make the “inventory” of website and app viewers a lot more efficient. Platforms like Google (AdWords) and Facebook have set the standard for both efficient and effective advertising. The automated process of buying and selling ad space is driven by AI technologies, which optimize real-time bidding. And best of all, algorithms analyze people's behavior and use this to optimise real-time campaigns towards audiences who are more likely to convert. It also helps you to reach relevant people who are actually interested in your products or services.

3. Marketing Forecasting

Technology can help us make sense of the flood of marketing data coming in and take action on it. Companies like Rapidminer, Birst and Sisense are aiming to become industry standards for marketing forecasting. Being able to predict the success of marketing initiatives can help businesses understand where to put their marketing efforts. Models for processing high volumes of clicks, views, time-on-page, purchases, email responses, and so on, can help businesses to predict results for campaigns that are already in the idea phase.