Marketing Artificial Intelligence — Applications and Challenges

Marketing is one of the key business functions where AI could have the greatest effect, as its core functions involve understanding customer needs, matching them with products and services and persuading customers to buy , capabilities AI can significantly enhance.

The most important aspects of implementing AI in marketing is planning, and setting expectations with the stakeholders involved. These are some of the areas to note before embracing AI:

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer relationship management (CRM) is an umbrella term that includes the processes, strategies and technological tools that help businesses successfully engage with their customers and improve the customer experience for maximum expansion of any business regardless of size and industry.

CRM platforms enable sales and marketing professionals to record and save customer profiles and purchase data, gaining a unique understanding of the customer behaviors for providing highly customized experiences to their customers. They can use this data to optimize sales strategies and find customer pain points.

It’s now smart CRM software that automatically automates tasks such as data entry and lead or service case routing. It can even figure out and interpret customers’ upcoming needs or wants – increasing the number of opportunities you have for savvy, relevant responses! Salesforce, HubSpot, etc both have AI-enabled chatbots, next best recommendations, and predictive analytics — making customer experience more seamless and everyone more efficient.

Chatbots

Digital marketers that include chatbots in marketing can engage with customers when they make purchases, gain insights into customer needs, and navigate complicated purchase scenarios better, which in turn drives lead generation and sales conversions.

Chatbots offer customers valuable customer support when the customers have a question related to the products, service, and more. Some chatbots respond quickly and are relatively simple to operate, but others employ machine learning algorithms to constantly learn and evolve.

Marketers will want to carefully consider what they’ll be working with these tools on and the end-goals they’re trying to achieve with technology. When selecting platforms and programs based on features – such as AI chatbots that learn questions of users, like “What is this product’s benefit?” and can get users connected to a rep if they need them – marketers can make the most of the tools available.

Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics uses statistical algorithm and machine learning technology for predicting the past to predict the future — trends, user behaviour, campaign results, etc. It gives businesses a tool to make them ahead of any event or difficulty, and prevents the business from collapse under the weight of unforeseen circumstances or business disruption.

It’s a tool that allows businesses to find high-value customers, segment consumers, optimise marketing campaigns and drive higher profits by tailoring the messaging to users.

Online fashion retailers might employ predictive analytics to detect their most valuable customers – say, men between the ages of 35-50 who are interested in sustainable fashion – and use this information to make it easier for them to purchase something on the website.

Predictive analytics has practical applications in lifesaving, for example, for detecting the earliest physiological symptom of an allergic response to save lives faster than any human could. They can even prompt a life-threatening injection of epinephrine. And predictive analytics is also invaluable in reducing cost, safety, and risks in sectors such as energy, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing banking, and security.

Content Creation

It is hard for most marketing teams to draw valuable insights from this vast amount of data. It is AI’s job to take care of this by weeding through terabytes of data in a matter of seconds – predicting, designing actionable intelligence for the next steps and offering content recommendations.

AI is the opportunity in marketing, by allowing marketers to uncover their customers’ desires and buying habits to present the best relevant ads for your target demographic that convert. Propensity modelling gives us this power.

Thanks to this technology, marketers are no longer wasting hours on non-essential activities but can instead focus their energy on creating efficient campaigns and impressing bosses with a quantifiable ROI. AI frees up your staff to focus on important projects like market research, competitor research, customer survey analysis, and real-time analytics; and designing actionable, scalable and dynamic marketing campaigns.