AI is the latest buzzword around town. Everyone is talking about it, and trust us when we say there’s a lot to talk about. It’s not just some shiny new fad that’ll blow over before the year is out. It’s a new wave of innovation that’s here to stay, and if you don’t get on board now, you’ll be 50 paces behind your competition in the blink of an eye.
As marketers, it’s important to understand the latest and greatest tools you have at your disposal. Below, we’ve compiled some of AI’s best applications in the marketing space, and what you can do to get ahead of the pack today.
Predictive Analytics
One of AI’s biggest use cases is being able to analyze large amounts of data. This will be a recurring theme throughout. Here though, we want to focus on how AI can extrapolate trends and patterns in customer behavior.
You want to predict future buying behaviors? AI’s got you. You want to optimize marketing campaigns and improve customer targeting? AI can do that with its eyes closed. Literally. Because it’s a program and doesn’t have eyes. You get the gist.
AI can also improve upon intent data and intent signals by helping you prioritize high-value prospects and engage with them at just the right time in their customer journey. On top of that, it can even help identify potential churn risks by keying into competitor research customers may be doing.
Basically, AI can be the smartest kid in class. But this time, you’re encouraged to cheat off their paper.
Personalization
While technology doesn’t actually have a soul (leave the existential debate for another time), AI has the ability to not feel soulless at all. Quite the opposite, really. Through its data gathering and analytics, AI has the ability to help create personalized marketing with a tight turnaround.
That means when you find your prospects are searching for one thing in particular, you can create personalized content around that search fast. You can even use AI to create unique landing pages that speak to customer specifics, building a better bond between you and your future clients.
Of course, there are also AI-powered chatbots. While these are more common, the latest advancements have made them feel much less robotic, and the whole experience of engaging with them results in a more pleasant interaction overall.
Why is all of this important? Quite simply, greater personalization results in higher conversion rates. And who doesn’t want easily attainable higher conversion rates?
Brand Consistency
You want any communication coming from your brand to have a consistent voice and tone. With AI, you can ensure that. AI can now power natural language understanding allowing for less robotic automated interactions with your target audience. Don’t worry, no need to fear any Hal 9000 scenarios just yet.
Paid Media
With AI, you can take your programmatic and dynamic ad programs to the next level.
On the programmatic side, AI can make your ads responsive. Something that would be prohibitive to do manually. That translates to better cost per engagement.
Shifting to the dynamic side, Facebook and Google’s respective AI allows advertisers to serve prospects and customers ads that are based on intent insights, online engagement and behavior, and product browsing. Building algorithms with AI data show the right product or service ads at the right time to the right audience. It’s the AI kismet we’ve all been waiting for.
Social Media
Social media has been at the forefront of AI in many ways. For marketers, AI tools can monitor for coverage, mentions, share of voice, competitor mentions, and interactions.
Using that data, you can join in conversations more naturally, interact with buyers, partner with influencers, and overall stand out from your competition. Though it’s important to note that the line between being creepily aware and casually in the conversation is a slim one.
That said, AI-enabled tools lend themselves to greater automation for posts and high-level engagement. With that in place, marketers can focus on real-time engagements with the best prospects.
SEO
Everyone wants to be first. Specifically at the top of the search engine results page (SERP). AI can give you that competitive edge right now. Using specific tools tailored for SEO, AI can identify popular topics and pinpoint relevant keywords with Robin Hood-level accuracy.
Beyond the obvious SEO advantages, it can help you find gaps in your content while simultaneously showing you where you can optimize your content efforts.
Content
One of the biggest topics buzzing around AI is its ability to create content. Whether that’s an image, copy, or even video, AI is becoming increasingly adept at coming up with new content based on user input. While it’s still in an early stage, the results are very promising.
For marketers, that translates to the potential to create content for social media, email, and more like headlines, image suggestions, or even body copy.
In fact, ChatGPT was used to develop much of the outline for this blog article!
That said, we’d caution you to carefully review everything. Like we said, while AI is advancing rapidly, it’s far from infallible in its current state.
Account-Based Marketing
Looking at all the possibilities of AI in the marketing space, it’s clear that ABM can take advantage as well.
It’s essentially an amalgamation of AI’s best use cases in the marketing space. Simply put, AI-powered algorithms can help to identify the best accounts to target, while predictive analytics models can help to create personalized content for each account.
Sales Enablement
AI can free up your sales teams to do what they do best—interact directly with top prospects. With AI identifying the best leads, sales teams can personalize their outreach, and then use AI once again to provide targeted content to prospects.
Automation
Let’s face it, there are some marketing tasks that are ripe for AI automation. Let AI do tasks like scheduling social media posts, analyzing campaign performance, and creating reports. It’s as simple as that.
Efficiency and Effectiveness
This is where all of AI’s abilities show their worth. It all boils down to efficiency and effectiveness.
From predictive analytics and personalization to content and automation, AI has the potential to have a great positive impact on your ROI. It’s all about finding the right opportunities to employ AI in your business to boost all the positive things you’re already doing.
A Word of Caution
While AI has great potential, to paraphrase a famous comic book and movie franchise, “with great AI-computing power comes great responsibility.” At the end of the day, we’re at an exciting beginning point. While many are certainly seeing green skies ahead, it behooves everyone to keep a watchful eye. AI itself isn’t untrustworthy, but there are still a lot of hit-or-miss moments at this stage that the wise will be wary of.
Right now is the time to take informed chances with AI and monitor the outcomes. Though at the end of the day, marketing, even B2B marketing, is about person-to-person interaction. While it’s great to incorporate AI into your plan, don’t let that take away from the people-first approach to how you engage with your target accounts and customers.