AI in Marketing – The Complete Guide

AI in digital marketing is the process of using artificial intelligence (AI) to develop, execute, refine and improve your business’s marketing strategy. It harnesses the power of AI and machine learning (ML) to analyse data, automate workflows, provide actionable insights, and even produce compelling marketing materials tailored to your brand’s unique requirements.

Think of AI as a vehicle that can deliver all the customer insights you need and want. You can market more efficiently and create personalised content that customers love. The vehicle is definitely a fast-moving one, but don’t panic. I’m here to show you how to be confident in the driver’s seat.

Let’s explore the benefits of AI in marketing and the challenges businesses face, including ways you can use it to win customers, track analytics, and make the most of your investment. I’ll address the best practices, identify future trends, and share real-world examples of companies successfully marketing with AI.

Lately, there’s been a lot of buzz about how marketers can use AI to enhance customer experiences and productivity. But for AI in marketing to fully reach its potential, we need to understand how it works and how to deploy it. We’ll show you everything you need to know in this complete guide. Let’s get started.

Artificial intelligence is most certainly here to stay, but it’s a welcome sight for the busy marketer. AI has the potential to revolutionise the industry forever, making it easier for brands to connect with their audiences and save time on tedious manual tasks.

To elaborate, here are seven exciting benefits of AI in marketing:

AI is an especially powerful tool for marketers looking to better attract and retain their audience. In a process referred to as lookalike modelling, the technology recognises the common traits and characteristics shared by your top customers. This means you are one step closer to targeting customers with similar attributes likely to be interested in your products or services.

Suppose you don’t already have the data you need. In that case, AI can help collect it by refining your data collection methods and parsing through vast amounts of information to pinpoint key insights and trends that may not be apparent to humans.

On top of that, AI’s advanced reporting and analytics capabilities enable in-depth and real-time insights into campaign performance. As a result, you can make better decisions based on better data that drive bigger results.

Because AI systems are designed to be user-friendly, the more marketing teams interact with natural language prompts, the better they become at articulating specific requests or prompts. The more effective the prompt output, the bigger the potential for valuable insights that connect and engage customers.

AI can also help you with retargeting, which is when a brand engages with the same customer multiple times with improved messaging. Automatic retargeting using AI means you can continuously learn from each customer interaction or conversion, optimising future content and marketing strategies based on the insights. The process of learning and adapting ensures the content remains relevant and compelling.

AI automates repetitive tasks, freeing up marketer’s time to focus on high-value tasks and innovation, such as:

• Drawing valuable insights from the information they possess.
• Experimenting with immersive technologies like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR).
• Exploring voice search optimisation and voice-based marketing strategies.
• Prioritising sustainable and ethical marketing practices.
• Leveraging influencer marketing and the development of targeted content for niche audiences.

When marketers have the time to focus on strategy, their businesses are more likely to attract repeat business and increase ROI.

Generative AI can help you reach consumers with different backgrounds and interests. For example, using AI in marketing can help you create content that reflects different cultural perspectives, making your messaging inclusive and accessible to a broader audience. Using generative AI increases your chances of understanding and representing the preferences of your unique customer segments.

Armed with insights into customer behaviour and market trends, AI can create helpful, engaging AI-generated content across multiple mediums. It can automate everything from pay-per-click (PCC) ads and social media posts to SEO and keyword research, helping a business improve the consistency of its marketing campaigns.

Going forward, generative AI is anticipated to be able to produce even more nuanced content, including videos, music, and images. This shift in content creation will help enhance customer engagement, as the output will resonate with the marketer’s target audiences.

We know businesses can expand their audience size and reach with AI-driven insights and targeting capabilities. We also know how using AI in marketing can enhance conversion rates by delivering personalised content and product recommendations. The same is true for audience retargeting, in which AI nurtures relationships with tailored messaging.

All of these benefits add up to one thing. The better you’re able to target your customers, gain insights from data, and improve your operational efficiency, the easier it is to generate a significant ROI and grow your bottom line. That’s the true value proposition of integrating AI into your business marketing efforts.

