Beyond Bots: Artificial Intelligence in Marketing

Chatbots Aren’t the Only AI Making A Debut in Online Marketing

Artificial intelligence is already starting to shape our online experiences. Marketing trends are incorporating AI to replace sales reps by using chatbots in messaging apps, but there are even more ways AI will change internet habits now and in the future. Check out some of the more popular AI marketing strategies.

beyond bots marketing artificial intelligence

Predictive Customer Service

If you could foresee how your customers would act, you could develop better strategies to meet their needs. Predictive customer service makes this possible. Many businesses already take a proactive stance on customer service, but predictive customer service leverages AI to examine data and create solutions for issues that haven’t happened yet.

Every interaction a customer has with your company is a chance to collect data, from phone calls to purchases to site visits. Add that to the public data available, such as social media exchanges and search history, and you have a wealth of information to tap into. Predictive customer services utilize this information to calculate issues that could arise to provide timely help.

Ad Targeting

Gone are the days of generic television commercials. Pay per click platforms like Google AdWords are using programmatic advertising AI technologies to analyze user behavior and automate a targeted response. This allows for real-time bidding on ad spaces and delivers relevant advertisements to the people who are most likely to be interested.

Catered Recommendations

Similar to the concepts of AI ad targeting, many eCommerce and entertainment sites such as Amazon and Netflix are using AI technology to cater recommendations based on past user behavior. This kind of personalized content is one of the hottest marketing automation innovations for 2017.

Data collected from past purchases and ratings is used to determine what the customer is likely to want. It then displays that item prominently for the customer to decide. This is a great way to boost brand loyalty for the retention of customers.

Search Engines

Search engines have been using AI for a while to optimize results, but the technology has become more advanced. Search engine algorithms can essentially teach themselves how to search for the user’s intended query at lightning speed. What does this mean for marketing? These intelligent search engines are changing the SEO game. Content has to do more than match a keyword; it has to be organically relevant to the intent of a user’s search.

Image Recognition

Image recognition software can take in visual information to identify a person or an object. This was first seen with facial recognition in digital camera’s focusing ability and later on with Facebook and photo organization apps. As the technology develops, expect to see more image recognition search applications.

For marketers, this means that images will become increasingly important for online platforms. People may begin to search using pictures taken from their phone, meaning images could become another form of the keyword.

Take your marketing tactics into the future by incorporating AI technologies. Staying abreast of these innovations can help you get ahead of the competition and show your customers you are keeping up with trends. AI can also make marketing easier by predicting customer behavior and making targeting more accurate. Keep an eye on how AI influences trends in marketing and beyond to stay on top.

Want to use Artificial Intelligence in your Small Business?

Your business many not have Netflix or Google’s budget size to create real artificial intelligence applications to help your business boost sales and predict customer behavior. Yet, you’re still able to create a simple or complex marketing or sales chatbot to help you answer customer inquiries while you’re office is closed. You can pretty easily program your own chatbot, or can get help from a marketing agency to build your chatbot.