How AI can bring more customers to your business
Have you asked Siri, Cortana or Google the weather forecast for tomorrow? Has Facebook known the right friends to suggest as tags in your photos? Does Netflix recommend a list of films and TV shows that reflect your taste in genre?
If you have, you have been tracked by Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is spreading tidal waves of disruption to industries worldwide:
- Digital Marketing
- Healthcare
- Security
- Farming
- Public Transport
- Insurance
- Financial Services
- Construction
- Banking
- Manufacturing
If you’re a digital marketer, you must stay up to date with the latest trends and breakthroughs in AI. If you’re a business owner, or consumer, it is worth understanding how it is being used.
Here is why digital marketers are thrilled about AI
Essentially, AI is a learning machine that removes the need for a human to perform the task.
AI means a computerised system that’s able to perform tasks human intelligence can already do, and even do it better. Industry experts describe AI appearing as one, or a combination, of these technological fields:
- Machine Learning: It collects data, learns human behaviour and makes evaluated predictions/decisions
- Speech Recognition: It can translate text into speech, and vice versa.
- Visual Perception: It can recognise images as detailed as human faces.
- Planning, Scheduling & Optimisation: Software that recognises the sensitivity of time.
- Robotics: Any kind of automation.
- Expert Systems: The ability to make decision-making of a human expert.
And more fields are being discovered and developed every day. It saves time, money and effort in almost everything a human can do.
Here are 4 ways AI is being used:
1.“Personalisation” of online customer service chat
Research suggests 56% of consumers would rather handle customer service issues by online chat than over the phone.
This statistic refers to company chatbots. These are AI-powered computer programs set to revolutionise online customer service and enhance personalisation in the customer’s user experience.
One industry expert suggests that chatbots offer numerous advantages, including:
- Assisting customers 24/7 and retain customer data
- Programmed to be friendly, never losing patience with customers
- Capable of responding to several customers at the same time.
- Produce more personable advertisements
- Tracking customer purchase patterns
Another expert suggests customers will feel they are talking to someone in the appearance of a conversational interface, which is simply translating communications between humans and computers.
Digital marketers see chatbots as opportunities for personalisation, with faster self-service and significant reductions in customer effort to make business transactions.
2. Targeting ads to audiences
Digital marketers are becoming more conscious people’s shrinking attention spans.
Research suggests that website visitors who are targeted with display ads are 70% more likely to convert.
To overcome the struggle of short attention spans, digital marketers will rely on AI algorithms to improve ad relevance.
AI algorithms will create and target audience groups with advertisements that are based on user history. Experts often refer to Facebook advertising as a great example of this.
The ads can also potentially learn to avoid users who don’t respond to specific types of advertising.
Website visitors won’t be exposed to irrelevant ads and will have an improved on-site experience. This meets the continuous demand by consumers for better interactions with brands online.
3. Real time marketing done offline
AI has the potential to optimise marketing campaigns for digital marketers, removing the manual labour involved in launching them.
What this means for digital marketers is that AI can monitor, optimise content and interact with customers on non-business days. SEO and digital marketing teams would no longer need to monitor popular web searches on the weekends when customer traffic peaks.
AI marketing platforms, such as Albert, have stepped into the spotlight. It can run and optimise marketing campaigns for you with very little human manipulation, using AI fields such as predictive analytics, machine-learning, control systems and feedback, and natural language processing.
Experts suggest it can offer ongoing insights and management of your paid and non-paid digital marketing campaigns, including email, mobile, social, search and display elements. It learns and maintains constant optimisation and analysis of your campaigns.
Looking from an international marketing perspective, AI is also suggested to potentially make translations in real time for digital marketers. This means AI can translate content in different languages.
Potentially, this will enable digital marketers to distribute content internationally without the boundaries of language, and local marketers can increase their reach across borders, with less difficulty.
4. Explores data and reveals the maturity of each customer
A data analytics company suggests there were over 3.6 billion Google searches per day in 2017, each search generating new data. This can reveal insights on a customer’s needs, behaviours and future actions.
Predictive analytics and propensity modelling are AI fields that extract these insights from data and help digital marketers execute more effective and relevant campaigns with a digital strategy.
One expert gives the scenario of a company wanting to increase sales by 40% this quarter through email marketing. Digital marketers would use an AI algorithm to identify the optimal strategy to achieve the goal, and automatically fine-tune campaign tactics based on the user’s response.
The more information AI receives, the better it gets at producing results over time and the better the return on investment in digital marketing.
