Will AI Marketing Replace You or Make You Rich?

Spoiler alert: AI marketing can't replace you or make you rich overnight. But AI can help increase your marketing efficiency, find blind spots in your analytics, and give you a huge creative well to draw inspiration from.

In this article, we'll dive deep into eight different areas of marketing that you can improve with the help of an AI marketing tool. We'll also provide recommendations for which tools to use and even show you how you can prepare your team for the changeover and promote an AI-supported culture.

Let's get to it!

Introduction to AI marketing

Chances are, by now, you've probably heard about the tidal wave of AI that's been changing the landscape of marketing as we know it.

From tools that help us write blog posts and generate images to those that can almost entirely automate your customer service experience, there's seemingly an AI-based tool for everything. But what exactly is AI in the first place?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science that aims to create systems capable of performing tasks that would normally require human intelligence. These tasks include learning from experience (machine learning), understanding and responding to natural language (natural language processing), recognizing patterns (pattern recognition), solving problems, and making decisions.

In simple terms, AI is about making computers think and learn like humans. However, it's important to note that while AI can mimic human intelligence, it doesn't possess consciousness or genuine understanding — it processes data and makes decisions based on its programming and the information it has been trained on.

How AI is transforming marketing

While the applications for AI are limitless, marketers are finding it to be one of the biggest ways to scale their businesses by using it to automate tasks, provide deeper insights, and personalize customer interactions.

Here are just a few ways AI is changing the landscape of marketing as we know it

• Customer personalization: AI can analyze vast amounts of customer data to identify patterns in behavior, preferences, and purchasing habits. This allows businesses to offer personalized content, product recommendations, and targeted advertising, resulting in a more engaging customer experience.
• Automation: AI enables automation of repetitive tasks such as email marketing, social media posts, and even content creation. This allows marketers to focus on more strategic aspects of their campaigns.
• Efficient ad spending: AI can optimize advertising campaigns by analyzing performance data and automatically adjusting the campaign as needed. This leads to better allocation of ad spend, higher return on investment (ROI), and less wasted budget.
• Customer service: AI-powered chatbots can handle customer inquiries 24/7, providing immediate responses and freeing up time for human staff to handle more complex issues.
• Voice search optimization: With the rise of voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, AI allows businesses to optimize their content for voice search, a growing trend in consumer behavior.
• Predictive analysis: Using historical data, AI can forecast customer behavior and market trends, helping businesses anticipate future opportunities or challenges.

AI marketing technologies

As we just mentioned, there are tons of ways to use AI for marketing. Let's start by breaking down several of those popular categories of AI marketing tools.

Chatbots and conversational AI

Chatbots (and conversational AI in general) have emerged as one of the easiest ways to dip your toes into the field of AI.

In the marketing sense, chatbots are mostly used to respond to customer queries on your website or social pages. By simulating human-like interactions, they can provide real-time responses to customer questions, drastically reducing wait times and elevating customer satisfaction.

These tools offer a unique way to enhance customer engagement, streamline operations, and even increase sales conversions by helping match the user to products that fit their needs.

Just take a look at this B2B chatbot example from Drift:

The best part about chatbots (aside from the extra hand for your customer service team) is their capability to operate 24/7, ensuring that businesses are always 'open' and ready to help.

Some popular chatbot tools include: Drift, Heyday, Manychat

Predictive analytics

It's easy to get lost in a sea of data these days. But luckily for us, AI once again has our backs with a little technique called predictive analytics.

AI predictive analytics is like a crystal ball powered by artificial intelligence—it looks at what happened in the past to guess what might happen in the future. Imagine if you had a robot that watched all your past basketball games, learned your tactics and your opponents' tactics, and then it could tell you your chances of winning your next game - that's pretty much what AI predictive analytics does, but in our case, for our marketing data.

And the more data it can learn from, the better it gets at predicting.

It's also important to remember even the best AI can't predict the future perfectly. Just like in basketball, there can be surprises or upsets. The predictions are just educated guesses based on past data. How good these guesses are can depend on a lot of things, like how relevant and good quality the past data is and how well the learning method fits the problem.

Some predictive analytics tools to check out: IBM Watson Studio, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, SAS Advanced Analytics

Data-driven marketing automation

We all have parts of our job that we wish we could automate away—but now, that dream can be made a reality with the help of AI marketing automation.

The combination of AI and machine learning techniques in this context refers to those tools that help automate marketing tasks, personalize customer experiences, and optimize marketing campaigns.

Depending on the tool you use (email automation, task automation, etc.), it can help you handle, understand, and implement your data and insights. Let's take a look at an example of email marketing automation.

