Artificial intelligence (AI) has seen tremendous growth in terms of usability and popularity in the last decade. It has positively impacted most companies that have integrated it into their workflows and facilitated massive efficiency improvements.
Sadly, this technology is also misunderstood, which has led to a slower adoption than expected in the business world. Whether it’s because of a fear of being replaced or because workers are intimidated by the complex nature of the new tech, AI integration has been uneven. Some companies have fully embraced it while others are lagging behind, and the latter are starting to notice the negative effects of their delayed implementation.
According to a recent study by Mailchimp, a staggering 50% of marketers said inadequate AI adoption is holding back their teams from achieving their goals. From data analysis to improved content creation, the impact of AI on marketing is powerful and multifaceted.
Marketing has a special relationship with AI. This technology doesn’t just allow this department to get more return on investment, it also allows them to accomplish tasks that were impossible or extremely costly before.
This article will go over the different ways marketing teams can utilize AI to gain useful insights and explain how you can properly include this technology within your practices.
How Does AI Help Marketing Departments?
Integrating AI in marketing tasks isn’t about replacing jobs with software tools but rather about enabling new possibilities and enhancing the results of traditional campaigns. Marketing departments all have similar issues, such as cost-effectiveness, scalable content creation, personalization and measurement of results.
The listed issues can seem insurmountable to small teams with limited resources, and AI can offer easy solutions to all of them. When it comes to marketing, there are two main types of AI that are used commonly: Generative AI and Predictive AI.
Generative AI
This refers to AI tasked with content production, whether it’s a blog article, an outline, a presentation or a set of images. Users provide the AI with prompts detailing their needs and the parameters the AI can operate in, and the model produces the desired result.
The results of these AIs tend to be a bit too sterile and generic to be used as generated, but they can provide a useful starting point to allow teams to create content at a faster and more scalable pace. These tools can also be used to provide data-based suggestions during creation rather than creating the content as a whole.
Predictive AI
Marketing departments routinely gather and generate immense amounts of data. However, small teams rarely have the resources or the skills to analyze it properly in order to rely on the information for decision-making.
Predictive AI allows smaller teams to upload data sets or content in order to get insights that will allow them to make informed decisions. For example, Hippoc uses your historical data of paid media to predict your future campaign performances before you launch them, and tells you which ad creatives will lead you to the best results.
What are AI insights?
AI insights are the actionable information and knowledge resulting from the data analysis achieved by an AI model. In the context of marketing, these insights could be text analysis to better understand customer reactions, ad campaign data to determine the best copy and creative to use for future ads or anomaly detection to clean up a data set or identify ad fraud.
The AI models that power marketing tools can be classified into three main groups based on their primary functions and objectives:
Data Analysis and Prediction:
- Predictive Analytics
- Recommendation Engines
- Natural Language Processing (NLP)
- Image and Video Recognition
- Customer Segmentation
- Email Marketing Optimization
- Attribution Modeling
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) Prediction
- Customer Churn Prediction
Customer Interaction and Engagement
- Chatbots and Virtual Assistants
- Social Media Analysis
- Content Generation
Marketing Optimization and Automation
- A/B Testing and Optimization
- Marketing Automation
- Ad Campaign Optimization
Key Benefits of AI in Marketing
Marketing can greatly leverage the power of AI. Unfortunately, the adoption of such tools is slow partly because they are still misunderstood and seen as too complicated to use.
A big part of increasing adoption within your team starts with understanding the tasks that can be accomplished with AI. Here are the most impactful tasks that can be accomplished via AI models:
Analysis of large data sets
Marketing departments generate incredible amounts of data, but too often, they aren’t used to their full potential. Data analysis is a full-time job requiring advanced skills that a lot of marketing teams lack.
Not only can AI perform data analysis quickly and cost-efficiently, but it can also perform certain tasks that would be nearly impossible to analyze for humans.
Content personalization
Consumers receive dozens of marketing emails every day, and these communications quickly end up feeling all the same. AI can be a great tool to personalize these messages based on consumer actions like purchases, products viewed and reactions to ads.
Campaign result forecasting
Getting an idea of campaign results is a constant struggle for marketing departments trying to optimize their tight advertising budgets. AI models can be plugged into the various ad networks you use to analyze past results and customer behavior to predict the results of a campaign, which copy will garner the most engagement or which ad creative will get the most clicks.
Enhanced content creation
While AI isn’t on the writing level of a human just yet, it can allow writers and artists to scale their output much faster. Using AI to create outlines and do research on complex subjects gives time back to the marketing department to actually create instead of being in constant research mode.
Closing the feedback loop by analyzing customer data
Marketing teams are often consumed by campaign results and the amount of leads generated, completely overlooking feedback received from clients. It’s not just a lack of time, it’s a lack of time and skills to properly analyze the text and gather actionable insights from it.
AI allows marketing teams to gather valuable context from online comments on social media and other platforms like sentiment and potential product issues. The results of this process can be extremely powerful and allow marketing teams to continuously improve their voice and tone through feedback.
Three Steps to Implement AI in Your Marketing Processes
Adopting AI and integrating it within marketing workflows is a multi-step process. It’s important to welcome it carefully with a prepared plan to be respectful of potential insecurities and misconceptions from your team.
Identify the best-suited tasks to receive assistance
While AI can accomplish almost any task within a marketing department, some are better suited for AI assistance than others. The answer to this question will be different for every company, but it’s always best to start with a task that is currently a complete gap within your team.
For example, if your team doesn’t have any data analysis capabilities, your employees won’t feel threatened by the addition and will see AI as a helpful addition. Similarly, prediction tools for ads are a great first addition as they allow your team to quell subjective debates like which ad creative will perform the best.
Hippoc is an amazing first AI tool to integrate within your workflows since it brings a skill set that a human worker simply couldn’t achieve. At the same time, it answers a major pain point of many marketers by giving them a data-based decision on the best ad creative, killing any preconceived notion or subjective decision on the matter.
Train your team on new AI tools
AI tools have greatly improved their UI in recent years, but most of them still have important subtleties that you must train your team on. A lack of training will significantly slow down adoption. A quick course on the usage of a new tool also gives your staff the required baseline to get creative with the tool and expand their knowledge on their own.
Analyze results and assess the ROI of AI tools
New products always end up receiving some form of criticism. If you’re not prepared with proper success statistics, executives might question the need for the newly introduced software, especially if the price tag is relatively high.
Make sure to include a detailed success plan with KPIs and ROI metrics that everyone agrees on before the product is put into your workflows. The results of this process will keep everyone accountable and give a level playing field when discussing the future of the tool within your organization.
Beyond Automation: The Transformative Power of AI in Marketing
AI is more than just putting some tasks on autopilot. It’s a tool that helps marketing teams scale their activities faster and far beyond what they traditionally could achieve. The fear of being replaced by staff is valid, but with a proper introduction to these tools and their potential, the feeling will dissipate quickly.
Though AI and machine learning seem to permeate the business world, this type of software is still in its infancy. Adopting it now ensures you’ll be prepared for future evolutions and gives you a crucial competitive edge in a marketing landscape where every little bit counts.
As mentioned earlier, ad creative prediction tools are a great first step when considering AI insights for marketing. We’d love to have a chat with you to evaluate the positive impact Hippoc can have on your ad campaigns.