To put these benefits into context, let’s examine a handful of AI's different applications in marketing. Here’s how businesses and brands use AI in marketing to fuel engagement, increase conversion rates, and grow their bottom lines.

• Content marketing: AI can generate branded blogs and social media posts with a few clicks, drawing insights from business data and previous experiences.
• Customer care: AI chatbots can provide 24/7 customer support, using natural language processing (NLP) to understand context and user intent.
• Personalisation: Algorithms can analyse user behaviour and preferences to provide product recommendations and deliver seamless, personalised experiences, boosting engagement.
• Predictive analytics: An AI tool can use a wealth of historical data to predict market and customer trends. It can forecast demand, identify high-value customers, and even predict supply chain problems.
• AI social media marketing: AI models can analyse social media data to identify the best time to post. They can then monitor engagement to determine ideal content types, all without human intervention.
• Search engine optimisation (SEO): Marketers can use AI to generate keyword ideas and automatically optimise web pages to improve the business’s position in the search engines.
• Ads campaigns: AI can optimise ad placements and timings by analysing demographics and user behaviour. Marketers can even use AI to bid on ad spaces in real-time.
• Sentiment analysis: AI tools can explore reviews, comments, and feedback on a product or service to gauge sentiment. For instance, social media listening lets AI tools assess customers’ viewpoints on social media platforms.

Let’s look at AI and automation from a different angle. While marketing with AI helps you understand customer behaviour and personalise marketing activities' timing, targeting, and content, it’s not without its challenges and disadvantages.

Ethical concerns about data privacy, security, and consumer trust call for compliance and regulations to safeguard customer information. There’s also the problem of AI bias, which could lead marketers down the AI path with false or misleading information. Combining these ethical concerns will require regular human intervention to verify the quality of AI's information.

Technical expertise is vital for successful AI integration. To get the most out of AI and ML models, you need experienced specialists who understand how to capitalise on the benefits while mitigating the drawbacks. Training up a skilled workforce capable of deploying, using and optimising these tools and platforms can be a hurdle.

For AI to produce excellent output, high-quality input is required. Poor data quality can lead to inaccurate insights, misinformation, and flawed decision-making. As such, businesses need to ensure their data is collected, collated, and accessible for use with AI tools. Ensuring proper data quality with unified customer profiles is also crucial.

Good AI relies on a solid data foundation and making AI outputs usable in the workflow. Companies that don’t collect enough data from tracking tools, surveys, and analytics may struggle to produce reliable insights considering every angle.

Many marketers are concerned that AI will kill creativity, especially as more brands use these tools to create AI content. For that reason, businesses need to promote AI as an assistive tool designed to spark creativity rather than a crutch to rely on.

Many AI models were trained on copyrighted material without the knowledge or permission of original creators (authors, artists, photographers, etc.). Apart from being an ethical black mark on AI, this has resulted in multiple global lawsuits that are unlikely to be resolved soon. Can you be certain that the material you’re using isn’t copyrighted? You’d better make sure to avoid legal ramifications.

It’s estimated that one in three Australian workers are at risk of job loss by 2030 due to businesses implementing AI. This will have significant flow-on effects that cannot yet be measured and it’s likely to be a key concern of your team.

Generative AI’s use of enormous volumes of data has created more urgency for data privacy. At the same time, some companies are AI-ifying their products without ensuring customer data is 100% protected. Customers have understandable concerns about privacy issues and data mining. To address this, companies have an obligation to provide transparency around how they’re using data and to ensure data privacy.

AI in digital marketing has its pitfalls, but by blending the power of AI with human insights and evaluation, each of these challenges can be avoided or mitigated, allowing companies to experience the full business benefits.

Keep these 9 priorities in mind as you pave the way for AI in marketing at your company:

Ask yourself what you hope to achieve, and align your team on the purpose of AI integration. This will assist with choosing the right AI tools and training your AI models to serve your business needs.