A retail business wants to better target its customers with more personalized email marketing. They have been collecting customer data, including purchase history, website browsing behavior, and demographic information, but they struggle to effectively use this data due to the sheer complexity and volume.

So, they decide to implement an AI-powered marketing automation tool to help manage this data and create more personalized email campaigns using the following plan:

1. The AI system first analyzes customer data. It then identifies patterns and segments the customers based on their purchasing behavior, preferences, and other factors.
2. These segments are then used to create personalized email content. For example, it might send a special offer on a product that a customer frequently purchases or a discount code on their birthday.
3. It has learned when each customer is most likely to open emails and makes sure to send the email at that time for maximum engagement.
4. Lastly, the tool tracks the performance of each email campaign, providing metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, and alerts us of any outstanding issues we should fix within our strategy.

Pretty nice, right?

As I mentioned before, the exact type of marketing automation tool you choose depends on what you're looking to help automate. Some overall marketing automation tools to consider are: HubSpot, Adobe Sensei, and Antuit.ai

AI-powered content generation

For some of us, writing is the bane of our existence—and that's okay. If you're silently raising your hand (or, worst case, shouting "That's me!" at the screen), this set of tools is going to be a game changer for you.

AI-powered content generation, also known as automated content generation or natural language generation (NLG), uses AI algorithms to automatically generate content that reads as if it was written by a real person. This process usually involves using machine learning and language processing techniques to create meaningful, coherent, and contextually relevant text.

If you're wondering what exactly it can help write, there's a simple answer: literally anything.

Ad copy? Check. Email content? Check. Sales pitches, social media content, and blog posts? check, check, and check.

While AI-powered content generation can save time and resources, it's important to note that, as of now, it usually requires human oversight to ensure accuracy and quality.

For example, I asked one of the most popular apps, ChatGPT, to list 5 reasons why my blog post is awesome. Note that I didn't tell it what the post was about or copy any of this content into the box before I asked it this question.

While I love the enthusiasm ChatGPT has for my work, there are still obvious areas within this space where human judgment and intervention are critical.

Popular AI content generation tools include: ChatGPT, Jasper.ai, Bing AI

AI for social media analysis

We all know by now just how important it is for brands to be on social, but the tough part is coming up with content people would enjoy and making sure you're sticking to a consistent schedule. Here's yet another part of marketing that AI can help with.

AI-powered social media tools use AI to streamline, optimize, and enhance nearly every aspect of social media marketing. By leveraging machine learning algorithms and data analysis, these tools can provide insights into what's working and what's not, automate your content creation and scheduling (including images), respond to comments, and help you make the most out of your social presence.

Here's a shortlist of the top AI-backed tools for social media: Hootsuite, MagicStudio, Invideo, DALL-E 2

Media buying AI

Since we just learned how AI can help us with our organic social content, it's time to look at what it can do to help us with our paid advertising as well.

While a lot of things are similar between the two, AI-powered advertising tools usually include features to help you with the following:

• Ad creation and optimization: AI can help you create engaging ads by recommending ad components (like headlines, images, or call-to-action phrases) based on what has worked best in the past. It can also optimize existing ads by testing different versions of an ad (A/B testing) and determining which one yields the best results.
• Targeting and personalization: By personalizing ads to target individual users based on their behavior, interests, and demographics, you can make your ads more relevant and increase conversion rates.
• Budget allocation and bidding: With ads, lost time IS lost money. AI can manage your ad budget and decide how much to bid for ad space. It uses historical data and real-time analytics to dynamically adjust bids and allocate budget across different ads, platforms, and audiences to maximize ROI.
• Performance analysis: AI can track and analyze the performance of your ads, providing detailed insights and reports. It can identify trends, highlight areas for improvement, and suggest actionable steps to improve ad performance.

And for this, there's one tool on the block that can do all of this and more: the Madgicx AI Marketer.

The AI Marketer takes care of all the details of creating your ad campaigns, from setting up ads to defining audiences, so your job is as simple as clicking "Launch,"—allowing you to get better results and save precious hours of your day in return.

The Madgicx AI Marketer gives you data-driven optimization recommendations based on real data that's inside your account right now, not just a black box of algorithms. Created by seasoned Facebook ad professionals with over 10 years of experience and millions in ad spend under their belts, you can be sure that this isn't another gimmicky AI tool.

The best part? You can try out the AI Marketer free of charge by signing up for a 7-day trial here.

AI for SEO

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a set of strategies aimed at increasing your website's rank and presence in a search engine's "organic" (or unpaid) results.

