While talking about an AI, the first thing that comes to our mind are the robots. But Artificial Intelligence is much more than that. The social platforms we use somewhere have a key component of AI in it. AI has become more popular today thanks to increased data volumes, advanced algorithms, and improvements in computing power and storage.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. AI refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think like humans and mimic their actions. The term may also be applied to any machine that exhibits traits associated with a human mind such as learning and problem-solving.

Artificial intelligence is based on the principle that human intelligence can be defined in a way that a machine can easily mimic it and execute tasks, from the most simple to those that are even more complex. The goals of artificial intelligence include mimicking human cognitive activity.

Use of AI for marketing

AI is being used in marketing initiatives in a multitude of use cases, across a broad array of industries including financial services, government, entertainment, healthcare, retail, and more. Each use case offers different results, from improvements to campaign performance, to enhance customer experience, or greater efficiency in marketing operations.

1. Marketing Automation

This category of software tech is designed to allow organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels and automate repetitive tasks. Marketing automation enables many modern marketing practices, including lead generation, segmentation, lead nurturing and scoring, relationship marketing, cross-sell and upsell, retention, return on investment (ROI) measurement, and account-based marketing. Many marketers today are overworked, dealing with issues like being unable to track engagement and chasing unqualified leads, just to name a few. Automation can assist by helping you scale your programs, delivering more personalized and targeted communications, aligning with sales, and measuring effectiveness.

2. AI generated content

For many content marketers, artificial intelligence means leverage. It’s a way to do the things they’re already doing manually—content research, competitive analysis, content gap analysis, content optimization, etc.—in less time and with higher quality output.

3. Voice search

As the name suggests, voice search refers to the use of voice recognition technology which allows users to perform searches by simply speaking into a device. The device could be a computer, a smartphone or a smart home assistant. it’s about utilizing the technology developed by the major players (Google, Amazon, Apple) rather than developing your own capability. Voice search will change future SEO strategies, and brands need to keep up. A brand that nails voice search can leverage big gains in organic traffic with high purchase intent thanks to increased voice search traffic due to AI driven virtual personal assistants.

4. Chatbots

Chatbots are software applications that use artificial intelligence & natural language processing to understand what a human wants, and guides them to their desired outcome with as little work for the end user as possible. Like a virtual assistant for your customer experience touchpoints. Use existing conversation data (if available) to understand the type of questions people ask, analyze correct answers to those questions through a training period, and use machine learning and NLP to learn context, and continually get better at answering those questions in the future.

5. Dynamic Emails

Dynamic email content is any personalized part of a mass message that changes based on user behaviour or data you have about your subscribers. To create personalized emails, marketers add variables to the mailing list, and group people based on specific common characteristics like location, gender, age, etc. Dynamic email content may also be referred to as AMP emails.

6. Programmatic media buying

Programmatic Media buying can use propensity models generated by machine learning algorithms to more effectively target ads at the most relevant customers. Programmatic ads need to get smarter in the wake of Google’s recent brand safety scandal. It was revealed ads placed programmatically through Google’s ad network were appearing on terrorist’s websites. AI can help here by recognizing questionable sites and removing them from the list of sites ad’s can be placed on.

Why is it important?

1. Incredibly accurate

AI achieves incredible accuracy through deep neural networks – which was previously impossible. For example, your interactions with Alexa, Google Search and Google Photos are all based on deep learning – and they keep getting more accurate the more we use them.

2. Learning algorithms

AI adapts through progressive learning algorithms to let the data do the programming. AI finds structure and regularities in data so that the algorithm acquires a skill: The algorithm becomes a classifier or a predictor. So, just as the algorithm can teach itself how to play chess, it can teach itself what product to recommend next online.

3. Analyze deeper data

AI analyzes more and deeper data using neural networks that have many hidden layers. Building a fraud detection system with five hidden layers was almost impossible a few years ago. All that has changed with incredible computer power and big data.

4. AI gets the most out of data

When algorithms are self-learning, the data itself can become intellectual property. The answers are in the data; you just have to apply AI to get them out. Since the role of the data is now more important than ever before, it can create a competitive advantage.

In the future, we are sure to see plenty of AI implementations that will disrupt business as usual, but we don’t have to wait for that future to arrive before putting AI to work in the real world. Focusing on smaller, more achievable AI implementations allows organizations to harness existing technology to bring greater efficiency to operations, communications, and customer service.