Collect all of your siloed data sets in one place and ensure they are readily available for analysis. The more data you can feed into your AI tool, the stronger the output.

This means using transparent data practices, ensuring data privacy compliance, and fostering a culture of ethical AI usage. For example, you can establish clear opt-in/opt-out mechanisms and communicate comprehensive data usage policies.

You learn more about your customers’ preferences by integrating data using AI-powered tools. This holistic view of customer behaviour helps create effective marketing.

When you use AI-driven recommendation engines on e-commerce platforms, product suggestions are based on individual preferences and purchase history. As a result, the customer experience is vastly improved.

Start small with simple applications and assess the integration's results. If all goes well, gradually iterate and expand your selection of AI tools, regularly reviewing as you go.

Providing training on how AI-driven natural language generation tools work will inspire you to craft compelling content at scale. You can generate personalised email campaigns, product descriptions, and social media posts that resonate with target audiences.

Using AI-powered automation tools for tasks such as data entry, report generation, and email scheduling enables your team to focus on more strategic initiatives and creative campaign ideation.

AI-powered analytics platforms can provide real-time data on customer engagement and conversion rates. This means you can make data-driven decisions and adjust as necessary to optimise campaign performance and ROI.

How does a marketing AI tool look in practice? Let’s look at three innovative tools you can use to experience the true benefits of using AI in marketing.

Salesforce Marketing AI is a purpose-built AI model that will optimise and refine every aspect of your campaign.

Here’s what you can expect:

• Gain deeper customer insights with generative AI customer segmentation, making it faster to get to market.
• Employ lookalike modelling to identify new high-value customers and expand the reach of your marketing campaigns.
• Develop your own custom AI models that support your business goals without any technical expertise.
• Deploy personalised campaign variations using predictive AI to drive customer engagement.
• Create on-brand experiences with personalised content generation grounded in your campaign data.
• Discover real-time anomalies in your data and receive actionable insights from our AI model to resolve issues.
• Use AI to score potential leads and identify critical customers in your sales pipeline.
• Automatically analyse interactions to receive recommendations for the next-best action for every customer.
• Use our data model to automatically classify and manage data for analysis. Save time on metric standardisation to ensure consistent reporting.

We’re only scratching the surface here. Salesforce Marketing AI is a groundbreaking all-in-one marketing solution to help you drive customer engagement and deliver results in your next AI marketing strategy.

Digital marketing and SEO are more closely intertwined than ever. What if AI could help to combine SEO strategies with first-rate content?

Keyword Insights is an AI writing assistant that blends keyword research, SEO best practices, and writing in a single platform. Here’s what it does:

• Automatic AI research across the top 20 ranking pages and sources like Reddit and Quora.
• An AI-generated list of headings, questions, and potential keywords to include in the content.
• Automatic outline generating for easier content planning.
• An AI writing editor filled with features for writing engaging copy.
• Built-in grammar and spelling checker for easy content editing.
• A grading system to help you improve and optimise your work.
• Helpful export options, making it easier to publish your content.

Keyword Insights is an excellent tool for copywriters and marketers who don’t want to centralise the entire process from SEO research to finished product.

Email marketing is an easy way to improve customer experiences, and few companies handle that element of AI quite as well as Seventh Sense.

Email marketing is an easy way to improve customer experiences, and few companies handle that element of AI quite as well as Seventh Sense.

The Seventh Sense platform relies on behaviour profiling to create custom emails that attract customer attention. It also evaluates the ideal time of day to send an email based on a user’s habits. It does this for every single customer on your email list by exploring data about their activities.

This allows marketers to automate email marketing by sending emails to the most valuable customers when they’re most likely to respond, driving more engagement. It also avoids wasting the time of your audience and your marketing reps.

An AI copilot is an assistive, conversational experience built natively into a tech platform. It brings the power of generative AI (similar to a chatbot) into software and guides users through various tasks. These copilots deliver real-time, proactive suggestions that help users boost productivity.

