“Hello Google, find me the nearest parking lot.”
“Play music from my favourite playlist.”
“Siri, crack a joke.”
Today, as we command, converse, and engage with Google’s voice assistant or Apple’s Siri, we often communicate with them as we would with a real-life personal assistant. These artificial intelligence-powered applications are up to the task, too, providing results that are crisp, precise, and personalised. Several factors such as user preferences, geographical location, dialect, and previous digital footprint etc. are automatically evaluated to identify results that are most relevant to the end-user. When AI pioneer and advocate Alan Turing said ‘A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human’ this was exactly what he meant.
But global giants like Google and Apple are not the only brands leveraging AI to drive user engagement. A growing number of marketers around the world are now relying on AI to amplify and optimise their marketing endeavours. After all, an automated programme which can come up with the most accurate communication to target your potential customer with, as and when an opportunity arises, can ensure that you don’t miss a prospective lead or business opportunity, even at 2 am in the night.
Thanks to artificial intelligence, business and marketing gaps which were prevalent just a couple of years back are now increasingly being addressed and eliminated. With major breakthroughs in machine learning, deep neural networks, and automation, programmes are now being designed to not only perform a predefined task, but also simultaneously learn and adapt without the need for additional programming. Let us have a look at how artificial intelligence and automation can truly redefine your consumer engagement experience:
Improving Response Time
There is no doubt that new-age marketing is all about presenting the right solution at the right time. A study by InsideSales.com revealed that brands which respond within the first five minutes of a generated query have conversion rates 100 times higher as compared to those who respond to queries after 30 minutes or more. By integrating AI into your marketing strategy, you can come up with a perfect, customised solution for your prospective clients to facilitate increased sales and nurture steady business relationships.
Understanding Customer Behaviour
Customers have specific purchase patterns, preset biases, and buying propensities that influence their decision-making process. AI-based marketing accurately profiles your current as well as prospective customers according to their behavioural characteristics, and analyses historical data to come up with the most optimum strategy to reach out to each and every client.
Machine learning algorithms additionally enable AI-driven systems to improve themselves with the data generated for every use-case without any human intervention, thereby making brand communications more focussed and accurate over time.
Developing A Greater Connect
A data-driven approach can also enable businesses to connect better with their customers. AI systems use advanced chatbots for online engagements as well as voice computing for over-the-phone interactions. The value within AI-based systems is that they do not function on a conversation template, but rather act as a replication of a real-life marketer capable of adapting to changing consumer requirements. This helps in initiating deeper brand-customer interactions and enhancing the overall customer experience.
Social Media Mining
According to Statista, an average Internet user spends 118 minutes daily on social networking sites. With more than 3.5 Bn people currently using the Internet according to most recent estimates, consider the massive amounts of high-volume, high-velocity cumulative data generated throughout the year. Social media mining and sentiment analysis enables you to extract this high-grade customer-centric data relevant to your business model and use it to design marketing strategies which echo the prevalent mood of your target audience.
Seamless Brand Experience
An organisation uses multiple marketing channels – traditional or unconventional – to reach out to its customers. In order to ensure maximum traction as well as high customer acquisition and retention, a business has to ensure that the customer experience is consistent across all the customer touchpoints.
AI augments your marketing strategy to deliver your present and prospective customers with a seamless brand experience across different marketing channels. It also allows you to analyse the consumer response in real-time and helps in tailoring marketing strategies on the fly to meet the expectations of your consumer base.
Client Tracking
Ever wondered why your website visitors do not generate an actionable query, even as they browse through your products and check out your services? The reason is a lack of dynamic customer insights, which is a gap that AI and automation address. By allowing you to reverse track the IP addresses of your website visitors, AI curates detailed user and contact information of prospective clients for you to build upon. This proactive approach allows you to maximise your business opportunities and design highly-focussed marketing strategies.
About The Author
[The author of this post is Ambika Mishra, founder and MD of Pulp Strategy -a multi-award-winning full service agency in the realm of experiential, digital and interactive marketing.]
