The adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) influences the growth of many industries such as Healthcare, Fintech, Digital Marketing, Information Technology, Logistics, and supply chain, Agriculture, to name a few. Among the broad array of industries, AI is proving to be a real game-changer in the digital marketing sector.
Last year, Google Analytics rolled out the GA4 tag in addition to the UA (Universal Analytics) tag, based on machine learning technology. With this technology, the data can be manipulated over the website.
Considering that user behaviour and data analytics play an important role in digital marketing, leveraging AI will be the most efficient way to maximize business operations. Especially when you consider building strategies for SEO(Search Engine Optimization), PPC(Pay Per Click) and Social Media Marketing, Artificial Intelligence stands out as the trendy choice.
What is Artificial Intelligence and how can it help businesses?
AI is the process of practising machines/ computer systems to mimic human intelligence. Although there is no guarantee for 100% perfection, it does get the operations done by making cognitive decisions based on its understanding of the huge data.
In addition to numerous benefits, AI technology provides businesses, especially digital marketers, with accurate results. This is the primary reason businesses implement AI.
Artificial Intelligence is often introduced in its bare name AI. So many don’t have any idea of its three tiers. AI can be split into three tiers as explained below,
- Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) – It is designed to achieve specific tasks, and these techniques usually perform slightly less when compared to the Human Brain.
- Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – AGI has become companies’ favourite since these techniques accomplish tasks similar to a human brain.
- Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) – We can term it as the future technology. The ASI interprets billions of data to provide accurate decisions and thinks beyond what a human brain can do.
Here are a few Statistics on how Artificial Intelligence helps businesses.
- 80% of technical leaders have recommended AI to be implemented in business for high productivity
- AI technology is boosting up to 40% in productivity rate.
- Almost 85% of businesses don’t have a direct connection/ human workforce to handle their customer’s queries. AI-powered chatbots have become a great alternative for humans.
- Even 42% of consumers worldwide accept that AI has changed their life.
Why Digital Marketing Needs Artificial Intelligence Technology:
After the recent pandemic, people are rethinking their attitude towards digital adoption. The digital pathway has changed for the better from a company with hundreds of crores of turnover to a common shopkeeper looking for digital mediums to promote their businesses.
The adoption of Google My Business by the shopkeepers is an excellent example of how digital transformation has taken place in the past two years. Every industry has their own marketing channels.
As suggested earlier, AI has a huge part to play in the digital marketing sector. With its ability to make accurate results quickly, digital marketers are fervent to implement AI in their marketing strategies that include,
- Voice Search
- Semantic Search
- Chatbots
- Content Creation
- Marketing Automation
- Ad Targeting
- Lead Segmentation
1. Voice Search:
A recent survey revealed that 98% of iPhone users use AI based voice assistant “Siri” instead of the type & search. The survey also found that 96% of Android users use “Google Assistant” to search for places, products and other information on the Internet.
Based on the surveys that disclose the positive side of voice search, Google has recently given its green signal to optimizing websites in favour of voice searches. Many SEO services companies focus on building content that can be in favour of user intent.
Ashkar Gomez, Founder of 7 Eagles – SEO Services Company in India, stated, “After the BERT update, Google used AI engineered NLP (Natural Language Programming) to understand the user intent and provide the search result in the query language (tone).”
As he states, Google now understands the human tone of voice with 95% accuracy, which ultimately helps Google Users get more specific information for all the voice search queries.
Also, it is important to note:: “The most commonly used voice search term is ‘near me’ which obviously has a very high search volume. But not to neglect, the term is easy to rank”.
2. Semantic Search:
In contrast to the traditional way of searching, search engines understand the intent and the contingency meaning of the query through the semantic search process. Whenever Google updates its Algorithms, there will be scope for SEO. Likewise, Google included semantic search implications in its recent updates,
- Hummingbird Update in September 2015
- RankBrain update in October 2015
- BERT update in October 2019
All these suggest search engines employ Artificial Intelligence with the help of Machine Learning to understand billions of data in a second. Interestingly, search engines try to check certain parameters of the users before fetching the SERP(Search Engine Result Page) results. These parameters include,
- Search History
- Existing Data stored
- Location of User
- Context and Setting of Browser
- Seasonal Enquiries
- Local Search key terms
- No of the time, users search for a specific website
- Understanding the exact synopsis of the search query.
It is always recommended to optimize a website for more semantic searches. You can achieve this for your website too by,
- Understanding your audience psychology, and demographics.
- Implementing Schema Markup to increase CTR
- Using long-tail keywords to optimize web pages to appear on specific searches
- Working on Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords
3. Chatbots
Chatbots are computer programming techniques engineered by Artificial Intelligence and NLP. They have a huge role in the digital marketing space as they are incorporated to understand the user’s queries and answer accordingly.
Being a valuable human representative, it can handle a huge number of customers simultaneously. These chatbots are of great help when they are embedded on websites. They offer 24/7 service and can also take up a live chat with visiting customers. This technology brings a positive impact when there is no one to attend the chat. Therefore it increases customer interaction and boosts business value.
As these chatbots are engineered by AI, they are almost equivalent to the human brain. Therefore they are able to respond with personalized answers to the customer’s queries.
