In recent years, marketing AI has become less of a luxury or a tenet of the distant future. It is now a necessity for businesses to maintain a competitive advantage. According to the 2022 State of Marketing AI Report by Drift, 51% of marketers are either piloting AI in their processes or scaling it to increase efficiency and performance.

AI can automate and optimize processes and consumer experiences that would take marketers months to perfect. That said, 57% of marketers believe that AI will create more jobs than it eliminates in the marketing industry. The future of marketing may look different, but there’s no reason to fear using AI to support your business. Here are three ways to use AI in marketing this year to save money and optimize your efforts in 2023.

What are some examples of AI in Marketing today?

Use Case #1: Conversational Marketing AI

In the last 24 months, the digitization of customer interactions has sped up by three years, according to McKinsey. Chatbots, for example, have become all the rage; most websites use them to help visitors navigate to what they are looking for. We’ve all become familiar with that incoming message sound that pops up after a predetermined amount of time spent on the homepage.

Whether you employ them for lead generation or customer service, chatbots rely on a mix of machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to determine what a visitor needs. First-party data will tell you if it’s a visitor’s first time on the site, or fifteenth. From then on, the AI will work to identify a consumer’s needs and point them in the direction of the right support article, research study, or form to request more information.

You can also use AI to send smart notifications to app users when they are best suited to take an action or complete a purchase. In order to enable this outcome, however, it’s important to use data to understand your consumer.

Use Case #2: Data Analysis

In marketing, every interaction counts. 32% of customers worldwide would stop doing business with a brand they loved after one bad experience. So you’d better make sure that every touchpoint you have with your consumer is positive. How do you do that? Through understanding consumer behavior data.

As of 2022, 29% of marketers were using artificial intelligence to predict consumer needs and behavior with greater accuracy. This number is only slated to grow in years to come. In the survey by Drift, marketers were asked to rate, on a scale of 1-5, the importance of automating and using AI for planning tasks. Constructing buyer personas received a rating of 3.68, while mapping buyer journey stages received a rating of 3.47. Predicting customer churn received a rating of 3.07. All of these use cases involve poring over consumer behavior data and drawing conclusions from it. 

Data analysis plays a huge role in planning marketing strategies and understanding your consumers in order to improve your services as well as your ROI. However, with the copious amounts of data available, how do you make sure you have resources pointed towards analyzing and acting on it all? Recruiting an AI tool to help you with your data analysis ensures that your team is absorbing data efficiently and picking up on all of the behavior patterns possible.

Use Case #3: Personalized Content & Recommendations

According to data from PwC, 65% of consumers believe that personalization is important to customer experience, and 25% would pay more for said personalization. Once you understand your customer through the process of collecting and analyzing data, marketing AI can also be responsible for creating and promoting personalized content and recommendations  that meet the needs of your audience while engaging and delighting them as individuals. 

Marketers can allocate their resources toward bigger campaigns, such as promoting deals during the holiday season, but surely not all of your customers celebrate the same holidays in the same way. These top-bill promotions may neglect segments of your audience. Even within the same segment, there can be significant variation in when or how a person likes to engage with your brand. That’s why it’s important to deploy an AI marketing solution that sees your customers as individuals rather than segments.

As of 2022, 41% of marketers are using AI to create personalized consumer experiences at scale. In the survey by Drift, the top three personalization use cases were:

  • Recommend highly targeted content to users in real-time.
  • Determine offers that will motivate individuals to action.
  • Present individualized experiences on the web and/or in-app. 

These are just a few of the ways AI can help you to enable personalization in your customer journey. Above all, AI is able to provide the right recommendations at the right time so you don’t lose opportunities with your customers. 

 

Whether you realize it or not, using AI in marketing has become the new normal. Globally, 58% of customer interactions are now digital, in large part thanks to the pandemic. AI is powering chatbots, notifications, product recommendations, email communication, and more to provide highly personalized experiences for consumers. 

As more and more companies realize the benefits of AI in marketing, adopting AI solutions will become necessary to keep up with the competition and continuously improve your marketing processes. Stay ahead of the curve by learning more about the AI solutions best suited for your goals and industry.