How AI can help you target your customer and market better?

A product becomes successful not just by its own virtue but also with the right marketing strategy. Marketing is all about reaching the right customer with the right message at the right time. A brand blossoms exponentially overtime if the strategy is crafted in the right manner.

With the advent of social media, the channel of communication and the scale of reach has widened over time. The rules of the game have now evolved, urging almost everyone to jump in the digital bandwagon to stay afloat in this competitive market. Digital marketing has proved to be effective because of the value that can be generated with the help of enormous amounts of consumer data.

The volume, variety, and velocity of the data have compelled businesses to make use of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to reach the customers much more effectively and reap better return on investments on every dollar spent. Artificial intelligence and data science with the recent advancements in machine learning tools, computing power and data have taken over almost every field head-on, and marketing is no different.

A survey by Salesforce infers that 51% of marketers are already using AI, and 27% more are going to adopt it by the end of 2019. AI helps companies to reach out among the sea of customers, the relevant ones and engage with them in a personalized way. Personalized engagement includes approaching the potential consumer with the correct message, appropriate time of contact and the frequency of communication to capture their attention. Further, the consumer data helps companies build a buyer persona for each customer enabling them to offer relevant recommendations across multiple channels of communication. AI algorithms also help understand the customer sentiment, current trends in the market and to segment different customers based on similar buying behaviors. Marketing now can be done with a proactive approach rather than a reactive one with the help of predictive analytics capabilities of machine learning models. AI can also help build a stronger relationship with the customer in a cheap, efficient and consistent manner with the help of chatbots. Effective customer engagement helps not only retain customers but make them as promoters of the brand.

Marketing automation with AI allows businesses to enhance customer satisfaction around experience, not channel. Many companies offer services to use AI for automating the advertising process to get a higher return on investment in advertisements across multiple channels. Automating ad campaigns such as on Google and Facebook helps companies reduce the advertisement budget wastage and simplify the media buying process. The use of AI enables us to identify and learn which platforms are most profitable and then channel the investment toward them. This results in autonomous targeting, autonomous media buying and optimized marketing campaigns. On top of that, insights about consumer behavior through advanced analytics and dashboards can help make better decisions and to design improved marketing campaigns in the future. It gives full visibility and monitoring of the impact their marketing strategy is having with consumers. The three main roadblocks to executing an AI strategy, according to marketing leaders, are budgetary constraints, customer privacy concerns, and lack of the right internal skillset (for example, too few data scientists). But with automated marketing, now even smaller businesses can use off the shelf tools for automated marketing campaigns, without getting into the hassle of building in house teams.

AI is not meant to replace marketers but to act as a tool enhancing their capabilities allowing them to focus on what they do best.

The trend is on the upwards of the use of AI in marketing, and the ones who would leverage its potential and adapt would outperform others who don’t.