How AI Marketing is Changing Digital Marketing Today

 

The science of marketing isn’t simple. Marketers must understand current technology, commerce trends, and human psychology: what drives individuals and broader social trends? Marketers must know how to leverage new technology on micro and macro levels while constantly revising performance. Marketing is pop psychology mixed with consumer technology, with a bit of fortune-telling thrown in too.

Today’s emergent “third-platform” technologies, such as data analytics, mobile devices, automation, and artificial intelligence (AI), are changing the way society and individuals interact on a fundamental level. One has to look no further than the use of AI marketing to find a microcosm of how new software solutions, machine learning, and big-data analytics are changing the game.

 
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What is AI Marketing?

Artificial intelligence, also known as AI, is the digital simulation of the human thought process. AI programs can perform limited intelligence-related tasks, such as reasoning, planning, learning, forecasting, and understanding language. Artificial intelligence can produce amazing results when coupled with data capture, storage, and the analysis capabilities of an effective CRM solution. 

AI marketing uses these 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.

An Abbreviated History of Marketing and AI

In the mid-2000s, digital marketing was just getting into the swing of things with online content creation, email marketing, e-commerce, and A/B testing. Podcasting was brand-new, people were starting to count clicks, and there was a lot of excitement about this new gizmo called the RSS reader. Marketers thought they were getting the hang of this digital thing.

Meanwhile, Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto published a paper called “Learning Multiple Layers of Representation,” which presented artificial intelligence in terms of neural networks that could do more than just classify sensory data like speech or images. These new networks could be programmed to make associations around information to generate data. In essence, Hinton said, these neural networks could “learn.” It was the beginning of deep learning — and yet another game changer for marketing.

How is AI changing digital marketing?

Advances in big data have helped in the early stages of the marketing cycle by collecting and aggregating the data points that marketers need to develop a strategy. AI marketing can affect the industry with features including:

Centralised data

Marketing relies heavily on accurate, usable data. However, the most relevant information to marketing is often spread across multiple data silos. AI-enhanced marketing automation can help gather, organise, analyse, and segment valuable marketing data automatically, learning and improving as it goes. The data can then be stored in a single, centralised location for easy use in marketing campaigns.

Improved A/B Testing

Like any other science, marketing puts forth a hypothesis (proposed campaign) and runs it through rigorous testing. From web copy to design elements, calls to action to responsive design, AI can run campaigns through algorithms to enable much faster and more comprehensive A/B testing. The efficiency factor is a selling point in and of itself, but since these algorithms learn the more they’re used, every time a site is put through the paces, the process becomes more intuitive and the results more insightful.

Virtual Agents

The line between sales and marketing has never been more blurred. These fields are now grouped under phrases like “customer experience” or “customer service.” The majority of the buyer’s journey is completed online, so consumers are looking for easy, self-serve ways to find the information they need to make an educated purchasing decision. Cognitive systems can leverage that opportunity through virtual assistants (such as chatbots) that provide around-the-clock customer support. These agents can point consumers in the direction marketers dictate, harness user data to inform sales and advertising efforts, and free up customer service agents for tasks with a higher cost-benefit ratio.

Targeted Lead Generation and client segmentation

Lead generation is one of the areas of marketing where the explosion of big data was celebrated — until marketers began to panic. It’s all well and good having a huge list of leads, but how were marketers supposed to qualify hundreds of thousands of potential customers? Today, cognitive applications cross-reference online consumers’ social media trends, web interactions, and mentions in public records to build a robust profile for each lead. Some algorithms can even tailor marketing messages to each lead, predict which leads are likely to convert, and execute a follow-up action if a lead chooses to go with a competitor.

Content Creation Written by AI

Somehow it’s easier to understand AI working magic with unstructured data than with words, but there are no sacred marketing roles untouchable by cognitive processes. Now that natural language processing is a widely accepted technology and machine learning enables algorithms to become increasingly accurate each time they’re executed, AI is being used to create marketing content and interpret users’ reactions to it. No computer can rival Philip Roth or Maya Angelou, but some programs can whip up everything from personalised content suggestions to ad copy, subject headlines, and calls to action.
 
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Timely messaging

For many customers, the window of interest does not remain open for long. Marketing AI keeps track of client preferences, analysing actions and determining when would be the best time to contact clients with greetings, offers, or content. By delivering marketing messaging when clients are most receptive, marketing AI helps optimise campaign ROI.

Self-learning

The beauty of AI is that, in many cases, it’s self-teaching or cognitive, meaning the longer it’s in use, the more accurate and beneficial its decisions are. These applications are programmed to replicate how the human brain works and continually evolve to better simulate intelligent processes and automate them.

The Future of Digital Marketing is Here

No doubt, it’s a little daunting. Marketers are asking the same question that most other industries are asking: In an age when machines can do our jobs, what will there be left for us to do? Ideally, cognitive marketing processes will free marketers from busy work, allowing more time for creativity and thoroughness. Imagine how much one team could achieve without spending endless hours on multivariate testing or chasing cold leads.

AI marketing with Salesforce

Regarding advanced artificial intelligence for marketing, Salesforce Einstein AI is the world’s most comprehensive AI for CRM. Capable of handling vast amounts of client and industry data and still simple enough to use out of the box without an in-depth understanding of computer science, Einstein is built directly into the world-renowned Salesforce CRM platform.

Marketers can take advantage of Einstein’s unique learning and 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. 

Best of all, Einstein AI is embedded into every core Salesforce product and service, no matter what aspect of your customer strategy. Learn more about Salesforce Einstein, and see just how intelligent your marketing efforts can be.

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