What Is AI in Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is artificial intelligence?

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be defined as the theory and development of computer systems that are able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. It involves computers developing cognitive processes that they can use as a means to make key decisions, such as answering a question.

In digital marketing terms, AI can support performance by doing things like changing a keyword bid to adapt to real-time market changes or choosing to show your audience a specific ad or message based on key real-time inputs about the customer. The benefit of AI for digital marketers is that it aims to create systems with human-like thinking skills, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from experience.

While full sentient AI hasn’t been created yet, there are several task-based automations that were once handled by humans that are now being performed by machines. This, of course, requires inputs from humans to help guide the process to meet your needs. A very simple example is a bank implementing voice and speech recognition into their internet and telephone banking services. This enables customers, for example, to access their bank balance via a voice recognition system rather than talking to a customer service rep.

What does this mean for digital marketing? Machine-actioned tasks can significantly improve digital marketing efficiency. Also, having machines handle mundane tasks can free up your own time to focus more on strategic decisions for a campaign or promotion.

Benefits of AI to digital marketing strategists

What are some of the ways that AI can help digital marketing strategists?

• Boost productivity: AI assists in automating a variety of jobs, meaning your own time and efforts can be redirected to more difficult and strategic tasks. Chatbots, for example, can provide customers with 24/7 access to solutions which can free up time for your customer-facing employees to be more strategic with their planning.
• Drive efficiency: AI can easily handle menial and repetitious activities such as data input, separating leads from a marketing campaign, and replying to consumer FAQs.
• Unearth insights: AI can assist organizations in eliminating guesswork. With AI’s data-driven research capabilities, you can develop a more effective marketing approach for your company, and potentially open up new marketing opportunities. Many analytics tools have an automated insights section that will highlight variances in traffic, conversions, and engagement. They will also provide an explanation for what might be the cause of these anomalies, helping you understand new and emerging trends in your data.
• Increase ROI: AI can help predict target customers’ buying behavior and choices by evaluating data, improving the user experience, and providing consumers with the content they require to complete their buyer’s journey. Tools such as Google Ads and Meta use conversion data and audience insights with AI-powered functionality to try to show your ads to the people on their platforms who, based on the data, are most likely to convert. When set up correctly and through strategy refinements, testing, and optimization, AI-powered conversion campaigns can drive much better performance than manual management.
• Personalize the experience: With AI, you can create more personalized campaigns and experiences for your target audience. You can use AI to efficiently craft customized content that will resonate with different audiences and address their needs or preferences. This helps you to attract potential customers and build loyalty with existing customers.

AI versus human input

Does this mean that the machines are taking over and humans will be rendered redundant? Not at all!

AI offers new ways to complete tedious and repetitive tasks, but there are some tasks that a computer will simply struggle to complete. For example, AI can struggle with effectively teaching new employees or with creativity. While AI-driven tools can assist marketers, these tools still need inputs and direction from you to deliver on your marketing goals.

If you think about it, many of the AI-driven tools used by marketers can’t have the same contextual understanding of your business or consumer as you do. Because of your professional and life experience, you know the nuances of your products, customers, and the wider happenings in life which can change things in the market. Machines don’t have the same level of contextual knowledge.

Machines only have access to the digital data that they are connected to. They can’t see or use the insights that you have about the specifics of your business or the nuances of customer behavior. So they’ll still need you to feed them the inputs to help them get the results you want.

AI in action

Let’s explore this further. Say, for example, you choose a specific image for an Instagram ad that you know your customers are likely to respond to. Who actually makes that choice? Instagram can’t create or choose the image for you. This requires human input. Although Instagram can tell you which one of all your images works the best, you still need to feed it the right data to begin with.

The same applies to Google Ads. It is very intelligent, but it still can’t really distinguish an offer headline from a CTA headline. Therefore, you might have to pin some of your headlines to a position to act as a prompt to guide the machine to drive the best performance.

Bear in mind, however, that there are already some advanced AI developments in existence, such as GPT-4(which can write screenplays and articles) or DALL-E 2 (which can create its own unique art, images, and photos). However, at this stage of its development, much of the AI used in digital marketing is in fact machine learning, a specific subset of AI, and it does need your input to succeed.