AI is an advanced technology that’s proving to be more relevant than anyone would have thought possible. One of its many applications is what is known as AI marketing. 

But just why is AI marketing trending? Well, every entrepreneur understands that marketing plays an important role in the success or failure of their business. They sit down and come up with an idea that will sell, they go to work to bring the idea to life and then tell people about this idea whether it is a good or service. 

This last part involves marketing and right now, experts project the value of AI marketing activities to reach  $107.5 billion in 2028. Another statistic that proves the relevance of AI marketing is that more than half the companies implementing AI technology are using it for email marketing. Secondly, a good number of businesses report that they intend to use AI for sales forecasting purposes. 

What is AI marketing?

AI marketing is the method of performing product or service marketing fully or partially using AI technology. This AI marketing is much different from traditional marketing in the sense that it involves raw, accurate data, intelligent processing, and high-value decisions and insights. 

How is AI used in marketing?

There are countless numbers of AI software out there. In the same manner, there are equally a lot of ways in which this software is used in marketing. Let’s take a look at the options available to businesses who want to try AI marketing. 

Email Marketing

Countless data show that the majority of businesses which make use of AI technology are applying it in their email marketing campaigns. Of course, there are AI writing tools capable of producing email ad copies. However, the highest application of AI in marketing is in automated email send time. What is the automated email send time? 

For those who don’t know, automated email send time refers to scheduling an email message to be sent automatically at a future time. A user employs this feature when they create an email but need to send it sometime later. They will input the email recipient’s address and set a time and date when they want the email sent. Once done, AI automatically takes over the work of sending the email at the exact time and date set by the user. 

Sales Forecasting

AI is quite noticeable when it comes to making predictions or performing a forecast. The interesting thing about this is the fact that the technology delivers a decent level of accuracy. 

The ability of AI to make predictions is used in fraud detection, understanding stock exchange fluctuations, and even recommending products to shoppers. 

The service is also being used for sales forecasting in business. This sale forecasting involves trying to tell the number of product units that a company will sell within a specified period. 

Customer Support

Chatbot is the general term used to refer to AIs that promote or engage in human-like textual conversations. These AIs are usually employed to improve customer experience. For example, they could be automated to answer basic customer questions. 

In many instances, a chatbot will attend to first-time customer inquiries and then pass the customer on to a human agent if they are not satisfied with their solution or service delivered by the AI. 

Content Marketing

Business content marketing focuses on promoting a product or service using video, graphical or textual content. AI can successfully perform Natural Language Processing (NLP) to create human-like voices for video adverts. Similarly, technology like Copy AI and Jasper can produce useful textual content including full marketing-focused articles. 

Marketing Campaign Analysis

As we said, AI is increasingly being used for business marketing campaigns. However, while companies perform email marketing, customer support, and sales forecasting using artificial intelligence, they can also turn about and analyze the performance or result of their marketing campaigns. 

Analysis like this provides clear and crisp details of what is working in a company’s marketing strategy. From here, a business can determine whether to revamp its strategy or to replace it. A good example is live website analytics which website or blog owners use in understanding what page, topic, or category is doing fine in terms of high traffic and low bounce rates. 

AI-generated results can also be easily shared with remote parties who are involved in a business’s marketing process. For example, a marketing manager who is not currently at the office. 

Ways to implement AI marketing in your business

It is crystal clear that AI marketing is a productive approach for businesses. If you want to get started with it, these are the things you need to do;

Set Data Privacy Guidelines

How user or customer data is collected and processed means a lot for both a business and its customers. This sums up the idea of data privacy. Typically, governments and regulatory agencies set down guidelines for this process and it is in the best interest of a business owner to ensure that the AI it uses is programmed to operate in compliance with any existing data privacy standards. 

Acquire Data Analytics Skill

Whether you want to train staff or employ ready-made data scientists, you would need to have someone who can successfully perform data analytics for your business. Data analytics skills make it possible to assess data for validity and insights. Possessing this skill will mean that a business can provide high-quality data to its AI, therefore, improving its marketing result. 

Acquire Technical Knowledge for Using AI

Technical knowledge here refers to understanding how AI functions, what type of data it processes and even knowing how to manage or troubleshoot performance issues. 

Outline Marketing Strategy and Goals

AI marketing is similar to regular marketing in that businesses still need to outline a strategy and some goals. By getting a solid strategy on the ground, businesses will position themselves to make the most of their AI. 

Let’s consider a business that decides to use the OKR framework for its chatbot customer support service. Its objective is to help customers find answers to ten frequently asked questions. The accepted result for this strategy will then be to receive customer feedback stating that their inquiry was well addressed and that they are satisfied with the quality of service.

