Importance of artificial intelligence in marketing and solutions for your business

This article was originally published on 17/11/2021

Managing several marketing initiatives and social media schedules simultaneously can be challenging for companies. Collecting uncategorised data for marketing insights can consume work hours that could be better spent doing more complex tasks. This is where the importance of artificial intelligence in marketing can be felt, particularly when it comes to digital marketing. 

This article will explore the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in digital marketing and how this could help companies scale up their marketing initiatives and customer reach.

How is AI in marketing changing the industry? 

Digital marketing operations are mostly concerned with promoting products, brands, and other related activities through digital platforms. These platforms include social media apps, websites, and online retail stores.

Many businesses try to allocate part of their workday to designing campaigns, strategising policies to enhance sales and improving customer experience. 

However, it may not be easy to perform all these tasks manually. This is why Digital Marketing in AI can be important, and businesses can leverage the role of artificial intelligence in marketing by using these solutions to improve their operations.  

Imagine a furniture business that has employed a robot to perform specific tasks. Some of these errands include implementing approved furniture designs, communicating with clients, announcing new offers to potential customers, and assessing the cost of materials and resources. 

Now picture such a robot doing the same in digital marketing —designing marketing campaigns and building email subscription lists, among other tasks. Businesses —particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)— could benefit from the use of artificial intelligence in marketing initiatives. 

What tools can aid AI in digital marketing for UK SMEs?

Often, businesses perceive the use of AI solutions as limited to data analytics. However, the importance of AI in marketing goes beyond tracking present and future patterns of customer behaviour. 

AI-powered processes may have potentially enabled companies to integrate new features that can speed up productivity and performance in their marketing operations.

Given the numerous applications of AI in marketing, we have listed some popular artificial intelligence marketing tools for UK SMEs. 

Chatbots 

Some companies are integrating chatbots as part of their artificial intelligence marketing solutions. Chatbots and Conversational AI platforms enable customers to communicate with businesses online using graphics, voice messages, and text messages over websites, mobile applications, and phone calls. 

Already used in many areas, such as in healthcare through the use of telemedicine, chatbots offer data and take feedback, which could help automate quick decision-making. Prompt responses to customer queries could also help companies improve customer loyalty —and, in turn— widen the scope for digital marketing. In addition, the feedback received from such chatbots could aid in creating data-driven marketing initiatives.

Shelf-edge labels

AI technologies can help businesses understand customer decisions and requirements based on digital shelf-edge labels. These shelf-edge labels collect details related to product ingredients, components, barcodes, prices, and more through digital tags. With this process in place, companies can potentially understand the preferences and needs of customers in greater detail and make predictions about their future purchase decisions, thereby helping them craft better-informed and focused digital marketing campaigns.

Robotic process automation 

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a productivity tool that enables the configuration of robots or bots to offer automated solutions. AI solutions such as robotic process automation could enable businesses to collate important data from various systems and devices efficiently, unlike manual processes, which could take hours or even days. This can help companies save time and navigate through the collected data, aiding in formulating future digital marketing strategies.

Business process automation 

Business process automation (BPA) enables the automation of various business functions and processes, such as data management and assessment, using advanced AI-enabled technologies. Such solutions could enable businesses to cast a wide net in their marketing strategies —such as business-to-business (B2B) email marketing— by automating tasks such as assessing, monitoring, and developing marketing campaigns. This could also help them identify non-responders on digital platforms, as well as improve their reach among respondents.

Machine learning 

Machine learning is a set of instructions comprising various technologies used for learning behaviour patterns and generating insights based on existing information. Machine learning for marketing could help businesses improve customer engagement and provide cognitive insights —the concept of assessing insights and self-reflective perceptions to offer improved awareness regarding a situation. This could potentially help them automatically track recurring customer patterns and design their digital marketing strategies based on age, interests, and income, to name a few metrics.

Predictive analytics

Marketing teams can use predictive analytics to determine future outcomes and uncover potentially profitable action paths via the extraction and analysis of data from their sales, customer actions, and overall business performance. By combining data mining, big data, machine learning and business intelligence, marketing teams can get better insights when it comes to decision-making. 

What are the benefits of artificial intelligence marketing solutions?

A clear question that most marketing departments may ask is, “how is digital marketing AI important?”

AI-enabled processes could help businesses by providing automated solutions for performing routine and repetitive tasks and also help pilot smarter marketing strategies based on analysing customer behaviour and purchase decisions. We will now list some advantages to show how AI can improve marketing.

1. Helps in utilising predictive analytics

As the importance of artificial intelligence in marketing may be gaining ground, companies could potentially benefit from adopting it. AI technology uses a series of statistical techniques, including machine learning, data mining, and predictive modelling (a statistical model that helps predict outcomes). With predictive data analytics, businesses can likely improve their real-time decision-making through historical and current data analysis. This way, they can translate customer behaviours and preferences into actionable insights and incorporate them into their digital marketing initiatives.

2. Aids in enabling personalisation

Understanding customer preferences is usually not just limited to purchase behaviours. Companies are realising the importance of AI as it could help in tracking browsing histories and creating a list of websites visited by customers, which could help businesses level up their marketing game via the use of targeted ads. These recommendations can potentially be integrated with their marketing automation platform and shared with customers through multiple channels, including emails, social media, and messaging platforms.

3. Helps with segmenting data

The importance of artificial intelligence may have intensified across industries as the need for categorising data persists. With the use of AI-enabled tools, data sets can be analysed and segmented or categorised efficiently, which would further help businesses personalise the customer marketing experience and tailor digital marketing strategies in alignment with the insights and feedback they receive.

4. Tracks the behaviour of leads

Companies are likely to understand the importance of artificial intelligence in marketing as it can potentially identify relevant channels for their target market. This technology could enable marketing teams to send messages on these channels —on the basis of the behaviour of their leads or potential customers— on apps for mobile devices and desktops, emails, and websites.

5. Assists in improving advertising campaigns

Artificial intelligence in marketing and advertising can help uncover trends and customer insights. AI programs can help marketing teams personalise and automate their PPC campaigns, uncover advertising channels and opportunities being used by the competition, and some software can even assist ad copywriters in drafting their PPC content. 

How is artificial intelligence shaping the future of marketing?

As the need to crunch data persists to improve outcomes, the use of AI-powered tools can help businesses enhance their marketing performance. AI is potentially gaining ground as a catalyst for growth in digital marketing as it has widened the scope of improving the customer experience and understanding their behaviours and patterns.

AI technology can help marketers spot and predict future trends. They can then use these data insights to make decisions, allocate budgets and know who to target. 

Marketing teams will be able to use AI to help them improve their product recommendations on their websites by using these technologies to better understand their customers and make real-time decisions and hyper-personalisation to ensure their products are localised and focused on what their customers want.