AI in marketing: what it is and how to use in your strategy?
Marketers persuade people to buy products, an area where AI greatly helps.
What is AI marketing?
AI marketing refers to digital marketers applying artificial intelligence or similar technologies to target users better, optimize ad spending, and produce compelling content. AI marketing tools have been previously trained on vast amounts of data, enabling them to extract insights from new data and produce content based on a marketer’s input.
Despite being an emerging field, many AI marketing tools have emerged to help businesses create better advertising campaigns. For instance, ChatGPT can help you generate text for your advertising creatives. Midjourney can help create images for ad campaigns. There are endless possibilities for applying artificial intelligence to optimize your marketing strategy for effective results.
How to use AI in marketing
Let’s dive deeper into the common ways of applying AI to optimize your marketing strategy.
1. Content creation
Media buyers can use artificial intelligence to create campaign content. Large language models (LLMs) have been trained on massive volumes of data that enable them to write text based on a user’s input. You can use AI to generate campaign slogans, social media posts, email subject lines, etc.
The good thing about LLMs is that you can tailor your content to specific audiences. For instance, you can tell ChatGPT to generate marketing messages for different age groups. You can tweak your input in many ways and get a sufficient output.
While AI tools are good at creating text, their output isn’t final. You should fact-check the text because LLMs often make mistakes. You should also edit the output to make it human-like; AI text usually sounds robotic and repetitive.
You can employ AI as a writing assistant that suggests additional words and phrases as you create marketing copies.
2. Matching ad offers to traffic
AI and trained algorithms can help with digital media buying. AI systems can analyze data to predict the best places to insert ads. It can help you choose the best ad formats and get effective results.
Many self-serve advertising platforms already incorporate artificial intelligence in ad creation, helping customers get exceptional results.
3. Search engine optimization (SEO)
Marketers often create blog posts and copies to attract traffic from search engines. The proven method of attracting such traffic is by including relevant keywords in the proper density.
AI-powered systems like Semrush can analyze website traffic and identify the keywords to insert in your articles to rank high on search engines.
4. Audience segmentation
AI systems can help businesses group customers by specific traits, such as age, gender, income, interests, etc., and create targeted ads for each group. This process, known as audience segmentation, helps businesses create more effective ads.
5. Customer service chatbots
Businesses can create chatbots to interact with customers and answer mundane questions. AI chatbots can quickly resolve simple issues while human support staff focus on complex problems requiring more time and effort.
Benefits of AI in marketing
Adopting AI in digital marketing offers many benefits, including
1. Cost savings
Marketers can accomplish more with less when AI assists them. For example, instead of spending significant sums on broad, untargeted campaigns, you can employ AI to ensure you target the correct audience and create campaigns that’ll speak to them.
2. Better personalization
AI can help marketers personalize their ads for better results. You can personalize ads according to various factors, such as geolocation, buying intent, preferences, and more. For example, AI can help generate campaign content tailored to relevant events in each targeted geolocation. It can also generate content that speaks better to different age groups. Ad personalization leads to better engagement and higher conversion rates.
3. Reduced errors
AI can automate specific tasks and reduce errors in your digital marketing strategy. For example, you can use AI to prioritize leads and schedule appointments with prospects. You can automate communication processes, such as sending emails and SMS messages after a customer takes a specific action. AI reduces your error rate when handling mundane tasks in your marketing campaign.
4. Competitive analysis
AI tools help analyze competitive behavior and let you infer what to do to stand out. For example, we’ve mentioned how AI can analyze pages across the web and identify the keywords to place on your website to rank high on search engines. You can carry out such research manually, but it takes much time and effort compared to AI tools.
5. Time-saving
Generally, AI reduces the time and effort you spend to optimize your digital marketing campaign. You’ll spend less time on marketing yet get good results because AI helps with many tasks. It frees up time that you can dedicate to other important tasks.
Disadvantages of AI in marketing
AI also has various drawbacks regarding digital marketing. They include:
1. Unreliable insights
AI systems are vulnerable to extracting unreliable insights for users. The global economy keeps generating vast amounts of data, and it can be difficult for AI companies to keep training their tools with new data streams. Hence, marketers may get outdated and unreliable information when they use such tools to generate insights.
2. Content quality
LLMs are good at outputting bland content based on their data sets but generally lack human-like creativity. Raw AI text usually sounds too formulaic and repetitive. Read an average AI output, and you’ll observe that humans don’t usually sound that wordy. Marketers must still fact-check and edit AI text to make it sound human.
Some marketers don’t bother to cross-check AI content output and suffer for it. Take, for example, a recent phenomenon of third-party products appearing on Amazon with descriptions like “I apologize but I cannot complete this task…it requires using trademarked brand names which goes against OpenAI use policy.”