The business programs its AI to identify the ten frequently asked questions - perhaps by using key phrases. Once identified, the AI will provide an automated answer or response to the specific question. Answers to each question will be well explained to ensure that they are easily understood. 

After displaying the specified answer to a customer’s question, the next step will be to ask for feedback on the quality of the service or the helpfulness of the AI response. 

What are the benefits of using AI in marketing?

You might be wondering what the talk is about AI marketing and what benefits it could hold for your business. Here are four of them. 

Increased Revenue:

Some of the signs of business growth are gathering a solid team, receiving increased demand for your products or services, and recording increased revenue. Yes, revenue is one of them. And many entrepreneurs can reach amazing figures in revenue by using AI marketing. 

Increased Marketing Efficiency:

Artificial intelligence has one basic characteristic of making smart decisions. This is precisely what leads to increased marketing efficiency. 

Take for instance that a logistics company welcomes the idea of AI marketing. The technology can be used to find shorter delivery routes for making products available to customers on time. 

AI also provides a less costly way of presenting products or services to potential customers. Secondly, it makes it possible to determine who is more likely to purchase a product or service. With this, businesses can target the right audience. 

Another reason why AI increases marketing efficiency is that it makes high-quality decisions in minimal time.

Improved Customer Experience

Applying AI for business customer support services tends to improve overall customer experiences even though much work still needs to be done in perfecting AI's understanding of user requests. 

AI is simply software so it is usually available online and can deliver round-the-clock service. This is better when compared to traditional customer services where humans need to take some rest between their work schedules. 

In addition to this, AI can use past user requests or inquiries to solve present requests by tailoring responses. 

Increased Business Productivity 

Of course, if a company can deliver a better customer experience, improve its marketing efficiency, and generate more revenue using AI then the business will become more productive as well, 

This is an indirect advantage of AI marketing to businesses - but it’s something entrepreneurs like to consider. They want to know how a particular approach (which is using AI marketing in this case) will add to the general value or quality of the business. 

Some AI marketing software

ChatGPT:

ChatGPT is a recently launched AI software that responds to customer requests or prompts through human-like textual communication. The software is suitable for generating written marketing content. 

FirstLanguage:

The FirstLanguage software makes natural language processing possible by offering sentiment classification, translation, and other similar services to users. 

Obviously AI: 

Obviously AI  is one of many software capable of helping businesses make predictions and understand possible influencing factors. Other examples of this data forecasting software are listed here. 

Difficulties in implementing AI marketing in business 

There could be several reasons why a business would find it difficult to implement AI marketing. We’ve listed most of the common ones here to help you out. 

Adoption

Businesses sometimes experience difficulty in adopting AI marketing strategies. This issue could arise from having to convince your business executives that AI will be useful to the company.  A major adoption issue also comes up in situations where a business encounters a high cost of acquiring or implementing AI for its marketing goals. Adoption issues would be easier to overcome when a business finds out that a similar business or even a direct competitor is successful in using AI in marketing. 

Technical Knowledge

Making use of AI in marketing requires technical knowledge. If your team members lack this, they will be unable to operate or successfully utilize artificial intelligence technology in reaching their marketing goals. High technical knowledge also allows teams to express creativity in the use of AI. 

This could significantly reduce the wastage of resources. For instance, saving cost by acquiring AI software capable of handling two or more marketing activities rather than acquiring AIs for each different marketing activity. 

Privacy

Privacy is a priority for businesses especially when they begin to collect or process customer and client data. Entrepreneurs know that they must strictly comply with privacy regulations laid out by governments or leading authorities in the region of their business operation. Failing to do this will most likely result in huge consequences, such as legal action against a business. 

Data Quality

AI works with data. As such, businesses must adopt a data-sensitive approach when using any AI marketing strategy. This approach ensures that high-quality data is consistently fed to the AI. In turn, businesses will receive more accurate and relevant results which they will use in improving their AI marketing process.  

Conclusion 

Traditional marketing has worked for so many years. Nevertheless, AI marketing is now taking over the scene with its characteristic low-cost and high-quality output driving more and more entrepreneurs to give it a try. The main benefits of this fast-paced method of business marketing include increased revenue, improved customer experience, and positive overall productivity. 

As entrepreneurs, this tickles our ears. We are sure that it also does the same to yours and that, perhaps, you’re inspired enough to employ the AI marketing method in your business. Be sure to take a look at our article for reference while you’re at it. We can’t wait to hear your story.