By Devi Sayithi.K - Marketing Club Executive
With the growing times, it is not surprising to see the rise of artificial intelligence in almost every field or domain. It has been a blessing in disguise for marketers to understand the current dynamics of the market and the customers, analyze complex data and come up with content for their current marketing agendas. AI is a one-stop solution for all mundane marketing issues, thanks to its automation aspect of it. Be it machine learning or deep machine learning, AI has aided companies to understand their customer base and predict their behavior to further enrich their experiences.
But what is the role of AI in marketing anyway? How does it help a marketer? Does it make the job easy? Let us find out in this blog post!
The survey conducted by Tata Consultancy Services in 2017 showed how AI is used across all domains in an organization. However, if we particularly look at how it has helped in marketing, AI has helped companies in understanding and anticipate what their potential customer might buy in the future. Accordingly, personalized recommendations would be provided. This helps in pumping out the right products and services to your target market and hence improves customer-brand loyalty. Furthermore, AI in marketing has helped bring improvements in media buying. What is media buying you might wonder? As the name suggests, it is the process of buying media space or advertising space. One such example of media buying is programmatic advertising. It is a real-time bidding process for purchasing ads online. Google used this for the promotion of its app, Google Search, back in 2014 using programmatic advertising. They were able to experiment wisely and were able to build ad targeting with the help of real-time third-party data. This led to a whopping 50% increase in their brand awareness.
AI in marketing has also led to the procurement of advertising mediums such as websites, youtube, social media, and traditional media such as television, magazines, etc. Social media comments have further helped companies to notice any issues via monitoring and taking corrective measures to improve customer experiences. It has also helped in tailoring promotions, be it online or offline.
Every company that we can think of has implemented the use of AI in their marketing mechanisms. Take Starbucks for example, which takes the help of predictive analytics to identify and understand its customers' needs. But how do they collect this customer data? With the use of loyalty cards and its mobile application, Starbucks is able to track the details of its customer’s purchases with information relating to specific times and days. With the help of predictive analytics, Starbucks is able to tap and engage with its customer group through personalized recommendations and special offers from nearby stores. With the helping hand of AI, understanding the customer through complex data and automating mundane tasks have been a piece of the cake. At least, it is better than doing those manually which is very time-consuming for marketers, putting a time restriction on their creative minds.
Amazon is a no-shocker when it comes to the usage of machine learning and AI to understand customer preferences and provide further personalized recommendations. They have been at the top of the pyramid in understanding and predicting customer behavior by providing what the customer is or “might be” looking for. They have applied the same technology to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) component with the introduction of Amazon Personalize. This provides real-time recommendations to its AWS customers.
Artificial intelligence, thus, is becoming an important tool in every marketer’s toolbox. Right from creating unique, personalized approaches to enriching customer experiences to curating content that your customers can engage with, AI has got it all covered. It is common knowledge that companies that use AI will definitely have a competitive advantage. Imagine the impact there would be if there was rapid implementation in the domain of marketing. AI in marketing would go hand in hand to understand the customers and enrich their experiences.