AI Marketing: How It's Reshaping Digital Marketing Strategies

In order to answer that question we will take a look at what AI marketing is, how AI is changing the future of digital promotions, and some of the AI marketing strategies most businesses will benefit from the most. We will also make some educated speculation on how AI will change marketing in the future.

What Is AI Marketing

AI marketing is a blanket term that covers a wide range of digital marketing strategies that use some form of machine learning to create content, analyze data, automate tasks, and optimize efforts across a variety of jobs. In short, AI marketing tools are a collection of computer software that collects, analyzes, and interprets data without human intervention.

In spite of the use of the term “artificial intelligence”, current forms of AI don't do any actual “thinking”. Some use language models like NLP (Natural Language Processing) and LLM (Large Language Model) to communicate and interact with humans in the forms of chatbots. Other forms of machine learning AI analyze massive datasets that have been fed into it and use pattern recognition to generate insights in response to the question being asked or the job being done.

Oftentimes AI marketing is used to speed up the processing of data, such as digital marketing analytics, to help companies see which of their efforts are the most effective and how they can be optimized. For others, it is used to help do tasks that would otherwise require more staff than a company could handle, such as using AI powered chatbots to handle basic communications with customers.

This collection of artificial intelligence marketing tools is growing every day. Every company will need to determine which of these tools will be the most effective for their specific uses. Full-service marketing agencies such as ComboApp are great for helping to navigate these questions and put the right tools to use for their clients.

Why Use AI In Digital Marketing

We now know what AI is when it comes to marketing and how it can be used, but why would a company want to use AI as a part of their digital marketing strategies? The simple and most obvious answer is that not using it could put you at a disadvantage to the competition. There are certainly more reasons than that though, and we are going to be addressing a few of them.

First, let's look at how the digital marketing landscape has been changed by AI and Machine Learning.

How AI Has Reshaped Digital Marketing

You really cannot overstate how much AI is reshaping digital marketing. On many of the world’s biggest websites, from Amazon to Netflix, all are running AI in some capacity for marketing and customer interaction. Most of these are not even noticed by consumers and are just a seamless part of the shopping or browsing experience. When you are browsing Netflix and it recommends movies you might like, this is AI at work. They use machine learning to analyze your behavior on the site, the content you watch, and then recommend things to you that will increase your time on the app. Amazon uses Ai for recommendations too, but they also use it for initial chat interactions to help solve problems that might not need an agent.

AI powered marketing could be driving around 45% of the global economy by 2030, and the uses we are talking about are just a few of the ways AI is being integrated into everyday digital marketing. There is hardly a moment of our online experience that goes by without having some kind of interaction with AI. Businesses are using AI for optimizing advertising, generating content, optimizing their social media posts, and gaining insights on customer behavior in order to offer products they are most likely to be interested in.

With businesses large and small taking advantage of these AI marketing tools, it makes it increasingly important to make AI part of any promotional strategy. While a human powered marketing team is always important, to be competitive that team needs AI tools to increase their productivity and results. The augmentations offered by AI driven marketing allow for processing and analyzing data with a speed and accuracy that humans cannot do alone. AI also allows for more efficient customer service via chatbots and email marketing optimizations.

Specific Uses Of AI For Marketing

When it comes to this massive reshaping of the digital marketing landscape, there are some areas that stand out as benefiting the most from machine learning in marketing. Any AI marketing strategy should start with the marketing channels that benefit your specific business the most and augment your existing efforts. However, if your existing strategy is missing a marketing channel that was being put off due to lacking the staff or skills to properly execute it, then it might be appropriate to look into how AI marketing tools might help you bridge that gap. Here are some areas of digital marketing most impacted by AI:

• PPC Advertising - One area that can be very valuable for using AI in advertising is PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns. AI tools like ChatGPT can help you to create optimal keyword lists, put keywords into classification groups, and even to create ad headlines for your campaign.

These tools are excellent for helping your marketing team to put together the most efficient keywords and phrases, as well as finding the right target audience for your campaigns. Ai can analyze the behavior of users that meet a specific market segment, and then tailor ads to reach them more effectively.

Another advantage of using AI in PPC advertising is when it comes to keyword bidding as well as optimizing the placement and scheduling of your ads. You can use these tools to analyze data to adjust your keyword bids in real time. AI bid optimization will let you create more efficient campaigns by managing and adjusting your bids based on factors that include budget, competitiveness, market trends, user behavior, conversions, and more.

These AI powered tools will also let you optimize when your ads run based on user behavior, and which platforms are best to run ads on at specific times.

• Social Media Marketing - Social media is another excellent venue for the use of AI in marketing. The most obvious use is to use these tools for analyzing and optimizing your social media campaigns. Much like with PPC campaigns, Ai can be used to manage your advertising spends on different platforms, as well as monitoring the sentiment around your brand.

Beyond ad and post optimizations, AI can be incredibly useful for generating different kinds of social media content. For instance, ChatGPT and similar tools can help you come up with engaging captions for your videos or image content. Of course, there are even AI tools that can help you to create entire images with AI as well. You can also use one of the language model AI’s to write social media content that is optimized to your keywords and audience.

