The world has come a long way in terms of technological advancements, and AI is one of them. Marketers have also taken advantage of these

improvements, implementing AI in digital marketing strategies.

All of these are designed to understand consumer needs and preferences and deliver customized customer experiences.

AI digital marketing strategies can help you deliver improved customer experiences. More than that, they can help you save both time and money.

Disclosure: This content may contain a few affiliate links, which means if you click on them, I will get a commission (without any extra cost to you).

What is Artificial Intelligence?

To put it simply, artificial intelligence refers to the intelligence showcased by machines.

Artificial intelligence empowers machines to think about, respond to, and perform tasks like humans. It also helps machines learn from experience and adjust to new input.

Why is artificial intelligence becoming increasingly popular?

  • It increases precision and accounts for more accuracy and fewer errors, which means greater work efficiency.
  • Artificial intelligence analyzes more and deeper data for valuable insights.
  • It can add to the capabilities of various devices with its smart, useful algorithms. GPS trackers, voice assistants, and home automation systems are just a few examples.
  • AI also adapts to new input through progressive machine learning algorithms.
  • An application supported by AI can help automate business processes, personalize service delivery, and provide business-specific insights.

With its exceptional ability to analyze data and learn from it, artificial intelligence is revolutionizing industries. 

Several industries have a high demand for AI capabilities, including medical, banking, and marketing.

Let’s take a closer look at the future of AI digital marketing – the challenges, solutions, benefits, and adoption of artificial intelligence.

The Relationship Between AI and Digital Marketing

In the early days of AI, marketers and businesses were skeptical about the use of AI in their marketing strategies.

It was larger companies like Amazon and Spotify who successfully implemented AI in various ways throughout their marketing and consumer experience, which led to smaller companies taking notice and implementing AI as well.

AI has a lot to do with creating the best user experience using relevant data like shopping behavior, websites visited, and page times to be able to recommend products specific consumers will be interested in.

Now, there is a strong relationship between AI and digital marketing, and it’s a crucial part of many digital marketing strategies.

How is AI Changing the Face of Digital Marketing?

From Google’s RankBrain and Voice Search to personalized Amazon recommendations, artificial intelligence is changing the face of today’s digital landscape.

With effective data analysis and the ability to adapt to input, artificial intelligence is taking over the human role of identifying marketing trends. 

Brands and marketers use AI digital marketing to save time and resources through automated digital marketing services.

How AI digital marketing can provide give you a competitive edge:

  • Helps You Understand Your Audience Better: AI can analyze data to easily predict the buying behaviors and decisions of your target customers.
  • Improves User Experience: You can use AI data to provide your audience with what they actually need.
  • More Effective Marketing: AI helps you end the guesswork. You can create a more effective digital marketing strategy for your business with artificial intelligence’s data-driven analysis.
  • Increases Productivity: Using AI algorithms, you can automate a number of repetitive tasks. This can help you increase productivity and save you both time and money.
  • Increases ROI: AI empowers decision-making and also helps you create better-performing content. Using AI digital marketing strategies helps you reach out to the right audience with deals they can’t refuse.

AI is quickly becoming popular among businesses, with 38% of consumers saying that using AI will soon improve customer service. And 73% of them are open to businesses that use artificial intelligence.

How Can You Implement AI Digital Marketing for Your Business?

Using AI digital marketing strategies can transform the way you engage with your audience. It can help you drive relevant traffic, acquire new customers, increase sales, and retain your existing customers.

Here’s how you can use AI technology to process your customers’ needs, wants, and preferences into personalized customer experiences.

Chatbots

Chatbots are the biggest example of the use of artificial intelligence technology. They act as a virtual assistant for consumers whether you ask Alexa to play your favorite song or Siri to set an alarm.

There are several AI chatbot programs that can help you engage with your customers in a better way. You can add useful chatbots to your websites, emails, apps, and text messages.

You can use chatbot programs to reach out to your customers or respond to their queries. 

They have the ability to answer the most common questions that your customers might have. And they can engage in human-like conversations that improve customer experience.

Chatbots can also help you collect leads while you sleep. With them, you do not have to worry about losing your valuable prospects anymore.

Don’t believe me?

Well, take the example of Collect.chat.

This interactive chatbot changes the conversation with consumers based on the way they communicate. It helps you collect customer information so that they don’t have to deal with passive web forms.

It also gathers feedback by measuring experiences and asking opinions. You offer customers richer experiences, capture their intent, and identify and engage valuable leads.

Coffee giant, Starbucks, is one of the brands making efficient use of this AI digital marketing strategy to supplement human employees.

When you need your favorite coffee with minimal human interaction, the Starbucks Barista bot for Facebook Messenger has you covered. It orders you coffee, just the way you like it.

The bot even understands complex orders. You can not only order a simple “latte” but also place complex orders with special requests. The bot easily allows you to order coffee like a “double tall mocha nonfat extra hot no whip.”

