AI in Marketing: How to Use Artificial Intelligence for Effective Marketing

By Henri Gisclard-Biondi

Published: April 15, 2021

The rapid progress of Artificial Intelligence has reshaped many industries and businesses and will continue to do so in the near future. But what about AI in marketing?

Marketing has arguably been one of the areas most affected by the rise of AI, as its capabilities have enabled marketers to devise innovative marketing strategies.

Are you ready to leverage AI technologies to create more personalized marketing campaigns and increase returns? Buckle up for the best AI-enhanced marketing techniques.

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An overview of AI

What does AI mean?

Artificial Intelligence or AI for short refers to technologies designed to replicate behaviors associated with the human brain. These can perform tasks usually attributed to real people, and adopt a human-like approach to problem-solving and learning.

AI can be considered as a simulation of human intelligence: AI-powered machines are not programmed the same way as regular smartphones or computers. To some extent, they tend to have the ability to solve new problems, without the need for programmers to embed a solution in their code beforehand for them to do so.

This is this adaptive process that has enabled cutting-edge applications and tools to be derived from AI technologies as it was becoming smarter.

The evolution of Artificial Intelligence

The concept of Artificial Intelligence was mere science-fiction a few decades ago. Today, it has taken a more tangible aspect and is infiltrating all kinds of businesses, from financial services to healthcare, and even our daily lives.

Though sentient robots aren’t a reality yet, some services we use every day couldn’t be possible without AI. These include voice searches and smart assistants (Google Assistant, Siri…), which heavily rely on accurate natural language processing.

In the future, more and more jobs could be partially automated or even replaced with AI.

Experts predict AI will evolve in 3 phases:

ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence): at this stage, AI is comparable to the infant stage in humans. It remains limited to a specific field and can only perform basic tasks.
AGI (Artificial General Intelligence): this is the transition stage before an exponential expansion of the capabilities of AI technologies. This “adult stage” is the phase cutting-edge AI solutions are at the moment. Their abilities cover more areas and become more complex.
ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence): this final stage marks the moment AI surpasses human intelligence and becomes able to perform tasks and conduct reasonings more complex than any human brain ever could. While some are confident AI progress is headed in this direction, others doubt we will ever be able to achieve this level of artificial intelligence.

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How can AI be used in marketing?

The main advantage provided by AI is to enhance the efficiency of marketing teams. It is often used for marketing automation and to gain time in all kinds of marketing processes.

Data analysis and marketing intelligence

AI has the ability to parse and analyze vast amounts of data thanks to machine learning. This technology consists of teaching AIs how to process data by feeding it a lot of said data (big data), making it more and more efficient in the process.

After this training is complete, the AI can analyze different datasets and find conclusions on its own, more quickly than traditional computers and without having been hard-wired to interpret signals one way or another.

Deep learning takes this to another level with more advanced AIs. It is used in technologies such as image recognition. However, AI-powered technologies, when applied to business, can be remarkable intelligence tools for marketers. They can reveal insight into customer behaviors and intents from the pile of data collected online through digital marketing.

Marketing automation and customer relationship management

Its resemblance to human behaviors also makes for warmer interactions and the delivery of human-like answers in real-time. The ability of AIs to process natural language makes it possible to create dynamic chatbots to deliver a great customer experience and streamline the customer journey.

Artificial intelligence and deep learning can be used to automate email marketing campaigns and other communications. This is made possible by its ability to learn how to recognize patterns and triggers to determine the best time to send an email or the preferences and interests of an individual customer or lead.

Thanks to machine learning and AI-powered marketing automation, marketers can foster customer engagement with a more personalized approach.

7 ways to leverage the power of AI in marketing

Incorporating AI into your marketing strategies can improve ROI and boost performance. Find out how Artificial Intelligence can be used to make marketing smarter and more efficient with the right marketing tools.

1. Access high-quality B2B data

The web is full of valuable information you may use to generate more leads or personalize your sales pitch with the latest insight. But the sheer scale of the Internet and the changing, complex nature of human interaction happening on professional social media such as LinkedIn mean advanced AI is needed to extract and sort the most relevant data.

Luckily, there are ways for your company to access sizable pools of B2B data, carefully curated to contain up-to-date contact information and context.

🛠 ZoomInfo employs automated machine learning to constantly scan corporate websites, news article, SEC filings, job postings, and other sources for information about industries, locations, revenue, and more. This allows you to leverage this data to close more sales and engage leads more effectively.

