If you want to stay at the forefront of your industry and ensure that your competitors aren’t swallowing up the audience that you’re supposed to have, staying up-to-date with the means and methods of digital marketing is vital. Right now, there is perhaps no change that is as potentially disruptive as the rise of AI. No longer a hypothetical, AI is here, and already the marketing landscape is starting to feel some huge ripples from it. Here are just a few of the ways it’s already changing how we market.
AI-Generated Assets Become The Norm
Digital content creation, across the board, is becoming increasingly AI-driven. With tools that are able to convincingly create written content, images, and even voiceovers, there has been a sudden and still growing swell of AI-generated marketing materials. Certain mediums, such as video, are still a little rough around the edges, but it’s not difficult to imagine that they will soon reach the same level of quality as other AI-generated content, too. There are still hallmarks of AI-generated content that the opponents of the technology are able to spot and call out, and without any true human insight guiding them, these materials can come across as generic or lacking in humanity, so it’s always important to use the technology with the requisite care, working alongside it, rather than having it work for you.
The Power Of Personalization
Personalization has been one of the golden geese for sales and marketing over the past couple of decades. The more specific you could make your marketing to the individual engaging with it, the more likely they were to connect with it on a real human level. Now, artificial intelligence enables hyper-personalization by analyzing vast datasets on consumer behavior, browsing history, and purchase patterns. Traditional segmentation relies on research, anticipation, and integrating data that has been gathered from the audience, but AI can adapt in real time, making sure that marketing messages align much more closely with the intent of the audience and the context they come across it in.
AI-Generated Snippets Dominate The Search Engine
The search engine has been one of the prime battlegrounds of brands looking to bring attention to their products and services. Rich snippets were one of the prizes of that arena, with high-ranking pages able to have their content promoted to the top of the page directly in the form of highlighted text snippets. However, now, AI-generated snippets are a lot more likely to appear instead of linking directly to a page. These snippets do still source information and text directly from websites, so there’s still a need to fight to get featured, but now brands need to speak specifically to what’s more likely to make AI notice and promote them.
Is AI Your Brand’s Audience Now?
The AI-powered snippets selected by Google as just an example of the role that AI is increasingly playing in the marketing landscape, that of the curator. A lot of people are using AI models as personal advisors or even replacements for search engines, directly asking it for insights, advice, and recommendations. As such, many of the leading Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) insights are looking at how companies now need to start creating content that is more likely to get picked up by AI models, rather than just appealing directly to the customer. Just as search engine optimization became a cornerstone of digital marketing, “AI model optimization” is likely to become the new discipline that dominates digital marketing interests for the years ahead.
More Incisive Analytics
As mentioned, AI is better able to create customer profiles on the fly with its ability to collect and integrate data from all manner of touchpoints. However, this can be valuable in more than just personalizing marketing messages. With AI-powered predictive analytics, marketers may be able to much better anticipate the behavior of their customers. By analyzing patterns across transactions, interactions, and social activity, AI can forecast which customers are most likely to churn, upgrade, or make new purchases. These insights allow brands to optimize campaigns, allocate budgets efficiently, and focus efforts where they will have the greatest impact. For instance, a subscription service could predict when a user might be losing interest, which can trigger the launch of retention campaigns.
Conversational Marketing Grows More Sophisticated
Perhaps one of the longest-standing uses of AI in general business is the deployment of the chatbot. These tools have come a long, long way from their humble origins. Initially, they were able to react to keywords and phrases and provide links or canned responses. Nowever, however, advanced AI assistants are able to be trained to guide the customer throughout the entirety of the buying process, answering complex product questions, and can even be built to upsell or cross-sell based on expressed or anticipated customer intent. As natural language processing improves, customers will expect seamless conversations across websites, apps, and messaging platforms. In the near future, conversational AI may replace or complement traditional digital interfaces, becoming a primary channel through which brands build trust and drive sales.
The Power Of Sentiment
One of the most important assets that any brand can have in its marketing efforts is an idea of the public sentiment around it. Companies that are out of sync with the public perception of them can easily make mistakes that worsen that perception, but being more aware of that sentiment helps them capitalize on the strengths of the reputation they have built, or change the record where that sentiment might be more negative. However, developing this understanding of sentiment requires a lot of data input, reading, and analyzing conversations, images, and videos. AI is becoming increasingly adept at doing this, which can offer brands the ability to develop their sentiment analysis processes with much less effort and investment.
Although the technology is still very much in its developing stages, the integration of AI into how we use the internet is already too deep to divorce. As more platforms continue to invest in the use and promotion of AI, it’s likely that it will only play a more prominent role in the future.