Personalized Product Recommendations

Many retail and ecommerce brands use artificial intelligence technology to track their customers’ preferences, habits, and buying behavior.

Want to know why?

Because insights they get help them make suggestions on products and services that their customers may be interested in.

Knowing your customers’ buying habits can help you craft a more effective digital marketing strategy. You can promote products that your customers may actually want to purchase.

AI digital marketing and data analysis strategies are far quicker and more accurate than any human capability. 

It empowers you to personalize the user experience for your audience, engage them, and increase ecommerce sales.

But how?

You can leverage predictive analytics to figure out what your customers might like. 

This is done by collecting and analyzing the details of their past engagements with your brand. 

However, to do this right, you need to leverage AI-powered data analytics tools that can sift through the massive amount of data and give you powerful insights.

Ecommerce giant, Amazon, uses AI-powered recommendation engines to effectively provide personalized suggestions. 

These recommendations play a vital role in scaling up sales and contributing to their revenue growth.

Amazon’s recommendation algorithms consider their users’ buying history, items in their cart, items they’ve liked, and what other users bought or viewed.

Enhanced Shopping Experience

AI digital marketing holds the potential to change the way we shop. 

Many brands are already experimenting with different versions of artificial intelligence to enhance the shopping experience.

Instead of browsing images of products with augmented reality, people can actually “try” products before you buy them.

stylus enhanced shopping
Image via Stylus

British multinational clothing retailer, TopShop, has used this AI technology to create virtual fitting rooms for their store in Moscow.

In this store, customers can check out how a dress looks on them by simply standing in front of a screen and a camera.

Interesting right?

When the customer stands in front of the large screen, they can see their own virtual version. Artificial intelligence allows customers to “try” different products without having to step into a fitting room.

While AI digital marketing is already popular in retail, other industries are slowly opening up to the use of AI technology.

Swedish furniture giant, IKEA, is taking AI digital marketing one notch higher. 

They are launching an app based on AR that will enable customers to visualize IKEA products in their own homes.

On the app, customers will be able to input the dimensions of their room. After that, they will see different products based on various designs and life stages.

When a customer selects a product, they will be able to view it as it would appear in their own homes. 

To make a purchase, a customer can directly order a product from the app. 

So, with AR, shoppers can shop for home furniture without leaving the comfort of their own homes.

Better Advertising

To make any marketing campaign successful, the prerequisite is to reach out to the right audience. 

With AI digital marketing, it becomes easy for businesses to target people.

Artificial intelligence collects user data, analyzes it, and predicts future behavior. With this information, brands can target ads according to the user's preferences.

In addition to this, AI digital marketing opens up opportunities for creating innovative ad campaigns. American shoe manufacturer, Airwalk, used AR and geolocation to promote their limited edition shoes, Airwalk Jim.

better advertising
Image via Gigaom

For this campaign, they used an AR app to create invisible pop-up stores in New York and Los Angeles. 

To access these stores, people had to download their app and go to either Venice Beach or Washington Square Park.

At these locations, users could find virtual shoes that were linked via GPS. Those who located these stores were then taken to Airwalk’s e-commerce website.

To complete their purchase, they had to enter a passcode link that was given to them on the site. Such innovation is only possible with AI digital marketing.

AI-Powered Website Builders

AI in digital marketing promises to take all the labor out of website design. AI-powered website design platform, The Grid, can design a website for you based on user data and how they interact with your content.

With The Grid, the only thing that business owners have to work on is the website content. Everything from colors and content blocks to web pages is taken care of by their artificial intelligence designer, Molly.

Just like Alexa and Siri, people can talk to Molly to discuss the design of their website. Using The Grid, website owners can expect to finish their website design faster.

ai powered website builders
Image via Wix

Other AI-powered website design platforms include FireDrop and Wix Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI).

FireDrop’s artificial intelligence designer, Sacha, can help website owners build landing pages. Sacha is programmed to accept your commands to make the design process easier.

With Wix ADI, website designers can look at AI designers without disturbing their current website. It’s meant to give website owners a feel of what AI designers can do.

Wix ADI picks up information about your business from the internet. Based on this, it divides the information into sections and designs pages.

Currently, most of these AI-powered website builders are still in their early years. However, you can expect them to become more sophisticated in the coming years. These website builders are the future of AI digital marketing.

Targeted Marketing

Targeted marketing is a marketing strategy that encompasses using collected information from current customers to decide who should see your ads.

You’re usually paying a price per ad shown to a user, which is why it’s important that the people who see your ad are worth the price.

AI can be used to automate this process. Firstly, AI is able to collect data from users who frequently visit your pages, watch your content, or comment on your social media feeds. A lot of times, this can be done on social media pages.

This information can come from someone’s social media accounts, email accounts, or login information for the websites they visit.

Some information like their age, gender, and location are part of these profiles online, which AI can collect.

AI can also collect information from cookies. Cookies are small pieces of text sent by a browser, which help the website the user is visiting remember information from their visit, which in turn helps the website make their next visit a better user experience.

