Increasingly, more and more marketers are turning to artificial intelligence with great success to help boost their marketing effort, writes Ivan Adriel de Silva.
Using AI to Shake up Marketing
If you’ve been following the world of marketing and advertising for a while, you’ll know that it’s never been more innovative. Marketers are constantly pushing boundaries to find new ways to connect with their audiences and must think out of the box to keep up with these changes and remain relevant in today’s digital world. Artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing is emerging as an effective solution for businesses to find and attract their ideal audience.
Many international organisations have transformed how they operate by implementing AI in marketing. With the right strategy and a proactive mindset, integrating AI in marketing can help build more effective influencer marketing strategies, generate new ideas, gain audience insight, and reach customers through voice assistants and chatbots. So what are the most exciting opportunities when it comes to using AI in marketing?
AI is transforming influencer marketing
AI is disrupting influencer marketing by measuring campaign performance and improving influencer discovery. Measuring campaign performance is the biggest challenge facing influencer marketers today. Social media users are unpredictable, so being able to achieve clear return of investment (ROI) isn’t also guaranteed. By adapting AI-driven influencer marketing tools, businesses can forecast accurate campaign ROI. Organisations are also using AI-trained models to search for the right influencers and detect fake engagement and fraudulent influencers. Everything on social media can be bought and sold such as followers, likes and comments. AI can help an organisation detect these fraudulent techniques, revolutionising the way brands perform influencer marketing. By implementing AI in influencer marketing, marketers are armed with information to make data-driven decisions that result in better campaign outcomes.
AI for content creation
Companies are tapping into AI to unlock new trends and designing prototypes to fuel their content creation. AI provides better insights into a business’s audience as it uses algorithms to detect patterns in large quantities of data. By constantly analysing blogs, forums, portals, and social media accounts, AI can spot breaking online trends and conversations, enabling creatives to validate ideas faster. During the early stages of a campaign, AI models can be used to quickly create prototypes of ideas. Using the latest AI models and tools, a 3D image or digital model of the idea and voice-over can be created. This provides marketers with a clear vision of what the entire campaign will look like and how it will function which can be shared with clients to validate concepts. We recently started using AI at Granite to help create hundreds of new narratives which has scaled our content production significantly. Embracing AI has allowed our team members to save time on monotonous writing tasks and focus their skills on more valuable areas of content creation such as strategizing and content mix.
Audience Insight
It is imperative for marketers to understand their customers’ behaviour and needs so they can successfully sell their product or services. Every marketer is familiar with creating a series of personas to match their different type of customers. For instance, a customer aged 25 to 35 will have different needs to a 50-60-year-old. The ads and content targeted to various cohorts of people will be different. The main challenge to this is the unceasing alternating of customer attitudes. In order to keep up with this fast-paced industry, marketers should consider investing in Artificial Intelligence. AI simplifies this segmentation process as it can quickly identify audience patterns and preferences, so marketers can subdivide their audiences easily. Marketers can use this simpler framework to enhance their understanding of their customers, creating messages which resonate with them so they can grow their brand.
Communicating through voice assistants
Voice assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Google are developing at a significant pace and many companies are embracing their services to effectively communicate with their audiences. These virtual digital assistants have surged in popularity in Ireland as their intuitive interfaces help us manage our frenetic lives. At Granite, we realised that we could harness voice assistant technology to communicate effectively with an organisations audience so collaborated with the Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU) to promote its energy savings and educational tools. Together, we launched ‘The Switch On’ to Savings, Rights and Safety campaign to help teach Irish citizens about energy safety, how to boost their savings and their rights as a consumer during the Pandemic. Since the campaign was launched during the pandemic, Granite and the CRU turned to AI, Google Assistant and Alexa as messengers to communicate this information to the growing number of smart Irish speaker and smart display owners.
Chatbots and Conversational Experiences
Customer service bots are another tool which are being used to help companies understand their most prevalent issues. While the average chatbot AI isn’t sophisticated enough to replace manual intervention, they are very useful for collecting information. Marketing teams benefit from understanding customers most common grievances, which helps them improve product and service development and craft tailored messages that will resonate with them. The bots can also be designed to run analytics on that data and identify the most common customer issues. By having access to this data, companies can make more informed business decision to enhance customer satisfaction and improve customer segmenting. When looking at our own business within Connector at Granite, we recognised we needed to prioritise this area and became the first agency to create a Facebook AI chatbot in Ireland. “Ava” was designed as a fast and personal way to connect people to the resources and expertise that they need, anytime and anywhere in the world. After carrying out some research, we discovered that people love to communicate with one another via instant messaging using apps such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp so designed Ava, the chatbot. By adapting a chat-first strategy, we have improved our services by automating repetitive tasks, scaling customer support, and providing a more personalised user experience.
Artificial intelligence is already having a monumental impact on the marketing landscape. Companies successfully incorporating AI technology offer enhanced customer experiences, growth, and development. By using AI creatively in line with customers’ needs and desires, they are guaranteed to return again and again. By adding AI to a marketing toolbox today, businesses can reap rewards tomorrow which will extend into the future.
Ivan Adriel de Silva is Growth Strategy Director, Granite Digital
