Mumbai: From Siri to Tesla Car, and Google AI to Alexa, Artificial Intelligence is now impacting every aspect of our lives. It is designed and programmed in a way to mimic and think like a human being. With data as the new oil in the marketing world, intelligence will be needed to derive meaningful insights to improve the marketing mix.

With the vast potential of collecting, analysing, applying, and learning data, artificial intelligence is transforming the digital strategies of various sectors. With its advancement, it is also impacting and dominating the world of digital marketing.

We all know digital marketing uses online platforms to advertise products and services of the brand. A study conducted by Salesforce revealed that almost 51 per cent of marketers are already using AI, as of 2018. But, after the pandemic, customers, as well as businesses, took the digital way resulting in an unprecedented surge in the way people experience the digital ecosystem, where our lives had literally moved online.

Here are some insights on how AI is playing a pivotal role in the field of digital marketing:

Customer Insights Integration

Customer insight integration basically refers to the analysis of customer behaviour. Insights in this perspective refer to the metrics that show, how well a certain content is performing. For example: On LinkedIn, when one uploads an image/video, AI immediately scans the image for nudity/sensitive content and rejects or removes it from the timeline. Alternatively, if your status has more comments on a particular post, the algorithm amplifies it to the second and third network of users. On another popular digital platform, Spotify, the app recommends playlists based on the user's choices. A similar algorithm is deployed by Amazon when you see recommended products based on your past purchase. Most popular digital platforms, through AI, are able to paint a virtual personality of the user, based on past behaviour and actions online.

Real-Time Tracking

Artificial intelligence also allows real-time tracking and lets the marketers know how a certain post is performing in an instant. For marketers, this means faster A/B testing of content, better analysis, and swift deployment of better strategies to produce more content of what’s working.

Enhances Customer Experience

Artificial Intelligence uses the theory of machine learning to study its user. They observe the pattern of the user's choices by monitoring what s/he likes or dislikes. After observing the patterns, they show content to users according to their preferences and likes. This makes marketing virtually personalised and the user engages more with the content as per his/her preference, stimulating dopamine. And it's not rocket science to note that a happy user is most likely to buy a product or service.

Chatbot

Chatbots are designed in such a way that it can stimulate human conversation with the help of pre-defined texts and sentences. With the introduction of AI in digital marketing, it has enhanced the customer experience by providing them 24x7 customer care services. A study conducted on American Businesses and Customers who have used chatbots revealed that 64 per cent of Americans agreed on the availability of chatbots 24x7, on any day as its best feature 24x7. An erstwhile long content that had a dedicated FAQ page has now turned into an interactive session where the bot addresses your most common concerns and directs you to a human when needed.

Email marketing

AI can also help email marketers reach the right customers at the right time, ensuring that messaging is relevant, engaging, and more likely to convert. It can also allow you to better analyse what types of messaging, subject lines, design, and images get the best results. With Artificial Intelligence, it has become a lot easier to send the customer personalised emails. 

With data-driven marketing strategies ruling the roost, Artificial Intelligence is the hero that ‘makes sense of the data, analyses the data, creating a virtual persona of the intended audiences, and predicts ‘better’ strategies to target them. And this is probably just the start of how AI will transform the face of marketing as we know it.

(Nikhil Sharda is EVP - creative & digital communications at Scroll Mantra. The views expressed in the column are personal and Indiantelevision.com may not subscribe to them.)