In 2022, it’s no surprise that marketing teams are using all sorts of tools to help them stay competitive. While some use planning tools, others choose solutions to optimize ad campaigns. Either way, there’s often a secret ingredient that separates the best from the rest - artificial intelligence. But how do you utilize this new technology effectively? How do you get the best ROI?
What’s Artificial Intelligence in Marketing?
In short, artificial intelligence is the term used to describe any type of technology that has been designed to complete tasks in a way that a human normally would. In the world of marketing, we’re talking about optimizing ad campaigns and talking to customers rather than opening cupboards and making dinner for us.
Depending on the tool in question, you might find that an AI tool uses technology like machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to better perform tasks.
Benefits of Using AI in Marketing
While this all sounds fancy and cool, you might ask why this is necessary. The marketing world has survived for many decades without AI, so why should you invest in this technology now? Well, the truth is that there has never been more pressure on marketing teams than right now. They’re expected to run optimized ad campaigns across social and search channels, introduce email marketing campaigns, and perform a million and one other tasks each day.
As a result, marketing teams are overrun, and many professionals are leaving the industry because of the pressure on their shoulders. With AI, marketers breathe a sigh of relief as mundane tasks are completed automatically. With the right tools, your business can eliminate a huge percentage of its to-do list simply by using AI tools.
Elsewhere, AI often improves the customer experience, boosts performance metrics, reduces costs, increases the productivity of marketing employees, and leads to higher revenue. But how?
Best Ways to Use AI in Marketing
Optimize Ad Automation
Of all the tasks that you must do today, which is the most cumbersome and stressful? Most marketers will point to social media advertising because the optimization process is so difficult. You need to review analytics, test different variables, and continually adjust campaigns to see what works and what doesn’t. The beauty of artificial intelligence is that it can partner with machine learning to do everything automatically.
As an example, Trapica is one of the best tools in the field. Once integrated with your social channels, the advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms monitor all your social media campaigns and optimize as soon as an opportunity arises. This includes the following areas:
All the things that used to take hours of your time per week are now performed automatically. Over time, you’ll notice that all the metrics shine brighter, and you’ve generated a healthy return on your investment. The reason we decided to highlight Trapica is that you can integrate this tool with all the big social and search channels including Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Google, and many more.
Google Analytics Intelligence
You might use Google Analytics, but do you use the Intelligence feature? Often, marketers and businesses are surprised that it even exists. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning offers all the answers you could possibly want regarding your Google ad campaigns. And, by ask, we mean literally ask.
Like an analyst, you’ll directly ask questions to the intelligence tool, and it will provide the answers. For example, you might want to ask where your traffic originates, why the bounce rate is going up, how conversion rates differ between organic search and referrals, and even what share of sessions are from one gender.
After asking a question, the tool will bring up the relevant data. Suddenly, those who found Google Analytics to be somewhat inaccessible will be sitting with a smile. Rather than wading through all the irrelevant metrics, you see exactly what matters by asking AI.
Personalization
This year, the importance of personalization will reign supreme. But how do you personalize when you don’t know your audience? Tools like Helixa and Trapica aim to remove this dilemma with advanced audience discovery tools.
With artificial intelligence leading the way, you’ll learn all about the people who interact with the brand most prominently. This includes demographics, location, interests, behaviors, and other important information. The more you learn about your audience, the easier it becomes to home in on certain characteristics and behaviors when creating content such as ad campaigns.
Why go through all the metrics yourself when you can introduce Trapica and let AI do all the hard work? Don’t forget, this is the same tool that automatically optimizes ad campaigns, so you’re cutting your workload down even further by taking advantage of both features.
Copywriting
Next up, we have a solution for all those who detest any form of writing. While we don’t recommend AI for any form of emotive writing, and we don’t advise solely relying on AI to write your content, tools of this nature can reduce the time that you spend writing significantly. For example, tools like Anyword will use AI to generate the following:
Once AI has developed copy, you can then spend some time refining it and tailoring it to your audience. While AI doesn’t create perfect copy, it can get your initial ideas down onto the page, and this can save lots of time. Now, you’re proofreading and making small edits rather than writing everything from scratch.
With AI and machine learning, these tools will learn the type of content that you prefer and create content about a specific topic. As mentioned, you won’t want to rely on AI alone, but it removes one of the most resource-intensive tasks from the process.
Google Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs)
As you’ll know, traditional campaigns work by performing keyword research, choosing the right keywords, and then creating an ad and landing page to reach out to this audience. With DSAs, the process works in the opposite way.
If you choose to launch Google Dynamic Search Ads, you’ll start with the landing pages. Essentially, you show Google the landing pages that you want people to click through to and Google works out the rest. After using artificial intelligence to scan the landing page, Google will select the right keywords to get people to the landing page before then also generating effective ad headlines.
Imagine this - you just show Google the landing page and the platform does the rest. We know what some people are thinking: ‘we tried DSAs before and it didn’t work well’. In the early days of DSAs, lots of campaign managers were turned off from this feature due to poor performance. However, you’ll be glad to hear that Google has made significant improvements. Therefore, it’s worth another attempt this year. When everything works well, you’ll improve your CPA while also saving lots of time for your marketing team.
Additionally, we should note that there’s a difference between responsive search ads and dynamic search ads. While RSAs create dynamic ads on your behalf, DSAs actually go further thanks to the advanced AI.
Chatbots
Finally, we can’t help but mention chatbots when they are so valuable for not only the business but also the customer experience. At first, businesses shy away from AI and machine learning chatbots because they think it will worsen the customer experience. However, you might be surprised to hear that nearly 70% of people in a recent survey admitted to liking chatbots because of the quick answers they get.
At the moment, you probably rely on replying to every comment, message, and email from customers. Wouldn’t it make your life infinitely easier if an AI chatbot handled the simple requests automatically? Once again, machine learning plays an important role because the technology learns how to better interact with people over time. If it can’t answer a question, it will pass the person onto your customer service team. However, the fact that the AI chatbot can answer many questions means that fewer calls make it through to the team.
Even at 2am, customers who can’t sleep and have grabbed their phone to do some shopping in bed are accommodated. They can open the chatbot, ask a question, and get an answer. With this, they’re more likely to stick with your brand and place an order (rather than going elsewhere!). Meanwhile, your customer service team has more time to deal with other tasks and requests.
Which form of AI will you implement this year? Naturally, the businesses that benefit most from AI are the ones that use various forms. For example, you can combine AI chatbots with automatic ad optimization. Suddenly, you will have so much free time that you’ll wonder why you didn’t implement AI sooner!
