Ashad Rehman
Jordan Bitterman, CMO of The Weather Company at IBM says:
“There are twelve threats to civilization; AI is one of these twelve threats. However, AI is the only threat which can also be the antidote for the other eleven.”
Gone are the days when brands had to organize everything in person. To attend major events such as the Super Bowl, marketers had to wait for the right time to publish a tweet or send out a post for maximum engagement. Now, times have changed. We have better tools like the IFTTT, Hootsuite, Socialbakers, etc. They allow us to automate our tweets and social media posts; even better, they become their own judge and publish the post on our behalf to create the perfect buzz for social events such as the Super Bowl.
Don’t we often wonder how some of these tools are capable to make critical decisions for us?
Like every industry, marketing is also embracing change. Every new sunrise introduces a technological advancement that’s better than the one crafted yesterday. And when the power of technology is intertwined with the marketing, the outcome is something beyond our imaginations. But, as much as the AI promises a remarkable future for the generations of tomorrow, some research analysts have realized the fact that AI can turn completely rogue on you.
A project named “Sophia” (A humanoid robot) was launched by a Hong-Kong based firm, Hanson Robotics in the April of 2015. It is a robot built in collaboration with AI developers. The robot is capable of carrying out detailed discussions with different individuals and respond to them in a sophisticated manner. Although many believe that her responses are scripted, she is still an AI-powered robot capable to make judgments on her own. When someone asked her whether she would choose to destroy humans! Surprisingly, her response was positive.
Maybe, we do deserve to be wiped out from the face of the Earth and machines have already realized that, (joke).
However, amidst the confusion, there are major technology giants who are bold enough to take that leap of faith. Some major technological giants such as the Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook have announced a partnered approach to implement AI initiatives which can turn beneficial for the people and society.
Today, AI has stepped out of the fiction and entered into spheres of reality. Statistics represent that more than 57% of the marketing agencies in the US are willing to adopt artificial intelligence to enable them to gain a competitive edge over their rivals. It’s just a matter of time until the whole world will go full throttle with AI.
But, how exactly the implementations are going to change the face of marketing? Let’s find out.
Here’s How Artificial Intelligence Will Change the Future of Marketing
1) The Shift from Programmatic Era into Cognitive Era
The future of marketing is going to shift from the programming era to a cognitive era.
Previously, when we used to visit a website and search for a product, let’s say a smartphone… that smartphone might run around us for at least 2 weeks and would show up on in-website ads as we surf through the Internet. It would target market us on our social media profiles and it will show up on random websites we are visiting on daily basis.
However, now times have changed. We are living our lives in an era where cognitive abilities of a machine are more entertained just than the ones which are programmed into the machine.
There are systems being developed that capable to identify why you left a website, how you left that site (exit pages), whether you bought a product or totally skipped it. Based on your actions, it will enable marketers to make informed decisions about crafting an ad that would be highly relevant to you.
It ultimately saves us from getting bombarded with unwanted advertising altogether.
2) AI Holds the Power to Automate our Content Production
One of the many individuals who will cash the true power of AI in the marketing sphere is none other than future content developers. Wait, just hold up! I know you are getting those ideas… No, Artificial Intelligence hasn’t yet reached a stage where it will generate content on our behalf.
Tough luck! It’s going to take some time to get there and until then, you will have to write on your own.
But, here’s how AI holds the true power to automate our content production. “WordSmith” is an AI assistant that greatly benefits writers. It is a collection of modules which allow writers to search for patterns in languages. An estimated 1.5 billion content pieces were created with the help of WordSmith last year.
Software applications like WordSmith are based on NLG (Natural Language Selection) which is an intelligent AI algorithm. On the other hand, AI sub-field NLG (Natural Language Generation) is an algorithm which translates data into natural language based on the kind of data you fed into the system. However, the solution is more sentence-based and may fail to create the perfect writing flow as that a writer may end up creating but it still turns out to be of great assistance. To produce as such, you ultimately require a senior writer which is skilled at writing.
