Marketing is the process of creating, delivering, and communicating value to customers and stakeholders. It involves understanding customer needs and preferences, developing and implementing strategies, and measuring and optimizing results.
Marketing has always been essential for any business to attract, engage, and retain customers, as well as to increase brand awareness, loyalty, and profitability. But in this age of sameness, many marketers find themselves facing challenges as increasing competition, similar product technologies posit a challenge for brands to create a clear
differentiation from their competitors. This means that in order to stay in the race, they must deliver more value through personalized, relevant, and timely customers experiences across their journey.
AI in marketing
This is where AI marketing comes in. Recently, AI has taken the world by a storm revolutionizing all business activities and functions; one of which is marketing. AI marketing applies AI technologies to solve key marketing challenges and enhance marketing performance. This emerging type of marketing can help marketers in various ways. Looking at the first step of marketing involves understanding customer’s needs and behaviors to be able to tailor products to these specific needs, hence the necessity of data analysis.
In this vein, AI can collect, process, and analyze large and diverse data sets from multiple sources, such as web, social media, email, CRM, and IoT. AI can also generate insights and predictions from the data, such as customer segments, personas, behaviors, preferences, and intents. As a result, it can help marketers understand their customers better.
When it comes to marketing strategy, AI can also be used in targeting customers. In this sense, it can select and reach the right customers, at the right time, on the right channel, with the right message. That can be done using machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning. AI can also optimize the budget, bid, and placement of the campaigns, as well as test and evaluate the results.
In addition to that, AI can help marketers improve campaign effectiveness, efficiency, and return on investment (ROI), all without any fatigue or wasting resources.
Another interesting realm for AI to demonstrate its capabilities is communicating value to customers. AI can be a great tool for content generation. For instance, it can create and optimize content for different channels, formats, and purposes, such as headlines, captions, descriptions, blogs, emails, ads, videos, and images.
Additionally, it can tailor the content to the specific audience, context, and goal, using natural language processing, natural language generation, and computer vision. Even in ads, we see the presence of virtual influencers (VIs), which are fictional “computer generated avatars whose purpose is to exert influences on social media”.
VIs were found to be more effective and are perceived as more credible when endorsing a technical product such as a speaker, versus a personal product; yet, current brand collaborations with VIs expand beyond technical products, to include several personal products such as clothes, jewelry, shoes, and cosmetics.
However, these domains are expected to be further extended to more product categories.
In conclusion, we could safely say that AI marketing is not a futuristic concept, but rather a reality that is already happening. Many leading companies and brands are already using AI marketing to gain a competitive edge and achieve better outcomes. However, AI marketing is not a replacement for human marketers. They are a powerful tool that can augment and enhance their capabilities and creativity. It can also help marketers focus
on the strategic and creative aspects of marketing, rather than the tedious and repetitive tasks.
Finally, a noteworthy comment is that AI marketing truly is the future of marketing, and the future is now. Marketers who embrace AI marketing will be able to create more value for their customers and stakeholders, as well as achieve more success for their businesses and careers.