These copilots are big news for marketers. They can improve overall operational efficiency by providing brand-specific insights. For instance, the right copilot could instantly create promotional material or copywriting, drawing from a wealth of data and information from across an organisation. This also leads to cost savings by reducing the hours spent creating marketing content.

For example, Einstein Copilot draws from your CRM data to provide recommendations and drafts of content, action plans, and custom code. It’s a way for marketers to be more efficient and have a subject matter expert at their fingertips.

AI marketing uses artificial intelligence technologies to make automated decisions based on data collection analysis to extrapolate conclusions about consumers and the market. These conclusions help marketers develop targeted digital marketing strategies.

Marketers can take advantage of AI’s automation capabilities to improve productivity, identify and segment target audiences, gather and analyse data, create highly accurate customer predictions, and deliver relevant client-facing messaging and content.

Let’s take a look at a real-world example of AI in marketing.

CommBank’s AI-driven customer loyalty program has done wonders for the brand’s reputation and ROI.

CommBank Yello provides existing customers with personalised offers and benefits directly in the app. As customers interact with the offers, the AI model learns and improves, providing more personalised, relevant experiences to customers based on what they value the most.

For instance, if the app detects that customers prefer a certain type of offer, a specific category of deal, or even a particular brand, the AI platform will provide similar deals in the future. If the user isn’t interested in entering prize draws, the AI model will learn this over time and phase out that type of offer.

CommBank Yello is a genius play for a few reasons.

1. It builds trust and loyalty with customers over time, providing them with rewards that they actually want.
2. It opens the door to bigger cross-selling opportunities for CommBank, boosting profit margins.
3. It acts as a competitive differentiator, allowing CommBank to offer personalised experiences to attract new members.

On the surface, Yello isn’t a revolutionary feature. It’s the same type of technology platforms like Netflix use to suggest personalised content based on past watching habits. But AI in marketing doesn’t have to be complicated. Simple integrations that prioritise providing personalised customer experiences can enormously impact engagement.

AI-powered algorithms and machine learning techniques help marketers process and analyse datasets quickly. Unlike traditional analysis, AI analytics can handle and sort larger datasets in real time. It can also identify complex patterns and correlations within the data, uncovering valuable connections and trends.

Marketers who use AI tools built directly into software platforms can track attribution modelling, performance insights, and customer insights.

• AI attribution modelling assigns credit to various marketing touchpoints that contribute to a desired outcome, providing insights into the effectiveness of different marketing channels and campaigns.
• AI performance insights provide comprehensive and actionable information on the effectiveness of your marketing strategies and campaigns.
• AI customer insights analyse customer data, predicting behaviours such as propensity to churn and propensity to buy and suggesting the next best action for personalised engagement and customer retention strategies.

The ability to process large datasets helps marketers make data-driven decisions that optimise strategies for improved performance and ROI.

The next two years hold tremendous promise in AI in marketing. While there’s no doubt challenges exist, AI will help meet customer expectations for tailored content as well as businesses’ quest for efficiency.

Marketers can expect to see a rise in AI usage when making predictions based on unorganised data. They’ll also learn to rely on first-party data to guide generative AI to produce customer-focused outputs that align with their brand.

As technology evolves, the focus on security will increase, too. With 68% of customers saying advances in AI make it more important for companies to be trustworthy, marketers have an opportunity to ensure their privacy and security are airtight.

Brands will use a trust layer to ensure that first-party data grounding is safe, mitigates bias, and doesn’t leak confidential data into open platforms for all to access.

It’s possible we could also see a complete reimagining of the end-to-end marketing process. As tech advances, AI solutions could build campaign briefs with automated content and journey creation, simultaneously generating performance visibility and actionable insights — all with the human in the driver's seat.

Ready to streamline your workflow with AI-driven agents? Discover how Agentforce can automate tasks and boost efficiency across your business today.