If you are fresh out of ideas for social media posts, you can even have ChatGPT help you come up with content ideas by telling it what you are trying to market and who you are trying to market to. With the right prompts, your advertising department could find itself mining content ideas that never would have come up in a normal meeting.

• SEO and Content - When it comes to SEO, the benefits of AI have some similarities to Pay Per Click campaigns. This is due to the importance of keywords to both forms of marketing. However, PPC campaigns use AI to analyze keywords for optimizing advertising bids, while in an organic SEO campaign you are optimizing content and how keywords are used within it. The goal is to find and use the optimal keywords in your content to improve your search engine rankings.

AI can be used for making and enhancing content as well. Marketers can ask a tool such as ChatGPT and ask it to create content on a certain subject and using optimized keywords. Of course, an experienced content writer should double check the copy and refine it to sound more human. The chatbot can also help your writers come up with optimal headings and meta tags.

By analyzing user behavior using AI advertising tools, you can have a website with content that is geared towards your audience to help increase their engagement. These tools will also help you to get your content marketing strategy optimized for newer types of search such as voice search and image search.

• Email Marketing - Email marketing is a tool that is vital to digital promotion. While automation has been a common trend in email marketing for years, AI is helping to revolutionize this field. Email campaigns benefit from data-driven marketing, and some of the best uses of AI for email marketing will involve collecting and using data.

The combination of AI marketing automation for emails, with skilled human writers, will allow you to provide customers with a personalized yet human experience. Ai tools can let your brand benefit from customer data and behavior, using that information properly to determine the type of content that will engage your audience and the optimal times to reach out to them. Everything from the right subject lines to get customers to click, to the right products to market to them.

Your business can save a lot of money and time by refining your email strategy. Using AI marketing automation for email will get your campaigns rolling in ways that are likely to give you some of the best ROI of any strategic use for AI marketing.

• Customer Experience - We have already seen some examples of how AI can improve user experience in everything from content to email marketing. However, these tools can also be used to improve the customer experience in other areas as well.

One of the best examples is AI powered chatbots. Customers have questions. Sometimes those questions are simple, like needing information about shipping, returns, or other requests. Other questions are more complex and require a more human touch. Ai chatbots will let you have a bot that will answer those simple requests for customers, and route more complex questions to the right departments.

These chatbots can also be set up to initiate contact with customers after spending a set amount of time on your website, or looking at a particular product. These kind of bots are great for lead generation as well as keeping customers happy. They provide you with a customer support solution that is available 24/7, and they let your customers know they are being listened to.

• Personalization - Personalization works into many of the above marketing strategies as well. AI lets you customize dynamic content for your customers based on their identity, shopping habits, likes, needs, and other behaviors. A website like Amazon is a great example, where every time you look at the site or app you are greeted by items that are most likely to get you to click and make a purchase.

By using customer data to personalize your content, emails, social media posts, and communications, you increase conversions and ensure customer satisfaction.

• Reputation Management - Few things are as important to your brand as its reputation. Now more than ever brands are under a magnifying glass and you do not want to end up having to clean up from a brand mistake if you can control it.

AI reputation management tools can help your advertising team to monitor for any negative sentiments, allowing you to make adjustments to improve customer experience. These tools can also help you to avoid partnering with the wrong influencers, involvement with the wrong event, or other missteps that could cost you both in terms of esteem and finances.

AI And The Future Of Digital Marketing

Predicting the future is hard, especially when it comes to technology. The moment you make a prediction, the next day there are breakthroughs that end up changing everything. What we can do is look at the present and see what is on the horizon, and make some educated guesses based on that information.

Overall, AI is going to continue to be a vital tool for marketing teams. These are a few specific areas to watch in the near future.

Machine Learning Refinement

One of the best bets in AI is that machine learning marketing tools will continue to improve and generate benefits for brands. The ability to extract data, analyze it, and put it into use in your promotional efforts is useful to every business. The machine learning models are being trained on more data every day, and the algorithms that they use will increase in their refinement and accuracy.

Machine learning will also improve language models and tools such as ChatGPT, making their output more accurate.

Regulations

Regulatory bodies all across the world are already looking into AI for its possible risks and impacts. Privacy concerns, bias, impact on employment, and limitations on the data used to train the models are all potential areas of regulation.

Don’t let this discourage you from the use of artificial intelligence tools. Keeping an eye on the news will let you know what tools might fall under regulation, and the companies that run the tools will usually be ahead of the curve on making adjustments to their products.

New Job Roles

AI and marketing jobs are going to find themselves merging in various ways. For example, content writers will learn how to write AI prompts to help them generate content ideas or even whole articles. All areas of digital marketing will be impacted and proper use of AI tools will become a requirement for many job roles, while other job roles will be created just for managing AI tools.

Conclusion

The use of AI in marketing is becoming an important tool for every business. With the use of these tools becoming ubiquitous, if a brand is looking to keep up in the marketplace they will need to begin to integrate AI into their strategies. Having marketers on your team with knowledge of how to effectively put these AI tools to use will make sure that your brand doesn’t fall behind.

A full service marketing agency who are experts in digital transformation can get you started on the right foot when it comes to your AI marketing efforts. ComboApp is one such agency, and we are ready to put AI tools to use across your marketing stack.