Power of AI in Marketing and 6 ways to use it

AI-specific use cases in marketing have been steadily increasing. With the emergence of generative AI (gen AI) tools, such use cases are skyrocketing. As Salesforce's Eighth State of Marketing Report finds, AI has found a spot in marketers' workflows and tech stacks, scaling efforts to improve operations and enhance customer experience.

AI can process massive amounts of data and turn them into valuable insights that enhance the customer experience and fuel marketing strategies. Automating data collection and analysis frees up marketers' time for tasks that require creativity and sophisticated thinking, infusing marketing campaigns with new ideas and innovation.

Understanding the Role of AI in Marketing

AI marketing tools use artificial intelligence to mimic human intelligence and automate decisions. They employ machine learning to discover trends, make predictions, and perform tasks without human intervention. Broadly, AI in marketing can be predictive or generative.

Predictive AI analyzes patterns in customer data to predict outcomes. For example, you can predict what customers might buy based on their past purchase behaviors. Generative AI creates text and images from the data it is trained on. Marketers use predictive AI tools to derive insights based on past data and generative AI to create content personalized to each user, at speed and scale.

Automation and personalization have emerged as the top use cases for AI in marketing. There are AI tools that automate repetitive tasks such as data gathering, customer assistance, predictive audience segmentation, email outreach, and lead qualification, saving marketers time and effort. AI tools can create curated and personalized experiences for customers, delighting them and encouraging their loyalty. All of this happens on autopilot, with marketing teams making the strategic decisions.

Here are 6 ways marketers can use AI in their daily workflows:

1. Enhanced Customer Insights through Data Analysis

You may be collecting more data than ever, but are you turning your data into actionable insights? AI tools analyze vast amounts of data from CRM databases, website activity, social networks, Product Analytics tools, and third-party data sources to understand customer behavior and preferences. Predictive analytics helps marketers understand which actions to take concerning a particular customer or target group and how to optimize a campaign for high performance.

2. Creating Personalized Customer Experiences

Personalization is a game-changer. Companies that grow faster drive 40 percent more of their revenue from personalization than their slower-growing counterparts, reports McKinsey. As already mentioned, one of the key ways marketers are leveraging AI is in the area of personalized marketing and messaging.

AI can automatically tailor marketing messages to individual customers based on their historical data and product usage. By delivering highly relevant content, businesses can attract customers' attention and increase trust, loyalty, and sales. For example, an AI-driven recommendation engine delivers personalized product suggestions based on customers' purchase histories and browsing behaviors. AI can also be used to predict the potential long-term value of referral campaigns and affiliate partnerships.

3. Automating Customer Interactions with Chatbots

SaaS and eCommerce customers alike have grown comfortable with the idea of having AI-powered chatbots help them find what they're looking for. Chatbots reduce their wait times, answer their questions, and direct them to helpful resources. A positive conversational and engaging experience improves customer engagement and satisfaction.

Apart from helping boost customer relationships and retention, high-quality and timely chatbot conversations lift the burden of customer support teams and enable businesses to reduce customer service costs.

4. Optimizing Marketing Campaigns in Real-Time

Marketing Ad campaigns are usually optimized using top-of-funnel indicators such as sign-ups, session durations, and activations, with the expectation that these proxy events are linked to actual conversions and high customer lifetime value (CLTV). Advertising platforms like Meta and Google offer short campaign optimization windows (typically less than 7 days), which force marketers to rely on top-of-funnel proxy events when actual conversion events are lacking.

AI can help anticipate potential conversions ahead of time. By using AI, you analyze the performance of your Meta, Google, and LinkedIn ads in real-time, and boost performance. Tools like Toplyne learn from your first-party data, to accurately predict an acquired user's term value within 1 day of acquisition, and relay this positive reinforcementback to Google and Meta. This process enables campaigns to rapidly and continuously learn from predicted high-quality users, and automatically adjust bidding (VBB), thereby improving RoAS.

5. Content Creation and Curation with AI

AI tools can create content based on natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms. That includes articles, social media posts, email subject lines and body, customizable presentation templates, and videos. Generative AI tools like Open AI's ChatGPT can curate content from various sources and personalize it to fit the needs of your target audience.

1. AI also helps with search engine optimization (SEO), generating semantically related keywords, building content around specific topics, and creating meta titles and descriptions, among other SEO-specific tasks. You can also improve search rankings using AI tools for updating existing articles with new and relevant content.
2. Advanced Market Research and Consumer Insights
3. The best SaaS companies in the world rely on market research to guide their product to success. In the hypercompetitive and highly diversified eCommerce marketplace, marketers must stand out as unique and double down on the customer experience, which is possible only with a deep understanding of the market and consumer.
4. AI algorithms can rapidly process insights from large volumes of survey responses, customer reviews, social media posts, and more. This enables the identification of market trends, patterns, and sentiment shifts exponentially faster than human analysis could. An ongoing analysis of research reports and news can help uncover early signs of emerging trends, competitor strategies, and industry shifts to respond proactively.

Marketing without AI-powered tools? Seems unlikely.

From social media and email marketing to SEO, online ads, recommendation engines, content marketing, and analytics, AI touches virtually all facets of marketing today. AI automation eliminates time-consuming marketing tasks and streamlines marketing workflows. The use of AI for personalization, consumer research, customer support, and predictive analytics can drive massive efficiency gains, better customer outcomes, and a bigger bottom line.

Given how data-driven decision-making is at the heart of every major business function, AI adoption shouldn’t come as a big surprise. Marketing is one of the key areas where AI can deliver great value. In this article, we discussed some ways marketers can leverage AI's power to supercharge their marketing efforts. The potential of AI to create more delightful and personalized customer journeys with improving bottom line eventually is immense. This also means AI will find a permanent and crucial position in every marketers' workflows and tech stacks.