Luckily AI hasn’t taken over our life yet but chatbots and virtual agents are some of the ways that AI is changing digital marketing in 2021.
Why do companies adopt AI?
Let’s think about this: why would companies want to adopt AI?
Well companies are not charities so they exist for just one reason to make money.
Even non-profit organizations AIming to save the world need to balance their books.
So for companies to adopt AI there must be a very good reason it will either help them make money or save money.
Data is the lifeline of AI and it won’t work without data.
I’ll be using AI or artificial intelligence as an umbrella term which includes machine and deep learning.
What is deep learning?
Deep learning is a machine learning deep learning is a machine using large amounts of data to train
complex deep neural networks.
Deep neural networks are capable of achieving human level accuracy for many tasks but they are hungry for data.
Examples of deep neural networks and deep learning in everyday lives include amazon recommendations, social media algorithms and everyone’s facial recognition.
Because AI needs data the adoption will probably first take place and where there’s data and probably money too.
Where can we find both data and money?
One of such business areas is the front line of the business sales and marketing because these departments have been collecting customer data and have a direct impact on revenue so this is where the money and the data is.
They need to understand customers and predict customer behaviour better in order to better serve the customers.
For example: In an interview the head of product and R&d of spotify Gustav Soderstrom mentioned that they can predict which podcast the listeners would possibly like based on their music taste.
So, that leads us to the…
Top 3 ways AI will impact digital marketing
After analysing a lot of digital marketing news around AI I have found these 3 ways that will have a major impact on digital marketing.
1. Customer behavior prediction and personalized user experience
Customer behavior prediction sounds fancy but it’s nothing new. The more digital products or services we use, the more data the service provider has on us.
Let’s not turn this into another episode of the social dilemma but this is basically advanced customer segmentation and attribution in digital marketing language.
Attribution tools allow you to see what drove customer x to do why there’s no magic once you see what’s under the hood but how you use these tools and how you cluster the data makes a difference.
For example: It’s actually impressive how spotify can make a prediction of the listener’s podcast preference just based on their music taste and you might have experienced this.
2.Programmatic advertising
If you’re in the business of SEM you probably already know that AI is taking care of the ad bidding on a
massive scale.
In digital marketing language AI is helping you best leverage your ad spend and optimizes your ROI
And in plain english AI will help you find the best way to spend your money. Just tell the AI your budget and criteria.
3. Content creation
It’s exciting and a bit scary. Websites like conversion.ai have been around so you can type in a keyword or a phrase as a prompt and it will generate an article for you.
It’s not bad. I tried to use conversion.AI to write an article for my website and its work is amazing. Checkout conversion.ai review.
Google’s open AI recently developed GPT-3 a gigantic language model that can generate human-like text
It can do some simple math and reasoning as well.
It’s not open to the public yet but I find the ability of doing math kind of amazing because it was trAIned with only text not numbers so basically gpt 3 learned math by reading english.
People who had early access to gpt 3 were amazed by the content that gpt 3 had generated because
It was realistic.
Ai is also used to generate music and sometimes it’s difficult to tell which piece was made by AI and which piece was made by humans.
Final Thoughts
Finally I want to point out that just because they say there’s AI inside doesn’t mean that there is AI inside. A 2019 survey showed that about 40 of the EU AI startups actually don’t have AI in their solutions. A lot of vendors want to capitalize the buzz of AI and want to sell you the snake oil so please do your homework before buying any AI solutions.