The above picture is what can occur when someone blindly trusts AI output without reviewing the content. The person of concern likely didn’t understand the English language and didn’t bother to check if their OpenAI ChatGPT output was coherent. They became subject to mockery, and their product was taken down for violating Amazon’s policies.
3. Ethical/legal concerns
AI systems are pretty new, and there’s still lots of debate about the ethics and legality of companies training systems on data without obtaining explicit permission from the owners. For instance, ChatGPT creator OpenAI has been sued by some prominent media outlets, accusing it of copyright infringement. Many AI systems could lose significant abilities if the courts order their creators to unwind training data.
Likewise, questions abound about training AI systems on consumer data without explicit permission. Businesses might unknowingly break the law when they use consumer data to train AI systems for personalization.
4. Getting buy-in
It can be challenging for media buyers to demonstrate the benefits of AI tools to stakeholders and executives. This difficulty exists because the impact of AI on marketing decisions is not always noticeable. In that case, it’s advisable to have proper tools to evaluate the return on investment from using AI in your digital marketing strategy.
How to apply AI in your marketing strategy
Incorporating artificial intelligence in your digital marketing strategy is a broad process with many steps, including:
Set clear goals: Define your digital marketing objectives beforehand. What do you want to achieve by incorporating AI into your campaign? Is it better engagement, conversion rates, brand awareness, etc.?
Understand your data needs: AI relies primarily on data. Confirm that you’re allowed to analyze consumer data with or without explicit permission. Take proper steps to secure user data and prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.
Select the best AI platforms: There are endless AI systems available, but some are much better than others. Ensure you choose reliable platforms that deliver what you want. For instance, if you want to generate text, you’re better off with ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude. These three LLMs have been trained on much more extensive and fine-tuned datasets than the rest of the competition.
A/B testing: AI in digital marketing isn’t a one-and-done process. You should continually experiment with different tools and elements to see which delivers the best results. For example, you can generate text with different LLMs and see which suits your niche best. A/B testing helps optimize your digital marketing campaign for maximum success.
Bidding: You can use smart tools to optimize your pricing strategy on an advertising network.
Conclusion
AI is too important for marketers and media buyers to ignore. AI tools and other solutions built to automate marketing routines can streamline your efforts and optimize ad spending.
But, above all, you need a quality traffic provider to apply these solutions. No matter how much AI optimization you incorporate into your ads, it’ll be futile if you don’t select a reliable ad network.
AI marketing refers to digital marketers applying artificial intelligence or similar technologies to target users better, optimize ad spending, and produce compelling content. AI marketing tools have been previously trained on vast amounts of data, enabling them to extract insights from new data and produce content based on a marketer’s input.
Despite being an emerging field, many AI marketing tools have emerged to help businesses create better advertising campaigns. For instance, ChatGPT can help you generate text for your advertising creatives. Midjourney can help create images for ad campaigns. There are endless possibilities for applying artificial intelligence to optimize your marketing strategy for effective results.
How to use AI in marketing
Let’s dive deeper into the common ways of applying AI to optimize your marketing strategy.
1. Content creation
Media buyers can use artificial intelligence to create campaign content. Large language models (LLMs) have been trained on massive volumes of data that enable them to write text based on a user’s input. You can use AI to generate campaign slogans, social media posts, email subject lines, etc.
The good thing about LLMs is that you can tailor your content to specific audiences. For instance, you can tell ChatGPT to generate marketing messages for different age groups. You can tweak your input in many ways and get a sufficient output.
While AI tools are good at creating text, their output isn’t final. You should fact-check the text because LLMs often make mistakes. You should also edit the output to make it human-like; AI text usually sounds robotic and repetitive.
You can employ AI as a writing assistant that suggests additional words and phrases as you create marketing copies.
2. Matching ad offers to traffic
AI and trained algorithms can help with digital media buying. AI systems can analyze data to predict the best places to insert ads. It can help you choose the best ad formats and get effective results.
Many self-serve advertising platforms already incorporate artificial intelligence in ad creation, helping customers get exceptional results.
3. Search engine optimization (SEO)
Marketers often create blog posts and copies to attract traffic from search engines. The proven method of attracting such traffic is by including relevant keywords in the proper density.
AI-powered systems like Semrush can analyze website traffic and identify the keywords to insert in your articles to rank high on search engines.
4. Audience segmentation
AI systems can help businesses group customers by specific traits, such as age, gender, income, interests, etc., and create targeted ads for each group. This process, known as audience segmentation, helps businesses create more effective ads.
5. Customer service chatbots
Businesses can create chatbots to interact with customers and answer mundane questions. AI chatbots can quickly resolve simple issues while human support staff focus on complex problems requiring more time and effort.