3) Artificial Intelligence Will Improve Sales Performance
Some professionals who are going to benefit from artificial intelligence are none other than the sales teams. Most of the sales guys spend countless hours producing confirmed leads. While sieving through a roundhouse of customers can often become a hefty task, it also shaves off a good amount of time from your clock.
In fact, some sales representative claim that more than 80% of their working hours are spent in identifying which of the leads have the potential to become customers and which of them are just “mystery shoppers” and not serious buyers. Making phone calls, sending out emails, awaiting responses and then replying them back, all at the same time, can often lead to a burnt out and frustrated sales reps.
As a result, they might not be able to put their best foot forward when pitching to a highly lucrative prospective client.
However, with AI things can dramatically change for sales representative all around. By using smart intelligent systems, first, sales representatives can avoid focusing on repetitive tasks. They will not have to go through the entire long processes of monitoring, categorizing and creating effective communication with leads. It will greatly help the sales representative as they can readily spend more of their time and energy on closing sales lead.
4) Micro-Segmented Email Marketing
Adding to the previous point, an organization communicates with its internal and external customers via emails. Now, doesn’t it sound beneficial if marketers can apply all of their creativity at creating remarkable content instead of exerting their mental force in monitoring how the emails are sort and sent out?
Email marketing has come a long way. From physical mail segmentation to scheduled send outs. Today AI can help you automate everything using the state-of-the-art marketing automation tools. Besides, there are several other automated emailing tools on the market such as Constant Contact, MailChimp, SendGrid, HubSpot’s CRM and others which can help anyone to easily comb through jargons of email data to reach useful conclusions.
Future AI applications will enable marketers to easily segment email information based on different areas of interest, demographics, regions and other criteria. So, if a marketing specialist wants to target a specific individual, they are not going to spend hours in analyzing information based on personal details, zip codes, telephone numbers to target different users belonging to different market niches. Instead, they will leverage the power of AI tools that will automatically reach out users belonging to their target niche by analyzing previously stored data and all marketer has to do is steer the tool in the right direction.
5) Website Personalization and Offering What Customer Wants
The world of internet is vast. It is ever changing and growing at an immense pace. However, audiences visiting websites day in and day out are navigating through hundreds of websites each day. What will make your website stand above the competition is how personalized your approach is towards attracting customers and how good are you at creating compelling experiences for them?
What people want is a personalized experience and if your website is failing to give them one, they will eventually switch to another alternative. There are many AI-powered tools that have emerged which you can integrate to your website in order to provide customers a more personalized experience. CNET Intelligent Cross-Sell is a platform that usually associates itself with consumer-electronic good products. CNET Intelligent Cross-Sell is a software platform that handles all cross-sells and upsells based on behavioral data and other attributes such as product profitability and score reviews to make sales process and experience better for users.
According to eMarketers, 48% of marketers resulted in observing a sales uplift in websites that are more personalized than those which aren’t. With AI-powered personalization, you can train bots at the back-end of your website, so they readily adapt to what you are searching for. They can collect information from the source the audience has reached to their platform and based on that, they can readily point the customer towards the right direction. With tools like Evergage, you can personalize your offers and even personalize search results with modules like Evergage SmartSearch to meet customer preferences. In short, it is a tool that fits best in the category of content marketing when it comes to website personalization.
The Wrap Up
AI is making dramatic changes for marketers in almost every aspect of marketing. With all the hype rising up on the Internet and a bit of a confusion, the future of AI in the world of marketing looks promising. In fact, some marketing departments which haven’t implemented the AI technology as a part of their business practices have an ambitious plan to do the same in the near future.
With technology growing at a rapid pace, there is an immense concern that AI-powered solutions come with uncertainties. However, future market leaders believe that gaining better insights, doing better forecasting and working on creative strategies can help give birth to more reliable AI solutions.
Joe Clark
Mohammad Ali