3 Ways AI Can Transform Digital Marketing Now

It is whilst discussing how AI will transform the digital marketing realm, that the famous American Researcher Roy Amara becomes more relevant than ever. Amara’s law states that we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

We have countless articles that predict an optimistic future for AI in marketing – promising a future where AI would replace human minds in conceptualising marketing strategies or even creating their own Ads.

Realistically speaking, that era is still distant with our existing technologies. However, there are certain elements in which AI is changing digital marketing now.

With the advent of the information age, the sheer quantity of data produced by digital users surpasses the capability of data analysts to make sense of it. Enter AI into the state of affairs – we enable machines to sieve through this massive volume of data to make sense of what it means for us and our brands.

In parallel, the expectations of the modern day consumer have changed drastically – they expect constant engagement as well as immediate responses. Brands need to feed this voracious appetite.

It is a costly affair for brands to constantly engage their consumers with traditional means. With AI, there is a pleasant coupling of lesser human effort plus greater targeted content for consumers.

Here are the 3 Ways in particular, which AI is transforming digital marketing addressing the data overload and modern consumers’ expectations.

Data Crunching

According to IBM, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. Out of which, only 33% of the total data we produce being actually valuable for marketeers.

As such, together with Big Data analytics, AI plays a crucial role to sieve and classify data to figure out what is relevant for the modern-day marketer and his brands.

For instance, Amazon has 20 years’ worth of shopping data collected over the millions of visits to their site. AI enables Amazon to improve the user experience for their billions of shoppers, at the individual level. From relevant product recommendations to understanding search language (voice and text) through machine learning, Amazon delivers a customised experience to each shopper.

Predictive Marketing

With AI analysing our data, we not only make sense of it faster but we can also use it to predict what our consumers like. With sufficient data about users, their content needs or their future actions can be predicted with AI.

A famous example of predictive marketing is the way Netflix created “House of Cards”, which won the Emmy award in 2013. Utilising data from over 25 Mn subscribers, Netflix found some interesting insights:

• Movies directed by David Fincher, the director of “The Social Network”, were watched from beginning to end.
• Kevin Spacey is one of the most popular actors in the United States.
• The British version of the “House of Cards” has done very well in the past.

With a hypothesis that combining these three elements would make a hit series, Netflix made it a reality by producing “House of Cards”.

Consumer Experiences

When it comes to AI ameliorating consumer experiences, chatbots are definitely a highlight. A chatbot is a form of AI that is able to simulate human conversation through either voice commands or text chats or both.

Trends in customer service are changing with an entire tech-savvy generation preferring to solve their customer service issues in ways such as FAQs, forums and online chat services.

With more than 34 000 chatbots on Facebook Messenger, it is evident that businesses are now capitalising on this opportunity to create new revenue streams using AI. Many industries including airline, clothing, and design are utilising this space to connect with their consumers.

Chatbots do not necessarily stop at providing feedback but play a valuable role in turning consideration into purchase. For instance, the chatbot of Sephora on Kik acts as a store guide providing you product reviews while you are shopping in a physical store.

It is evident that neither man nor machine can work in silo. Digital marketers of the present day need to work in tandem with machines to make decisions with the power of AI.

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