Janaki Aravind, an SEO Analyst at DigitalSEO, the leading digital marketing company in Chennai, remarks that “When using a chatbot to have a conversation with users, it gives a pleasant experience to them.
This will help improve the reputation of the website”. She also feels that “AI chatbots help users without getting distracted or tired; this is beneficial especially when most support teams are overburdened with other tasks”.
User experience, bonus rate, and dwell time are what a search engine looks for when ranking a page. So if you have an online business, it’s time to create chatbots to achieve a great customer experience.
4. Content Creation
Every digital marketer agrees to the fact that content is the king of marketing, and it has a huge role in bringing the right audience to your platform. No matter which forms the content is disseminated, it has created a massive impact on traditional and digital marketing.
Content is the sole actor that helps with promoting, educating and engaging the targeted audience. Content is often meant as the solution to the user’s problem.
The Content Creation space is now grabbed by the AI-engineered Natural language Generation (NLG) technology. With the use of this emerging technology, one can deliver upto 2000 articles in a second.
It is also interesting to note that these articles will be in the natural language of the users they target, so connecting with the target audience is just a piece of cake now. In recent times, industries that deal with spontaneous updates like News, Stock Market, Sports stories, etc., are using AI-engineered content creation techniques.
Content curation is another set of tasks AI can do brilliantly in a flash. With the help of Artificial Intelligence, anybody who is aiming to curate data for a specific topic can benefit. It gathers and organizes only the relevant data from the Internet and present, therefore saving your time.
There is no surprise; big brands like Amazon, Alibaba, etc., are using AI to showcase the recommended items/ products on the customer’s screen once they enter a query. Therefore AI helps to create a meaningful experience for the users.
If knowing all these is not enough, heed to the fact that it is sufficient to elucidate the importance of content curation in the near future. “Content marketing will be the future of the Digital Marketing Industry, and AI has already acquired 40% of the Content Marketing tools and techniques.”
5. Marketing Automation
One of the digital marketing avenues every marketer wants to explore. When it comes to user behaviour and data analytics, marketing automation would be their first choice. Digital marketing practices like Email Marketing, Ad Campaigns, Social Media activities scheduling are at the top of the list.
Automation tools deeply influence these activities. When the above activities are automated, the cost spent on the workforce will be slashed down by 200-300%.
After realizing AI benefits, many companies started investing in SaaS products embedded with Artificial Intelligence for Automated Marketing excellence. With these tools, enterprises can automate marketing workflows, emails, tasks assignment, scheduling and custom audiences creation for the Ad campaigns. Its human-like intelligence recommends a personalized message for any campaign to be launched and gives suggestions in decision-making.
Marketing automation is ideal when there are many stages involved in the acquisition process. With effective implementation, businesses can set up multiple campaigns and track the customer’s journey.
Additionally, the integration of AI with other tools helps understand big data and interpret them into meaningful insights. Here is a list of leading AI powered Marketing Automation tools.
- Astro
- Clara
- ActionIQ
- Adobe Audience Manager
- Cloudsight
- Acrolinx
- Automated Insights
- analytics
6. Ad Targeting
Ad targeting is one of the major skills required for every digital marketer. Every business owner needs initial sales, better insights and high numbers of customers to grow their business. Ads help in this regard.
But remember, ads work well only if you are ready to burn your budget. But the good news is that you can choose native banner ads, display ads, or search ads that come as the cost-effective option.
Since Google and Facebook are empowered by AI in segmenting target audiences by user’s interest, demographics, behaviours, and retargeting, it is good to work with AI based tools to lower the cost per acquisition by the data captured from previous campaigns. But, it is useful only if you are able to earn millions of dollars to get the customers to the top of the funnel.
Some of the AI tools used for Ad campaigns are, Reveal Bot, Zalster, aitarget, Trapica, ReFUEL4, etc.
7. Lead Segmentation
As a digital marketer, it is important to do many campaigns specifically for lead generation. When considering effective lead generation, clustering leads is very easy when we work with limited/ minimum data; however, as we keep on illustrating, it is AI that has the potential to deal with billions of data. Let’s know the classification of leads first,
- Hot Leads – The customers who are ready to acquire your service or products
- Warm Leads – The customers who are likely ready to buy, certainly not now.
- Cold Leads – The customers who have no interest in your product or service.
Lead segmentation is not a cakewalk; it needs more and more work to achieve results. However, with the help of AI, you can automatically segment millions of leads into these three categories in a minute.
This methodology is also known as Lead scoring. It will reduce our efforts wasted on focusing on warm and cold leads instead of hot leads. The popular lead scoring tools are HubSpot, Infer, PipeCandy, Maroon.ai, etc.
Wrapping up:
- There are many areas where AI has already made its impact and is still acquiring more space.
- However, the adoption of AI technology in digital marketing is a little higher and getting broader day by day.
- AI is going to be a powerful tool with fascinating features, and its uses in digital marketing will only grow.
- While plenty of businesses are running behind AI, this is high time for any digital marketer to understand AI and invest in it.
- Hope this article helped you with insights on Artificial Intelligence and its role in Digital Marketing Growth.
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