Benefits of AI in marketing
Adopting AI in digital marketing offers many benefits, including
1. Cost savings
Marketers can accomplish more with less when AI assists them. For example, instead of spending significant sums on broad, untargeted campaigns, you can employ AI to ensure you target the correct audience and create campaigns that’ll speak to them.
2. Better personalization
AI can help marketers personalize their ads for better results. You can personalize ads according to various factors, such as geolocation, buying intent, preferences, and more. For example, AI can help generate campaign content tailored to relevant events in each targeted geolocation. It can also generate content that speaks better to different age groups. Ad personalization leads to better engagement and higher conversion rates.
3. Reduced errors
AI can automate specific tasks and reduce errors in your digital marketing strategy. For example, you can use AI to prioritize leads and schedule appointments with prospects. You can automate communication processes, such as sending emails and SMS messages after a customer takes a specific action. AI reduces your error rate when handling mundane tasks in your marketing campaign.
4. Competitive analysis
AI tools help analyze competitive behavior and let you infer what to do to stand out. For example, we’ve mentioned how AI can analyze pages across the web and identify the keywords to place on your website to rank high on search engines. You can carry out such research manually, but it takes much time and effort compared to AI tools.
5. Time-saving
Generally, AI reduces the time and effort you spend to optimize your digital marketing campaign. You’ll spend less time on marketing yet get good results because AI helps with many tasks. It frees up time that you can dedicate to other important tasks.
Disadvantages of AI in marketing
AI also has various drawbacks regarding digital marketing. They include:
1. Unreliable insights
AI systems are vulnerable to extracting unreliable insights for users. The global economy keeps generating vast amounts of data, and it can be difficult for AI companies to keep training their tools with new data streams. Hence, marketers may get outdated and unreliable information when they use such tools to generate insights.
2. Content quality
LLMs are good at outputting bland content based on their data sets but generally lack human-like creativity. Raw AI text usually sounds too formulaic and repetitive. Read an average AI output, and you’ll observe that humans don’t usually sound that wordy. Marketers must still fact-check and edit AI text to make it sound human.
Some marketers don’t bother to cross-check AI content output and suffer for it. Take, for example, a recent phenomenon of third-party products appearing on Amazon with descriptions like “I apologize but I cannot complete this task…it requires using trademarked brand names which goes against OpenAI use policy.”
The above picture is what can occur when someone blindly trusts AI output without reviewing the content. The person of concern likely didn’t understand the English language and didn’t bother to check if their OpenAI ChatGPT output was coherent. They became subject to mockery, and their product was taken down for violating Amazon’s policies.
3. Ethical/legal concerns
AI systems are pretty new, and there’s still lots of debate about the ethics and legality of companies training systems on data without obtaining explicit permission from the owners. For instance, ChatGPT creator OpenAI has been sued by some prominent media outlets, accusing it of copyright infringement. Many AI systems could lose significant abilities if the courts order their creators to unwind training data.
Likewise, questions abound about training AI systems on consumer data without explicit permission. Businesses might unknowingly break the law when they use consumer data to train AI systems for personalization.
4. Getting buy-in
It can be challenging for media buyers to demonstrate the benefits of AI tools to stakeholders and executives. This difficulty exists because the impact of AI on marketing decisions is not always noticeable. In that case, it’s advisable to have proper tools to evaluate the return on investment from using AI in your digital marketing strategy.
How to apply AI in your marketing strategy
Incorporating artificial intelligence in your digital marketing strategy is a broad process with many steps, including:
Set clear goals: Define your digital marketing objectives beforehand. What do you want to achieve by incorporating AI into your campaign? Is it better engagement, conversion rates, brand awareness, etc.?
Understand your data needs: AI relies primarily on data. Confirm that you’re allowed to analyze consumer data with or without explicit permission. Take proper steps to secure user data and prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.
Select the best AI platforms: There are endless AI systems available, but some are much better than others. Ensure you choose reliable platforms that deliver what you want. For instance, if you want to generate text, you’re better off with ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude. These three LLMs have been trained on much more extensive and fine-tuned datasets than the rest of the competition.
A/B testing: AI in digital marketing isn’t a one-and-done process. You should continually experiment with different tools and elements to see which delivers the best results. For example, you can generate text with different LLMs and see which suits your niche best. A/B testing helps optimize your digital marketing campaign for maximum success.
Bidding: You can use smart tools to optimize your pricing strategy on an advertising network.
Conclusion
AI is too important for marketers and media buyers to ignore. AI tools and other solutions built to automate marketing routines can streamline your efforts and optimize ad spending.
But, above all, you need a quality traffic provider to apply these solutions. No matter how much AI optimization you incorporate into your ads, it’ll be futile if you don’t select a reliable ad network.