The theory behind this is that if your customer is searching for a topic (for example, shoe store NYC), and your website is the very first option, it's pretty likely that they'll click on your website and view it—hopefully earning you a new customer in the process.

The search engine uses complex algorithms to decide which sites to show you and in what order. They consider things like the words you used in your search, the relevance and usability of the pages, the expertise of the sources, and your location and settings.

AI-powered SEO tools leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate, enhance, and streamline various aspects of search engine optimization. They use advanced algorithms to analyze data and provide insights to help website owners optimize their sites, create relevant content, and improve their search results. These tools often help with things like:

• Keyword analysis: These tools can help identify the most relevant keywords for your content based on the analysis of large volumes of data. They consider factors like search volume, competition level, and relevancy to suggest the best keywords for your site.
• Content optimization: AI can analyze your content and provide suggestions for improvements based on SEO best practices. This might include identifying opportunities to use relevant keywords, improving readability, or suggesting related topics that could enhance the content's value to users.
• Backlink analysis: These tools can assess the quality and relevance of the websites that link back to your site. They can identify potentially harmful links and suggest opportunities to acquire high-quality backlinks.
• Competitor analysis: AI can analyze your competitors' websites and SEO strategies, providing insights that can help you identify opportunities to improve your own SEO.

Popular AI SEO tools include: Surfer SEO, Semrush, and AlliAI

AI-driven customer segmentation & targeting

Personalization should be one of the core tenets of marketing for 2023. That being said, making sure the right message gets to the right person can be extremely difficult.

Imagine you're the host of a big party where you have all sorts of people: some love dancing, some are there for the food, some love quiet conversations, and some are just there to watch. As the host (or the marketer), you'd want to make sure everyone is having a good time. But how do you know who wants what?

This is where AI-driven segmentation comes into play. It's like having a super-smart party assistant who can quickly look at all your guests, figure out who likes what, and group similar people together. So, instead of treating everyone the same, now you know you have a group that loves dancing, another that's more into food, and so on.

By spotting patterns in this data, AI can group (or "segment") your customers into different categories that make sense. Using this information, you can then make sure that the right person is sent the right offer at the right time.

Some AI-driven customer segmentation and targeting tools you should try are: Salesforce Einstein, Optimizely, Segment

The future of AI in marketing

While AI is already incredible now, it's only going to improve as the algorithms can increase their productivity and are able to handle more complex tasks.

However, as AI marketing becomes pervasive, ethical considerations rise to the surface. Balancing personalization with privacy concerns and ensuring unbiased AI algorithms are crucial.

P.S. If you're interested, I posted my soapbox rant personal viewpoint about ethics in AI marketing tools here.

As AI continues to evolve, businesses must adapt, addressing these limitations and ethical concerns while capitalizing on the transformative potential of AI in marketing.

Preparing for AI adoption in marketing

Using AI in a helpful way isn't as easy as telling your teams to 'just do it'; it's also about preparing your team for the shift. Here are a few tips on how to do just that:

1. Redefine marketing roles for AI adoption: Start by identifying how AI can augment each role in your marketing team. It's not about replacing humans but enhancing their capabilities. For instance, creative roles could be supported by AI to generate data-driven content ideas, while strategists could use AI for advanced customer insights.
2. Upskill marketing teams for AI: Provide training on AI tools relevant to your team's roles. This could range from using AI tools for social media management to understanding predictive analytics.
3. Develop an AI-ready marketing culture: Cultivate a culture of curiosity and continuous learning. Encourage your team to experiment with AI technologies and learn from successes and failures.
4. Create an AI-driven marketing roadmap: Define a clear strategy for AI adoption. Identify key objectives and KPIs, select suitable AI tools, and establish a timeline for implementation. Start small with pilot projects, learn from them, and gradually expand AI adoption across all aspects of marketing.

Remember, the shift to AI is a journey. It involves iterative learning, adjustments, and patience. Keep communication open, involve your team in the process, and celebrate milestones along the way.

Conclusion

And there you have it! We've navigated the exciting landscape of AI in marketing, diving deep into eight distinct applications of AI that are reshaping the industry. We've seen how AI can personalize customer experiences, analyze data, automate routine tasks, and so much more. We've also highlighted a selection of tools that can help you harness the power of AI, offering improved efficiency and insights.

However, the journey doesn't end here. As AI continues to evolve, new opportunities for innovation in marketing will emerge. By preparing your team and processes for AI-driven advancements, you can stay ahead of the curve, capitalizing on the benefits of AI to craft compelling, data-driven marketing strategies.

The future of AI-driven marketing is bright, and it's unfolding right before our eyes. Be ready to seize the opportunities that come your way!