AI and the Future of Digital Marketing.

If you haven’t heard of ChatGPT, what rock have you been hiding under?

Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is the latest AI chatbot on the block and it's caused a stir among tech enthusiasts (and all sorts of other enthusiasts). Over the past week, we've had a blast getting all up in it with it and seeing what it's capable of.

But, it got us thinking... what does the rise of AI mean for the wide, wide world of digital marketing? Will the next blog post you read have been written by a bot? Did an AI predict that you’d buy from an ad you just got targeted with?

Have a gander at our take on the newest developments in AI Martech.

What is AI Marketing?

AI marketing, also known as artificial intelligence marketing, is the use of AI technology and techniques to improve and automate marketing efforts. This can include the use of machine learning algorithms to analyse customer data and make predictions, natural language processing to improve customer interactions, and other AI-powered tools to automate and optimize marketing processes. AI marketing can help businesses to better understand their customers, personalize their marketing efforts, and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.

Types of AI Marketing. 

There are many types and uses of AI Marketing, with more being discovered all the time.but Here’s a list of the most common:

• Creation of Content
  ChatGPT is especially good with this element – if you ask for a blog post or a caption for a social media post it will produce exactly that.

• Programmatic Advertising
  AI is already taking over PPC advertising. Google Ads, the biggest online advertiser, uses Machine Learning in their smart bidding and placement strategies.

• Chat Bots
  When you message a company’s Chat Bot, they might be a person — but they could also be an AI that is designed to help people with the most common problems.

• Behaviour and predictive analysis
  The best (in our opinion) use of AI and Machine Learning in marketing is their ability to predict sales, retrieve customer insights and a number of other marketing analytics processes.

• Personalisation and the Right Message
  You likely know that Netflix will change the image of the film based on what it thinks you are more likely to watch. This is done through an analysis of what you watch and the covers you click on. It’s done through AI and Machine Learning.

What are the benefits?

• Increased ROI: AI allows marketers to work more efficiently and get better analytics,
  which means that we can do more in the same amount of time and work smarter. This
  leads to better returns from doing less.

• Increased Personalisation: With customers expecting personalisation, the businesses that don’t do this will fall behind.
  AI will help make your marketing more personalised. Whether that is a personalised push notification or an ad that shows
  products a customer viewed recently.

• Increased Efficiency: AI gathers data and can analyse this data much faster than humans. It also can help to generate
  ideas or even write some copy to help out (quick fun fact: this blog post idea came from us riffing off an idea generated by
  asking an AI for new blog post ideas).

What are the drawbacks?

There are several drawbacks to the use of AI in marketing:

• Lack of human touch – at the end of the day an AI is a programme, so using an AI in customer service can frustrate customers.
  How many times have you been sent in circles by a chatbot or asked a question it doesn’t understand, and it sends you things that
  are only vaguely related? Also, no matter how well it writes, an AI lacks creativity. It will take data and produce a good approximation
  of what you want, but for out-of-the-box thinking, you need a human.

• Cost – AI systems can be very expensive. There are free versions (ChatGPT for example) but other AI systems can be well out of
  reach for many SMEs.

• Ethical concerns – this is a topic all on its own, but we’ll touch on it here. For example, AI’s can perpetuate and amplify bias
  depending on the data with which an AI is trained. There are also privacy, job loss, and potential misuse concerns, to name just
  a few.

• Lack of transparency – there is a huge lack of transparency in AI programmes. How does it work? Where does the answer or
  the solution it suggests come from? If you ask an AI to write a blog post and then post that, is there the potential for plagiarism?
  Also, if an AI makes a recommendation without explaining why, it stops marketers from learning why they do certain tasks, and
  it turns marketing into a box ticking exercise.

• Limitations – AI systems can’t perfectly replicate the creativity and flexibility of human thinking. New situations can stump
  them whereas a human can adapt.

• Data – AI systems learn from data sets. If the data is incomplete or biased, then the AI’s decisions would be biased or potentially
  wrong. Using ChatGPT as an example again, the data that ChatGPT draws on is from 2021 and before, so it couldn’t answer anything
  after that.

Examples of AI in marketing.

There are plenty of companies using AI to help with their marketing, doing everything from recommending products to personalisation, and from analytics to chatbots. Here are a few examples, but there a bunch more:

• Netflix is one of the classic examples of AI in marketing. They use it to provide personalised recommendations to
  users based on what they’ve watched and what they’ve rated.

• Sephora has a chatbot which offers beauty advice and shares content and product suggestions.

• Google’s Rankbrain (how it chooses to serve websites in relation to a user’s search) and Ad platform are
  both run by AI.

How will AI change marketing?

There are a number of ways that AI will change digital marketing in the future. Personalisation, predictive analytics, automation, and customer interactions are likely to be the areas that are most affected by AI.

AI can use customer data to personalise ads and communications to the customer and with chat bots and natural language processing, customer interactions can be sped up and improved upon. These lead to much better customer experiences.

As regards predictive analytics, AI will be able to analyse many data points and accurately predict future buying patterns — and also key audience segments the business may be missing. It can also automate many basic marketing tasks, which will free marketers to do more strategic planning.

As you can see AI has the chance to help and change marketing in many ways. There are some drawbacks to keep in mind as you go about your experiments in AI. For now, it seems like AI will not be replacing digital marketers, but it is a powerful option in the digital marketer’s tool belt.

By the way, one of these paragraphs was written by an AI. Can you tell which one?