Is Marketing Moving in a Whole New Direction?

With all the talk of AI taking over the world, established marketing teams may be concerned about their methods becoming outdated. This is understandable. But the reality is that methods are shifting to some extent. What you’ve been practicing in recent years is still completely relevant to the task. But there are points that deserve attention.

What exactly does this mean? Many things, actually. Everything from personalizing emails to creating the cheapest ad network can be made easier with AI. Let’s take a closer look.

AI is not to be feared

The main thing that you should keep in mind when approaching AI is that it is something that you should work with. It is not there to take over the entire marketing world. For the tasks that it does replace, your employees’ time can be better spent on other, more fruitful tasks. So let’s take a cool, rational look at what AI is and is not likely to do for marketing. 

Automating routine tasks

There are certain aspects of the job that no one enjoys because they are mundane and involve very little creative thought. AI can take care of many of these less appealing tasks for you, including:

• Data entry, by auto-filling necessary data into appropriate places
• Spreadsheet organization, given the proper commands
• Initial content creation, to give you ideas that you can work with and adjust as you wish
• Ad copy for additional strength in your marketing

Again, the use of AI in these tasks in no way means that you can’t use your own creativity, it just helps enhance it and keep you focused in the right direction.

Winning at the SEO game

AI is key to beating the competition when it comes to SEO, by as much as 65% according to one source. It is also essential for keeping up on what is going on inside your industry. 

In using AI to power your SEO, you gain multiple benefits:

• You not only optimize your use of keywords and keyword phrases, but you can learn about new trends in keyword usage that you might not have otherwise known about.
• Your competitor analysis will be much enhanced and you will gain meaningful insight into what you need to do to keep apace with the competition.
• AI can provide you with precise, actionable insights about how to hone your message to fit your target audience.
• Trends in searches . The human eye can detect some degree of patterns when looking through search queries, but AI can do it much better. Use AI as a guide for honing your meta descriptions.

In scouring the entire Internet to detect patterns, AI can produce fast and detailed results that can help you strategize and hone the perfect long-term plan to meet your goals.

Learn to use data better

Marketing is a creative endeavor, for sure. But at its core it is really all about data. People – even whole teams of people – have limited ability to deal with massive amounts of data. This is another area in which AI can be a lifesaver.

Among the many things that AI data analysis can assist with are:

• Honing your target audience to reach just the right people. You never know when part of your target audience might have dropped off and switched to another brand. Or conversely, there may be a new demographic that could potentially be interested in your products if you know how to speak to them in the right way. AI can lay this all out for you.
• Pinpointing which campaigns are lacking compared to others. If you undertake a series of marketing campaigns and some perform slightly better than others, you should be able to determine the reasons for this and focus on the things that really work.
• Determining which of your marketing channels is most successful and why. There could be a lot of subtle factors involved in who you reach through which channels, and how your conversion rates are affected.

Personalizing to scale

Personalization is the name of the game these days. But to be effective, it needs to be accurate. Imagine sending a “personalized” marketing email to a customer and calling him by the wrong name.

AI can help you make personalized product recommendations, come up with tailored content, and help direct you in terms of individual marketing needs to a large degree. But you always need to check its suggestions to ensure accuracy. This is why AI cannot act alone; it is an excellent tool to have, but one that shouldn’t be used by itself.

Use it to your advantage

Again, the key to mastering the AI game is to learn how to use it to your advantage. It can be an excellent tool for providing insight. It can also take care of monotonous daily work and analyze data. And it can cover other crucial aspects of marketing. But you still need your own skill, creativity, and sharp eye to keep your business moving. Get the formula right and you’ll be prepared to charge ahead.