Marketing is predicted to be a major area of business operations set to see monumental change – thanks to the rise in artificial intelligence (AI). In fact, a recent study by McKinsey has found that, along with sales, marketing will experience significant financial impact by virtue of these advances. In essence, if you’re in the marketing or advertising space – and you aren’t yet taking advantage of the power that AI offers your clients – then you’re missing out on huge opportunities for success and growth.
When referring to AI, we’re not talking about machines with the ability to learn, adapt and grow like we do (or replace our jobs as so many fear). Rather, we’re speaking to the software that marketers employ to build campaigns that connect with the right people based on analytics, context, and personalisation. For example, a marketing team who learns how to personalise an email – based on past analytics and data – to increase the likelihood of receiving a reply.
What we don’t realise, however, is that, in one way or another – we’re already making use of AI in our daily marketing practices, and there’s massive room to grow this in the future. Here’s a peek into how marketers are currently using AI to drive ROI for their clients.
Advertising
We all know that Facebook and Google are the largest online advertising platforms across the globe and that they both offer tools to segment their audiences using predictive analytics. Where segmentation allows advertisers to break their target audience up by characteristics like age, gender, income level etc. – predictive analytics gives them the added ability to decipher which of these groups a specific product or service is most likely to appeal to.
It’s a lot trickier to attribute growth of the bottom-line to ad content, placement, or other factors with traditional advertising methods such as television, newspapers, and magazines. On the other hand, AI-driven ad tools introduce advertisers to a whole new world of learning, analytics and optimisation based on data. Take for example Sonata MORE, a fully-integrated AI campaign optimisation platform built on a foundation of extensive, mobile-first data sets. A solution provided by us at AMA Digital, Sonata MORE unlocks predictive,pre-bid buying decisions to drive the best outcomes for clients and ensures the right impressions at the right time for zero budget waste.
Public Relations
Traditionally, PR’s core focus was exploring ways to get coverage of their client’s product or service in mainstream media publications, but with the advent of digital PR, the landscape is changing at pace. One of the most substantial shifts in this space is the opportunity for brands to promote through social media and partnerships with key influencers and content creators.
PR departments are now harnessing AI’s ability to help match products with key influencers who have ploughed all their effort into building a highly engaged, cultivated audience that is likely to actually care about what that brand has to offer.
Email Marketing
Email marketing has come leaps and bounds from tweaking headings and modifying a few words here and there so as to inflate open- and click-through rates. While such changes to subjects and email copy can differentiate your mailer from the plethora of spam received, AI plays a far more crucial role here. The emergence of AI-powered marketing tools empowers marketers to work within the tool to automate changes to their mailers based off previous data and analytics that reveal what worked and what didn’t per audience.
Regardless of your goals for the year ahead, AI will undoubtedly play some sort of role in your marketing strategy. But partnering with an agency who’s equipped with smart-tech tools and solutions to take AI to the next level, and drive impact for your business – is certainly something you should consider including in your budget plans. We’d love to chat further about how we can rev up your marketing ops in tandem with the revolution that is AI.