2. Analyze customer behavior

AI can help you analyze data collected across a variety of sources. This in turn ensures you can create coherent customer relationship management strategies.

Artificial Intelligence is able to process all kinds of signals left by users when browsing your website or carrying out their daily activities. You can perform a detailed analysis based on:

Which pages they visit on your website,
How much time they spend on each page,
What sections they find the most interesting,
What products they buy…

A careful analysis of these signals will give you the ability to map out the customer journey and deduce what your leads and customers need. This means you could streamline your sales funnel and sharpen your sales pitch to close more sales while saving time and money.

What’s more, AI can assist you with lead scoring and understand patterns to prevent churn by “guessing” when a customer is about to leave for the competition.

3. Launch personalized email campaigns

Marketers have long sought to deliver more personalized content to prospects and customers. AI can help accomplish a finer customer segmentation, all the way down to the individual level. Based on behavioral analysis, it is possible to determine which topics would best suit each lead to curate the content pushed to this individual.

But the benefits of AI for email marketing don’t stop there. It can also learn from each round of emails to adjust parameters dynamically for each recipient. It can refine schedules to send emails at the right time and frequency.

More relevant content that adapts to individual habits is more effective at engaging customers: more personalization means improving KPIs such as opening rates, CTR and overall customer satisfaction.

4. Improve your content marketing campaigns

Another form of marketing AI can improve is content marketing. It can do so in two distinct ways.

In the same vein as email marketing, it can improve the relevance of your content by pushing better, more personalized recommendations for similar content users may like. You may have seen it in action across the web, on websites such as YouTube, or more recently on TikTok, known to entice users to keep browsing with carefully curated videos, tailored to their interests.

Another way AI could revolutionize content creation in marketing is by assisting content creators or even generating content itself. Artificial Intelligence can suggest words or even complete sentences when writing any type of content. It can also suggest edits to make videos look sharper or more vibrant, as well as to edit entire objects out of a picture.

In some cases, it can even generate content from raw data that mimics human writing. For example, it can write news reports or product descriptions without human intervention. Some expect Artificial Intelligence to take up a more prominent role as a content creator in the future, especially on the web.

🛠 A simple way to test out AI-assisted writing is by using Google Docs. Its smart engine can suggest words and sentences dynamically as you write, so you can focus on your ideas rather than wording or spelling. It also provides advanced collaborative functionalities to work together from anywhere.

5. Build a chatbot

Chatbots, also called conversational AI, can help you build a more interactive relationship with visitors and provide 24H customer service at a minimal cost. AI can be used to recognize the meaning of users typed in or spoken by the user and deliver the best answer from a pool of helpful tips and explanations.

Technologies such as Natural Language Generation (NLG) even allow advanced AI to create a personalized answer based on the meaning and context of the request. A chatbot can be used to handle Frequently Asked Questions, welcome visitors, promote special offers, collect valuable data and more.

🛠 Professional chat and chatbot software allow you to build your own chatbot quickly and use it to add a human touch to your website. You can enjoy great returns with this interactive, intuitive way of delivering personalized value to your visitors.

6. Find the right price and budget

The volatility and constant evolution of supply and demand make it hard to estimate the right price in real-time. However, machine learning algorithms can solve this problem by running and analyzing the results of countless tests.

This supercharged A/B testing can help you optimize the price of your products and services, but also reduce your marketing budget. Indeed, AI-assisted testing can help you find the most effective marketing channels and best target audiences, to update your marketing strategy accordingly quicker and more efficiently.

It can then maximize returns by adjusting the budget allocated to each action. For example, it could help you bid the optimal amount of money for your PPC ads campaigns in Google Ads or similar services.

7. Predict the future and make better decisions

Of course, even the most advanced AI could not come close to predicting the future in detail. But when AI works hand-in-hand with Sales Intelligence software and Business Intelligence (BI) tools, they can make decision-making easier and smarter.

Sales & business intelligence solutions are designed to collect, organize and present data in relevant reports for leaders to design strategies and make predictions. The capabilities of AI can help these tools make better forecasts by enhancing predictive analytics, and ultimately present the results in a more user-friendly way.

Businesses today all rely on BI to optimize their processes, boosting ROI and efficiency. One can only imagine the possibilities offered by smarter AI for businesses when applied to these already groundbreaking solutions!