How to Include AI Tools in Your Marketing Strategy
The Internet has changed and transformed views towards life and all that it entails. Something like running a remote company was a foreign issue only over a decade ago. Communication, travel, business, and even education have all felt the impact of the Internet and emerging technologies. There are new tools and technologies being invented daily to improve quality of life, work, and to help businesses grow in sales and revenue.
One of the emerging technologies taking the business world by storm by its transformative nature is artificial intelligence (AI). One top application of AI is in improving marketing and advertising for businesses. There are many AI tools available in the market today to facilitate better business intelligence to improve marketing strategies. Further, you can use custom AI development services for more business-specific AI solutions.
However, as much as this technology is useful and gaining attention from many businesses, it’s important that you understand how to integrate it well into your marketing strategy. As a technology with a proven record for successfully supplementing human efforts, it’s worth trying if you’re yet to. Read this article to know how to integrate AI into your sales and marketing department for better results.
Using AI to Boost Marketing Strategies
AI can change your business’s and your teams’ approach to marketing for the better. While many see this technology as something that can potentially replace humans, it more accurately complements human efforts in marketing and elsewhere. The first and most common way is by providing more data, reports, and insights for your teams to work with.
Accurate data and better insights can help your business learn more about customer behavior and probable reasons they act as they do when interacting with you. By making decisions based on the best information gathered and analyzed, it’s possible to target your campaigns better, use the most suitable tone, and tailor your campaigns to the right audience. At the same time, you can automate tasks that are repetitive, time-consuming, or laborious, which is particularly useful if you run Google Ads for clients or sell other related services.
Know What AI Can Do and What It Can’t
Most of the time, business managers can get swayed by the hype of a particular technology and jump right into implementing it into their marketing processes. However, the best approach when considering AI as a viable technology for boosting marketing efforts is to understand it. Go deep into what it is; the capabilities and limitations alike. Before the implementation, understand how it will bring actual value into your marketing strategy.
Understand Your Current Marketing Processes
The next logical step is evaluating and assessing your current marketing processes. This is where you review your existing strategy and understand your customers’ purchase process. Evaluate and see if AI is the best option to help you boost or optimize these processes. In the same breath, identify the problems your business is facing in its marketing efforts and list them down. For example, are you having challenges with:
- Acquiring new customers
- Retaining customers
- Not having enough data to go by
- Customer support response times
- Team productivity
- Communication breakdowns
- Task priority management
- Creating helpful content
- Generating leads or;
- General marketing efficiency
Finding out what issue you’re dealing with can help you find the best ways and areas to apply AI in marketing. You don’t want to fall into the risk of using AI just for the sake of it, rather you should use it to solve a particular problem. Below are areas AI can help improve.
Improved Communication
Effective communication is the backbone of a successful marketing campaign. Knowing where to reach your audience, when, and how, is critical if you want to make strides in improving lead generation and conversions. That means you need to know the right time, channel, and message for more impact and success.
Fortunately, available AI tools can help you track customer activity across devices. This ensures your messages are targeted to what device customers are using at the exact time you’re sending your messages. The advantage of this is higher visibility and the likelihood that a customer will actually read the message. If you want to achieve brand communication in your marketing campaigns, AI-powered communication can help.
Better Customer Engagement
AI tools can predict customer engagement by analyzing customer behavior and interactions on your various platforms. They can read and segment customer behavior according to age, region, shopping habits, preferences, and other things. These tools pull data from many sources, including your website analytics, social media, feedback, and reviews.
You can train machine learning, which is a branch of AI, to analyze data and identify patterns that you can use to forecast customer engagement. This helps you to place your brand’s ads, products, or services right where they’re likely to elicit a reaction while creating a better customer experience.
Choose One Use Case to Experiment with First
For better success and minimizing risk, don’t overhaul your marketing strategy all at once. The best approach is choosing a use case that creates a balance between being business-critical and one that will give you a good picture of what AI can do. For more accurate results, test on the marketing area you know best. If you’re doing email marketing, don’t test it on search engine optimization (SEO).
Doing this might not help you determine if AI tools are the best for email marketing. Instead, pick a certain percentage of your address, significant enough to show results but not big enough to collapse your campaign should it fail.
Keep Monitoring and Growing
When you notice a positive change and impact in one area after integrating AI, move to the next and keep growing until your marketing strategy is AI-powered. However, along this process, the most important thing is understanding what you’re trying to achieve. Also, when monitoring and growing AI use cases in marketing, don’t forget to seek the help of experts for guidance.
Takeaway
The role of artificial intelligence in marketing in today’s business landscape can’t be ignored. AI tools can help you and your teams create more intelligent marketing campaigns by gathering data and giving you the right insights and nudges to follow. However, always keep in mind that an effective marketing strategy is one that helps you understand and connect with your customers at their level.