Artificial Intelligence (or AI) is a buzzword that gets thrown around in many different fields. Marketing and advertising are two of the latest to be innovated with new AI technology, and much of it is reshaping the way marketers examine and reach everyday customers.
Some of the most innovative companies in the world have utilized AI to increase their exposure, find their audience, and better optimize their budgets. A great example of AI’s infinite capabilities are Amazon’s retargeted web ads—If you’ve ever shopped on Amazon.com then browsed the web, you’ll probably notice advertisements in the sidebar, or in your social media feeds, for deals on products you were just viewing. These ads are automatically targeted by Amazon AI, and have been extremely effective in increasing sales. Taking it a step further, Amazon has plans to use AI technology to send customers samples of new products they might considering purchasing.
AI marketing capabilities are not limited to large corporations. In our modern tech age, any business has the means to use some of the world’s most advanced AI and machine learning. Various new platforms provide features such as optimized ad targeting, chatbots, automation, and data-based advertising to bring the power of AI directly to small and mid-sized businesses. In this blog, we’ll take a look at some invaluable AI that small businesses can use every day to advance their enterprise and streamline their services.
AI Optimized PPC Advertisements
If you’ve run Facebook ads for your business, you may already be using AI. Facebook advertisements use a “learning phase” to analyze your audience’s behavior upon viewing your ad. An algorithm sorts the viewers and begins to distinguish patterns in their behavior to better direct future ads.
Facebook understands and caters its ad tools to the needs of its largest customer base — small to midsize businesses. Their AI advertising platform is constantly improving to better serve beginner-level users and optimize any-sized budgets. Via the machine learning data captured in the learning process, any business can find the best audience for their digital marketing strategy, dramatically reducing their CPC (cost per click) and providing invaluable feedback on the behavior of potential customers.
Another commonly used PPC ad platform is Google Ads. Google competes with Facebook through new and improved machine learning advertising tools. We recently wrote about how Responsive Search Ads and Ad Strength use AI technology to help advertisers optimize their ads. With the power of AI to help optimize both ad verbiage and placement, novice marketers can achieve high-caliber results.
AI-Powered Content Creation
Some AI platforms have the ability to orchestrate creative tasks such as content creation and email follow ups.
Tools like HubSpot’s Content Strategy tool use machine learning to help marketers discover new content ideas that perform well and validate those content ideas in the most efficient way possible. They can sweep the web to identify hot topics people are engaging with and make recommendations on topics to write on.
Other AI Content Creation tools can read your content and make recommendations for SEO keywords, or even determine whether the language is in line with your brand voice and style guidelines.
Marketing Automation Platforms and Predictive Analytics
Data-driven marketing automation platforms can help a business achieve just about anything they’re willing to invest the time and money into. According to an article in Entrepreneur magazine:
AI allows marketers to engage new customers who match their existing customer profiles more efficiently. Customers’ interests, buying habits, and past interactions can be combined to give sales teams a vast pool of data to analyze and filter down to likely targets. This allows marketing to be more efficient and enables companies to build highly-targeted content.
Online video streaming giant, Netflix, employs AI-powered predictive analytics. Using AI paired with their own data, the company presents image thumbnails next to movie choices, based on what it thinks you are most likely to click on. The thumbnails differ depending on the viewer and cater to the subconscious of a browsing consumer.
AI-powered marketing automation platforms can also help with predictive lead scoring, voice and visual search, and even integrate with 3rd party platforms to bring greater efficiency in your business’ processes. For example, e-commerce platforms can streamline their shipping logistics, smart CRM’s help agents easily contact clients, and customer service can be automated to save time and resources.
Chatbots
Chatbots are a great way to engage with customers directly before even meeting. With a small bit of code installed on a webpage, any business can harness the power of AI customer engagement. Many chatbots have the ability to answer questions, collect personal information, conduct inquiries, and even schedule appointments. In this regard, an AI chatbot can act as a stand-in agent to a savvy customer on your website no matter what time they visit. This type of innovation can add infinite flexibility to a sales workflow, saving countless hours and keeping online engagements organized and updated.
With these tools, you can level the playing field and begin to utilize AI to meet your business objectives. Utilizing AI will keep your business competitive in the emerging data-driven economy.