AI can use this information to offer the person a customized experience by recommending products or making browsing the website faster by pre-adding login information or product pages.

AI for CRM

Content relationship management systems are designed to help businesses study and analyze their relationships with their customers, employees, and suppliers.

There are plenty of CRM tools at your disposal online, and most of them use AI in one form or another.

AI is used to gather customer information and data. It then uses that to find ways to improve customer relations and sales channels.

AI can do plenty of things to better your customer relations like:

  • Manage data becoming increasingly too large for humans to manage
  • Manage customer relations more efficiently by automating CMR tasks
  • Accelerated content production
  • AI interprets customer usage patterns faster and better to create optimal user experiences

Best Examples of AI in Marketing

Next, I’ll share some of the best examples of the use of AI in digital marketing.

Starbucks

Starbucks created a loyalty card and mobile app in 2016 that frequent customers can purchase. They can then use it to collect points, which in turn can be traded for gifts, vouchers, and discounts.

starbucks 2
Image via Geekwire

Starbucks is using AI to record the details of users' purchases. Specific information is collected such as time of day, day of the week, location, what they ordered, and even what the weather is like that day! This in turn is used to create personalized recommendations for customers in the future.

Here is a video posted by Microsoft on YouTube about Starbucks and how they’re using AI for digital marketing.

Alibaba

Alibaba, the third-largest retail store in the world, makes good use of AI digital marketing.

In 2018, they launched their first official AI store called, FashionAI, in Hong Kong. This concept store was created to test their idea to streamline the fashion retail experience through the use of AI.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uccIK78flx4

In this video from Alibaba’s YouTube Channel, they show the shop in Hong Kong and how it works. It creates a personalized experience for shoppers by having them log in with the mobile app by scanning a QR code or through face recognition.

Shoppers walking around the shop can then look at clothing, whilst the smart mirrors show the clothing piece, pricing, and clothing that matches the piece. It even shoes where other clothing in the store can be found.

Amazon

In 2019 Amazon launched Amazon Personalize.

Amazon Personalize is a machine learning service that Amazon offers to developers to help them create personalization at an individual level.

It’s the same personalization technology used by Amazon.com for their recommendations.

FAQs

Q1. What is AI in digital marketing?

A. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the technology that deals with creating intelligent machines that can think and talk like humans. This technology has numerous applications in the field of digital marketing.

Q2. How AI is used in digital marketing?

A. Artificial intelligence is currently being used to optimize digital marketing campaigns by improving almost all aspects of them. From understanding customers better to analyzing campaign performance, AI helps improve digital marketing campaigns in numerous ways.
 
Here are some of the most common uses of AI in digital marketing:
 
– Gain comprehensive customer insights
– Understand the latest industry and content creation trends
– Personalize marketing communications
– Automate routine tasks and processes
– Generate, nurture, and convert leads

Q3. Will AI replace digital marketers?

A. While AI technology can certainly automate a lot of manual tasks, it is still a long way from reaching a stage where it replaces marketers altogether.

Q4. How will AI change digital marketing and advertising?

A. AI will make digital marketing and advertising more accurate and targeted. It will help optimize campaigns and deliver a better return on investment than ever before.

Q5. Is machine learning the future of digital marketing?

A. Machine learning is definitely proving useful in the field of digital marketing and may very well be the future. In any case, digital marketers will leverage machine learning technology more in the future and will rely heavily on machine learning to improve their campaigns.

Q6. Why do companies use AI in digital marketing?

A. Companies have started to see the benefits that AI provides and use it to improve their campaign performance. AI has the potential to transform the field of digital marketing altogether, making each marketing strategy much more targeted and effective.

Q7. What is the best tool for AI in marketing?

A. The most popular AI tool in the field of marketing is chatbots. AI-powered chatbots are being increasingly used to engage website visitors and convert them into customers. AI chatbots can answer questions, help with site navigation, and even provide personalized product recommendations.

Q8. How is AI used in mobile marketing?

A. The most important use-case of AI in mobile marketing is to send personalized and targeted marketing messages. You can use AI to send personalized offers and discounts to your target customers, based on their demographics, locations, preferences, etc.
 
Not just that, you can also automate the process where users get push notifications based on certain triggers. So, AI can help make mobile marketing more targeted and efficient.

Ready to Embrace the Future of AI in Digital Marketing?

Artificial intelligence is an incredible technology that can work wonders for your brand. Using AI digital marketing strategies will help brands deliver improved customer experience and market your brand more effectively.

AI digital marketing can also change the way we build websites and interact with customers.

Have you used AI digital marketing strategies before? Please share your experiences in the comments section.

18 Comments

  1. Maninder Singh says:

    Very Informative and Insightful Article. Thanks a lot for sharing such information.

  2. Christy R. Dias says:

    Thank you so much for this significant information. I really appreciate it.

  3. This article is very informative, updated and transparent.
    What a useful information provided by this blog! It’s remarkable. Thanks for helping me out

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