Artificial Intelligence is being used heavily in the marketing world as we speak. From B2C companies using machine learning to better enhance their customers experience with them to B2B companies using it to predict their marketing results. We are fast moving into a world where AI and marketing go hand in hand. Here, we take a look at the key benefits of implementing AI into your marketing strategies.
7 Benefits of AI in Marketing
Artificial Intelligence, Predictive Insights, Machine Learning. Call it what you want. It’s here to stay. And it’s only going to make our job, as marketers, easier and much more efficient.
Here, we take a look at the key benefits of implementing AI into your marketing strategies.
1. Automatic Lead Scoring
Using your existing Marketing Automation tools and data, AI will rank your leads based on likelihood to convert. As well as saving tonnes of time it’s a way of relieving the pressure to generate enough qualified prospects for sales. Leaving your lead scoring up to a machine inevitably gives marketers the ability to qualify leads in a more accurate, smarter and faster fashion. This then enables you to optimise your marketing efforts to attract similar prospects attention. After all, we are hardcore advocates of working smarter not harder.
2. Data Segmentation
As marketers, we all know the benefits of data segmenting. We also know how long and strenuous it can be when you are trying to achieve a number of different goals and variances. However, with AI, you can analyse multiple datasets quickly, giving you the insight to learn unique qualifiers about each of your contacts that you wouldn’t see from a human perspective. Allowing you to personalise each of these datasets to within an inch of its life.
3. Advanced Personalisation
Sifting through this data at the speed and accuracy AI does also opens up the doors to a better understanding of your previous customer journeys. From start to finish. Without having to personally delve into hours’ worth of conversations and website analytics, you can discover customer attitudes and behaviours. Making personalising your marketing, for lead generation and customer engagement, a walk in the park. Combined with your Marketing Automation tool you can set up predictive and automated journeys to deliver the most appropriate and tailored message to respective contacts in real time.
4. Betting understanding of leads behaviour
An AI integrated marketing automation solution will not only give you visibility of more channels relevant to your target market that you may not have been utilising before, it will also allow you to track actions of your individuals across these channels. This allows us, as marketers, to move on from basic data segmentation to sending triggered communications based on leads actions and behaviours elsewhere. Compiling a leads actions across multiple channels such as website, mobile, email, social media, AI will capture actions and create a knowledge of each leads interests and preferences.
5. Personalising leads user experience
And by personalising we don’t just mean adding in the persons first name to all communications and passing it off as personalised marketing. We mean on a much larger scale. Using AI to track interests, preferences and behaviours of your leads means a whole new revolution of personalising your marketing. Think about product recommendations on retail websites such as Amazon. Using AI, Amazon learns individual’s product preferences based on their previous browsing and purchasing history, creating a whole pool of ‘recommending products’ for each individual visitor. Integrating this into your marketing automation platform means you can send out similar recommended material via multiple different channels: email, SMS, social.
6. Multichannel Reach
We may think we are already doing this. Using a marketing automation platform means exposure to a multitude of marketing channels: email, social media, SMS, live chat messenger etc. AI plays a part in optimising your multichannel reach further, which is particularly important in this day and age as we are a hardcore digital era, using multiple channels to search our favourite brands. It’s sometimes hard to know which channel to use to reach all your different persona’s, seeing as everyone seems to use every channel and there isn’t always one best channel to use. AI learns the preferred marketing channel for each individual lead. Sprouting the same content to your entire lead base but on their preferred channel. Something we, humans, wouldn’t be able to achieve even if we tried.
7. It’s all in the timing
Now we’ve looked at the ‘what’, ‘who’ and the ‘how’, let’s look at the ‘when’. This is probably the most important part of your marketing strategy. It’s all about the perfect timing. We have been living by that law for a number of years now in our sales and marketing teams. Marketing will warm the leads up for sales so that sales are only contacting people we know are at the ‘buying intent’ stage of their journey.
This eliminates cold calling and scaring potential buyers off by harassing them too soon. Using AI in this strategy highlights the importance of contacting leads at the right time. AI can determine and send communications which has the highest chance of engagement. Delivering campaigns to individuals at their preferred timing, based on previous engagement history. Surely this is something we all need in our life?
Artificial Intelligence combined with your marketing can see huge benefits and bring in some great results. Take a look at our latest split testing guide, the Great British Split Test, to find out how you can continue to increase your results over time.
Machine learning and behaviours
One thing that AI does so much better than human beings is to be able to identify intent in a potential audience. Often it’s an audience that the human marketer may have missed altogether because the cues were too subtle. This intent can be gleaned from previous behaviours i.e. what the person has done and how they have engaged online, even before any action – such as a purchase – has been taken. Brands using AI in this way will have the advantage of being able to market to those already susceptible to a product or service.
Getting to grips with big data
Big data is still viewed by many as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. However, what is becoming clear is that its many benefits are only available to those able to wade through the enormous volume of information that it presents. This is where AI can really come into its own in a marketing context, crunching data to acquire insights that have been informed by a much deeper and broader data set. AI will provide us with the ability to deal with this data and to do it at a much faster speed, processing six figures of variables every second. The combination of AI and big data could be incredibly powerful for those looking for actionable marketing insights.
Responsive learning
The whole point of AI is that it’s not a static technology but one that continuously evolves to respond to the challenges that it’s presented with. For example, marketers using AI might set the task of extracting data to enable better targeting. Assigning this to an AI will not only produce better results at a faster rate than a human being could achieve but will also produce improvements to the process as the AI refines its own parameters to make it more effective.
Driving personalisation
Personalisation is not just a nice to have, it has a tangible business impact too – Econsultancy research revealed that 93% of companies see an uplift in conversion rates from personalisation. AI has the power to amplify personalisation, producing much more focused insight and on a much wider scale. Using it will give marketers the ability to reach a broader audience and to make marketing communications and content far more effective and targeted.
At Iconic Digital, they see marketing trends come and go and there’s no doubt that AI is one of the most fascinating of marketing horizons – with the most potential. They predict that within a year many of us will be engaging with it, if only on the most basic of levels.
Machine learning is the way forward when it comes to marketing success. Staying ahead of the competition is paramount in a dog eat dog world. Understanding and identifying your potential target market is essential for your strategy. Machine learning allows you to identify potential customer and predict how they’ll engage. It’s a powerful way to create successful, targeted marketing campaigns and segments you were unaware of, with ease.
It’s not a new concept. We are engaging with AI on a daily basis, sometimes without even realising. It’s Netflix recommending what to watch next, what’s on your Facebook feed, and how Google knows where you are going and when.
What marketers think
Admit it, it intimidates you a tiny bit. Us too. Having a machine predict how good you are at your job is scary stuff.
But imagine how it can work to your advantage. Predicting which customers are not only most likely to convert, but also deliver the most lifetime value before you have even reached out. Sounds like a marketer’s dream, right?
That said, 89% of B2B marketers now have AI on their roadmap for 2018. And if you aren’t one of them, it’s worth considering and getting ready for the revolution.
How to prepare
Warning: The AI revolution is not the future, it’s already here! So, it’s crucial to begin preparations right away to stay ahead of the game.
First things first, know your target audience. While you may think you already do to some extent, it’s time to delve deep into your data.It’ll help you identify the industry, location and job title of your leads. Plus, what time in the day they are most likely to engage with your campaigns.
Once this is underway, it’s time to devise an action plan and be ready to roll it out as soon as you can. You can see our 4 steps to prepare here. Machine learning will help you thrive and improve your marketing results with ease.
