How AI Is Reshaping Marketing

20 December 2018

 

We’re in an technological era where the lines between the real and digital worlds are increasingly blurred. From voice-enabled digital assistants to self-driving cars, artificial intelligence (AI) is enabling machines to take on more tasks previously only achievable by us humans.

 

Artificial Intelligence (AI), broadly speaking, is technology that simulates human thought processes. As with any other business functions, AI is being leveraged by marketers to automate tasks, improve workflows and glean customer insights. AI represents the fastest-growing technology that marketers expect to adopt within the next year, with 51% of marketers being active users and a further 27% planning to incorporate it by 2019i.

 

But how exactly can AI transform the function of marketing for your business? Let’s find out below:

Data analytics

As the volume of data being generated and recorded climbs exponentially since users started becoming active creators compared to passive consumers in the past, it’s necessary for your business to improve its efficiency in collecting and making sense of all this data.

Data cleaning, processing and mapping – basic processes of filtering and extracting data – take up chunks of time from your data analysts, but only make up a small slice of the value their work brings. As analysts, their value comes from analysing the data. Having AI perform the basic tasks frees them up to derive critical insights and develop new strategies from the data for your business.

“AI is unbiased and great for transparency. They process data independently and can be more accurate in understanding what people really need, usually even better than people themselves.”

 – Dave Sanderson, CEO at Singapore-based AI company Nugitii

One such application of AI is in aiding social listening. Social media intelligence tools can comb through social media platforms for all mentions of your brand, picking up and assessing user sentiments for you by associating certain words written in user posts to positive or negative emotions.

Programmatic buying

Programmatic advertising leapt into the ad tech scene as the first truly automated method of buying advertising inventory. If your company employs programmatic buying, you’d know about its ability to improve efficiency and scale significantly.

 

While programmatic buying generally identified past trends based on audience data and consumer actions to select who to serve impressions to for maximum ad relevance and experience, AI brings in the element of prediction.

 

For instance, you can estimate the probability that a consumer will respond to your ad to determine how much to bid for an opportunity. You can take data such as those from Internet-of-Things devices and combine them with deep contextual analysis of webpages to make better bidding decisions and customised marketing messages.

Content marketing at scale

Another area where AI is making progressive developments is content marketing. Content marketing - creating and distributing useful relevant content to connect with audiences – is boosted by AI in areas of planning and research.

 

AI-enabled content tools can help you perform contextual search, extracting and summarising resources on the Web. They can even analyse what types of content your audience is seeking and point you to well-performing content in that area. You will then be able to quickly identify a topic and develop an outline of the supporting points to build from.

 

Through AI’s implementation in search engines, your viewers’ experiences are enhanced by being directed to content that are more relevant and customised to their interests. As such, instead of creating content with mass appeal for the sake of better search ranking, you would be creating content that speaks directly to the right audience – meaning more qualified traffic for your brand.

Chatbots

Chatbots are the next marketing wave that will be around for years. Using natural-language processing – a branch of AI that automates interpretation and generation of human language –  chatbots are programmed for users to interact with via text messaging.

 

You can employ chatbots to respond to queries around the clock and even enhance customer service support by troubleshooting to resolve issues. According to a HubSpot report, 71% of the people surveyed are willing to use messaging apps to get customer assistanceiii. This is predominantly because they want their problem solved fast, without having to navigate through help pages or wait days for a response email.

 

They can also improve your brand’s engagement with your customers through personalised communications, at the same time lending a voice to your brand. Beauty and cosmetics retailer Sephora created a chatbot on Kik that asks users who interacted with it to take a quiz, providing insights on what makeup style the user favours. The chatbot will then draw from these learnings to provide customised beauty tips and product recommendations.

 

While still a relatively new development in marketing, AI is here to stay. Marketers are already seeing irrefutable results of its ability to increase marketing efficiency. Especially with the agility that your business need to have in order to keep up with the shifting digital landscape, AI lends you a timely helping hand with less complex tasks so that your marketing team can focus on performing higher-value activities to drive your business forward.

For more information on how StarHub can help to enable AI solutions in your organisation, please visit www.starhub.com/ai.

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