The attitude towards artificial intelligence in society is contradictory. Some welcome its rise, while others fear the emergence of a “higher intelligence” dominating humanity. As Stephen Hawking once said: “Artificial intelligence can be both man’s best friend and man’s worst enemy.” In other words, AI needs to be controlled and used as a tool that can turn out to be very useful and sometimes invaluable, including in the business field. Daria Vasileva, a digital marketing expert with international experience, who is also a mentor and author of professional publications, explains how it is used today.
AI: undeniable advantages for business
Initially, AI was used only to automate basic tasks and create simple chatbots. Today, however, its use has become increasingly diverse and crucial for digital marketing. Doug Talmadge, creator of Gradial, one of the most successful US startups in this field, put it this way: “We’re building tools that enable marketing moves at the speed of thought.” What kind of moves are these?
First and foremost, there is advanced analysis of large data sets. AI algorithms make it possible to build and even predict real customer behavioral patterns based on the results. This allows marketers to optimize sales tactics and strategies.
Hence, the second advantage is getting closer to the customer — the consumer of goods and services. By analyzing customer preferences and behaviors, AI offers personalized recommendations that can apply to individuals as well as target audiences. This is an invaluable tool for increasing people’s engagement and satisfaction, as well as for creating effective loyalty programs.
The third benefit is cost reduction and optimization of business processes. AI allows you to free your employees from routine, repetitive tasks, giving them the opportunity to solve more important problems that require a creative approach and out-of-the-box thinking. This increases staff productivity and efficiency by an order of magnitude.
In addition, AI allows you to reduce advertising costs through more accurate targeting and optimization, and relevant identification of target audiences that could become future customers. Coincidentally, a breakthrough event took place in the US last year: AI passed the so-called Turing advertising test, which examines the extent to which a machine can mimic a human: computer-generated adverts outperformed human-generated adverts.
Finally, one of the most important benefits is self-learning. Whereas the management of a company has to spend money on employee training and professional development, AI teaches itself in the process of functioning, which allows it to be constantly at the forefront of the challenges of modern marketing.
America’s Artificial Intelligence
Today, the widest application of AI in marketing and business process optimization is surely happening on the American market, the one that is most open to innovations. Moreover, the first cases emerged even before the worldwide debate about the possibilities of AI came to light.
For instance, The Washington Post has been using the Heliograf bot for eight years now, which initially facilitated news searches, but was later upgraded to generate not only news but also analyses. Google Performance Max, a system with AI elements, manages advertising on all Google platforms.
In neighboring Canada, one of the leading e-commerce platforms, Shopify, introduced its own neural network to improve user experience last year: the system not only provides personalized recommendations but also predicts trends and aligns the work of the online shop with them. According to US marketers, today AI technologies are most in demand in e-commerce, finance, advertising, healthcare, automotive, communications, real estate, and the hotel business.
Synergy: not competition, but cooperation
A fundamental question in modern digital marketing is whether AI should eventually replace marketers or content creation specialists. It seems more appropriate here not to oppose these two worlds but to talk about synergy. AI should not replace people, but instead complement and enhance their functions, since at this stage of development of machine intelligence, it is not yet able to surpass human creativity. In addition, the introduction of artificial intelligence should be in accordance with legislation and ethical norms; otherwise, a scandal could occur.
A classic example of this is the AI-generated video with Donald Trump, which once circulated on social networks. After that, Google required advertisers to label political advertisements created with the help of AI.
However, there are also positive examples in this segment. For instance, the American agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners created an advertising video for the Salvador Dali Museum in Florida, using the image of the famous artist with deepfake technologies. After Dali’s heirs gave their consent, the interactive tour of the museum was created, as if conducted by the maestro himself, and was a huge success.
Briefly the major
To summarize, let’s briefly outline the main toolkit of digital marketing that incorporates AI elements:
● Chatbots: the best platforms, such as ChatGPT, Bing, or Bard, allow marketers to understand customer queries and generate answers, conduct surveys, and distribute content thanks to deep natural language processing techniques.
● Customer segmentation and personalization: tools for analyzing the needs of the target audience are key to effective marketing campaigns that utilize personalized recommendations.
● Ad targeting: the use of AI allows marketers to identify target audiences, predict responses to contextual advertising, and increase conversion rates while optimizing the budget.
● Content generation: available tools, such as Copy.ai or ChatGPT, help create short texts, summaries, and other content.
About the author
Daria Vasileva is an accomplished digital marketing expert with 15 years of global experience. She has successfully helped enterprises plan and execute traffic acquisition and lead generation campaigns, create content marketing strategies, and increase brand awareness. Daria demonstrates expertise in performance marketing, e-commerce, website and mobile app development, social media marketing, search engine optimization, and email marketing, as well as loyalty programs.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/daria-vasileva-digital/en