How do we leverage Artificial Intelligence in marketing? Have you been deliberating on this recently? Or are you unknowingly using AI without even realizing it?

New-age technologies such as AI have revolutionized every domain and marketing is no different. With marketing at the cusp of its change, we uncover the role of AI and its implications on marketing in this blog.

Read on to know how AI is bringing modern marketer’s mission to reality.

What is AI and types of AI

Artificial Intelligence is a computer program that mimics human intelligence. There are two forms of AI - Pure AI and Pragmatic AI. Pure AI is a process of building machines that have equal or better cognition than humans who created them in the first place. You might have seen them in SciFi movies :)

Pragmatic AI is a set of AI technologies that consists of Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing. They are designed to deliver specific business value. We are already a beneficiary of pragmatic AI in different ways - autotype, spell checkers, personal virtual assistants, navigation maps and the list goes on.

The Role of AI in Marketing

AI will enable marketers to make better decisions and enhance the overall marketing effectiveness. Let’s take a deep dive on various marketing functions, the current challenges and the role AI can play to make marketing more intelligent.

Content Creation & Curation

Content is at the core of any marketing strategy. Whether it is ad creative, email or website - there is nothing like the content that connects with your target audience.

With the rise in demand for hyper-personalized content, content creation process had become a tedious task for marketers. The entire journey of choosing a topic, searching keywords, content format (either in blog, video, infographic, podcast), the content publication (website, Facebook, Twitter) and then mapping all of this with buyer personas is both time and resource-intensive.

Besides, there is neither a proper mechanism to do a content audit nor understand the performance of various content strategies and initiatives. It’s very difficult to attribute a particular content piece directly to marketing ROI leave alone to obtain data-driven feedback.

There are already a few tools for content creation in the form of brainstorming through HubSpot’s Blog Idea Generator, BuzzSumo, Feedly, SEMrush, CoSchedule. This would fall under the bucket of Natural Language Processing (NLP) wherein the tools help you with content ideation, content popularity, content prioritization among others.

Onboard AI, and witness content intelligence platforms powered by Natural Language Generation (NLG) at work. Quill, Wordsmith, Articoolo, WordAI are some of the next-gen content writing platforms that marketers can thrive on to develop targeted content for various marketing campaigns.

Tools such as PathFactory are solving the challenges in B2B buyer’s journey with micro-personalized content thus enabling buyers’ to make purchases faster. Vennli, another AI-fueled content intelligence platform, helps you see the world through customers’ eyes by creating killer content for every persona across the buyer’s stage of the journey.  

With content overload both for the producer (organizations, marketers) and the consumer (buyers and prospects), Content Profiling plays an instrumental role in streamlining the content strategy. AI can take complete stock of your content on the website, outdated blog posts etc to understand the performance and the impact on customers.

Email Marketing

Owing to a cost-effective and highly successful approach, Email marketing has been an integral weapon in a marketer’s armoury. But email marketers in their constant search for relevance, face a lot of questions - what content should we choose for the campaign, which email segment should we target, what time and day are the best to send an email and finally, did the mail make it to prospect’s inbox?

Content Selection

Content is of paramount importance for any email. Some of the features that are on offer by AI are Subject line optimization which helps you choose the best words that will make a great subject line based on the previous mail history and list of spam words that can be avoided. 

Body copy optimization is another feature that can be personalized on the go depending upon the recipient's past behaviour. AI can uncover user engagement with an email that may not be perceived manually to a naked eye. 

Check out Phrasee, an AI-powered copywriting tool for your email subject lines, preheaders, headlines, Call to Action (CTA) and many more.

Smart Segmentation

Marketers typically segment the lists based on the firmographic data. With the support of AI, you will be able to better profile the data and take the leap to send hyper-personalized emails with the focus on ‘Segment of One’. Every journey is uniquely curated factoring the needs of individual users.

Delivery Optimization

Imagine a situation wherein you send a cold email to a prospect. There are high chances that it might go to Junk or Promotions tab depending upon the email application [Outlook or Gmail]. Unless and until your email is opened in the particular tab, it is safe to presume that the next email of your nurture campaign will not go to the Inbox.

What if I were to say that using AI, your email will exactly land when the user is checking for emails at a particular point of time? Assume Jack checks his mail every morning at 7 AM. Your email lands exactly at 7. Bingo! It is Send time optimization to your rescue to boost the ROI of email campaigns. Email service providers can leverage AI/ML to optimize mail delivery and increase their overall reputation.

Domain/IP Warmup is a common technique used to improve the domain reputation. Though this is not in control of the marketer, AI can be used to ensure that Internet Service Providers such as Google, Yahoo do not slow down the acceptance rate of the emails. These key inputs will help the marketer to calibrate the email strategy.

Workflows, Automation Logic, A/B Testing

Welcome emailers, free trial sign-ups, cart abandonment, form submissions, internal sales rep notifications, trigger-based workflows (payment reminder, ebook download) are some of the common workflows that marketers use for engaging their contacts. These workflows might have been manually set up or come as a built-in template with marketing automation tools used by marketers. 

Creating an automatic logic for the nurture campaign is a tedious process. Assuming various scenarios, conditions, user behaviour, and mapping email with the corresponding content take a lot of time. Add A/B testing to it and a marketer’s productivity takes a serious hit. 

AI can help create more sophisticated automated workflows by tracking behaviours, event and customizing email messages paving the path for lead conversion. AI platforms can quickly identify trends, highlight key differences in the A/B campaigns allowing marketers to channelize their creative energies on other activities. 

See how Rasa.io allows a marketer to send a personalized newsletter for every subscriber. 

As per Forrester Research, companies that use AI in email marketing can gain up to $1.2 trillion per annum from those who do not. Trust you would want to fall under the category of former companies.

Social Media Marketing 

The role of social media marketers is more like a journalist. Though this applies for every kind of marketer, it applies more for social media marketing specialists. They scout dozens of websites such as LinkedIn to check out the content and also act as a brand custodian in channels such as Glassdoor. From Social Listening to Sentiment Analysis, they must have done it all.

Most of the marketing tools are equipped with social listening and sentiment analysis capabilities. But some AI companies are turning heads. One of them is Cortex with a feature of Social AI. The tool exactly knows what to post and when to post, taking the guesswork out of the equation.

Search Engine Optimization

They say that some of the best-kept secrets are on Page 2 of Google. Well, how often do you go and check the second page while searching for something online? No wonder, ranking on Page 1 is a priority for all. But with voice search revolutionizing the SEO landscape, website content optimization has taken paramount importance. Voice search in itself is fueled by AI to provide relevant searches for user queries.

BrightEdge gives a perfect mix of search intent discovery, optimized content creation, and performance measurement into one single tool. Frase uses website content to answer visitors’ questions to improve SEO and drive conversions. Twinword is the first AI-powered keyword research tool that uses smart filters to narrow down the keywords search, user intent, topics or patterns. MarketMuse, helps you outdo the competition by predicting content success, crafting better content, and creating content faster. 

Hope that some of the above use-cases have inspired you to consider AI in your marketing strategy. What are you waiting for? Add AI to your marketing armoury and enjoy the marketing success that you have always wished for.