Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing

The internet has come a long way in the few decades since its arrival. From the creation of ARPANET, a basic means of communication amongst two computers, to the invention of email, online shopping and wireless. Nowadays, a majority of people enjoy permanent connectivity and just about anyone can create their own website with companies like 1&1 for example. The next thing to get your head around is Artificial Intelligence and the most effective way to incorporate it into your marketing strategy.

When most people think of Artificial Intelligence they think of robots, The Terminator and, quite simply, the future. We are slowly coming to terms with the fact that the future is now and both businesses and individuals alike are having to get to grips with all that this AI revolution will bring. While slowly introducing AI to your business model, your customers will quickly adapt to it, learn about it and grow to enjoy it.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Understanding what AI actually is, is of course the first hurdle in knowing what kind of role it will play in your future. Accompanying this are many more questions such as: Will AI take my job away? Will AI kill us all? Will AI replace humans entirely? With change, always comes fear.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, artificial intelligence is “the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.” However, no amount of definitions can prepare us for what’s in store. The term itself is an all-encompassing label that has grown to encapsulate a number of different things.

According to Vox Creative, AI is therefore now beginning to splinter off into various subfields, such as voice recognition and handwriting recognition, and in turn, become something other than AI altogether. As the term AI is constantly evolving, so too will our understanding of it.

Digital Marketing and AI

Artificial Intelligence has not only brought a number of advantages to the commercial world, but also a number of challenges along with it. More and more businesses are taking on the oftentimes rewarding challenge of incorporating AI into their company communications and practices. Below provides a few ways in which AI can improve your digital marketing strategy.

Content creation

While AI is not yet at the point of creating all digital content, this year will see it being used for certain areas of content. Many respected news sources are using AI for generating breaking news reports such as The Washington Post’s use of AI particularly in its creation of real time election updates. Most of us have probably read a large amount of AI-generated content online without even realizing.

Personal shopping

Digital marketing is constantly striving to make the user experience more personal – especially in the world of e-commerce. The notion of personal shopping was once a thing of luxury, now however, more and more online shopping platforms are using AI to extract data insights and recommend products that already suit the user’s taste according to style, price range and size. AI is being used to find out exactly what a customer is looking for – as would be the case when one walks into a store.

Targeted advertisements

What we’ve seen lately is more and more targeted advertisements online with platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Amazon and YouTube being prime examples. By using AI and machine learning to assess who your target audience is and what they like/dislike (location, interests, profession, gender, age group, etc.), the click-rate on targeted ads is sky-rocketing. Additionally, AI can help businesses learn when and how their audience best responds to, or acts upon, ads. Soon, individual or personalized advertising will take over and the days of seeing ads that are of no interest to the user will be well and truly over.

Chatbots

Users expect customer service to provide an instant response rate 24/7 – no matter where in the world you are. The most feasible and cost-effective way of achieving this is with AI. Chatbots are quickly changing the face of customer experience providing an instant and seamless service. Not only can they handle multiple queries at once, but they can also provide a proactive customer service: reaching out to customers on the site before the customer even figures out where the contact page is.

Voice search queries

When voice search first entered the scene it was met with a lot of controversy, with more voice search disadvantages being discussed than successes. Issues with the voice recognition software itself was a large demotivating factor; factors such as background noise, accents, interference, languages and a simple lack of accuracy always worked against a less-developed voice search function. 2018 is set to see major improvements in voice search queries and an overall more sophisticated software. Already we have seen products such as Amazon Echo and Google Home.