How Artificial Intelligence Will Change Digital Marketing As We Know It

Artificial Intelligence was one of those buzzwords in 2019 that everyone was throwing around, whether it fit or not. Yet, the magic of AI does actually have a lot of varied applications, including even in digital marketing.

Essentially the technology is about automation, for better or worse, freeing up humans from mundane jobs and legwork so they can instead focus on higher pursuits. So here’s how AI can be applied to digital marketing strategies in the coming years.

Automation for optimization

Machine Learning involves AI that is continuously learning and improving at a particular task, ideally to the point where it can function independent of human interaction. In digital marketing, even for companies that have in-house teams, that means you can have an AI that focuses on making business decisions. It can handle ad-targeting, search optimization, and more. That way, your precious human resources can instead focus on the financial elements of running a business, or creative inspiration for campaigns.

Analysing consumer behaviour

One thing AI is particularly good at is pattern recognition. It’s capable of analyzing vast amounts of data much faster than a human, and picking out trends. This is particularly good when it comes to analyzing and collating data from various platforms in order to profile customers.

Right now, marketing agencies and business can use these AI learnings to reform strategies. In the future though, AI could possibly advance enough to take even bigger decisions on its own, like performing customer outreach and customizing content based on the receiver.

Contextual search ads

If you’re searching on Google or somewhere else, the platform is gathering anonymous data in order to better inform your future searches. That’s what e commerce sites do when they suggest ‘related products’, the AI there is looking at your budget and purchase trends in your search history, to better optimize the results shown to you. And as AI improves in its contextual understanding, search gets that much more nuanced. This would also allow digital marketers to more finely hone both their SEO tactics and search ad strategies, incorporating each consumer’s patterns into the mix.

Voice search and speech recognition

Voice search has grown drastically over the past couple of years, thanks to both how prolific digital assistants have becomes, as well as how accurate Siri and Google Assistant etc have become at speech recognition. That means more and more people are going to be searching using voice commands, opening up a completely new avenue of audio-based ads targeted at users with smart speakers, using contextual search engines to improve their accuracy.

Lead generation

Because AI is so good at sifting through troves of data to find specifics, it’s ideally suited to finding customers and clients based on data it’s receiving. AI empowers digital marketers to not just reach their target audience, but also to generate and sort new leads based on how receptive a consumer might be to a specific product.

Every digital marketing specialist needs to know about AI

Whether you think its creepy or cool, artificial intelligence is the way forward, even in marketing. And now is the best time to get up to speed on the technology. You don’t have to be able to build your own AI; but learning to understand how it works will allow you to make decisions about where and how to use it, giving your business the critical edge it needs.