The campaign execution, testing, optimization and analysis work that marketers are required to perform manually today has grown too immense for them to handle effectively. Artificial intelligence marketing is a real solution to the nearly impossible challenges facing marketing professionals everywhere.
Marketers today must coordinate their campaigns for dozens of devices, technologies, and channels, meeting individual users with messaging relevant to who they are and what they want. Achieving that near 1:1 consumer targeting takes plenty of data from each relevant channel — it takes so much data, in fact, that dealing with it effectively has become an almost impossible challenge for most organizations.
The overwhelming response to the problem of big data overload has been to adopt a wide array of software tools to organize information and surface insights. But in these frameworks, every channel and technology has its own individual tools for optimization and troubleshooting — tools that require a dedicated team and are often incompatible with one another.
The necessary solution is a single system that intelligently unifies all the disparate and moving parts plaguing the modern marketing department, testing and optimizing campaigns across channels at the 1:1 scale — that solution is artificial intelligence (A.I.) marketing.
What Makes A.I. Different?
An A.I. marketing platform is a self-driven tool that learns and grows with your business, helping you minimize manual input and maximize ROI. It can access and integrate with all relevant data streams to instantly understand every interaction that users have made with your brand, synthesize that data to inform its decisions, and carry out extreme multivariate testing to discover new insights without human supervision.
A.I. marketing differs from programmatic and automated marketing systems because it is built from the ground up utilizing A.I. technology, with the ability to run campaigns across both paid and unpaid channels, test, optimize, and analyze at a massive, previously unavailable pace and scale, while offering proactive insights on steps the marketer should take next.
What exactly is A.I.? Well, it contains a number of unique components:
- ML-based techniques such as predictive analytics and deep learning
- Expert systems comprised of rules based on singular methodologies developed by the technology’s vendor
- Natural language processing, and other components.
By unifying these different elements, AI allows a computer to detect patterns, draw conclusions from them, and adjust its behavior in accordance with those conclusions — all without the need for additional programming. A.I. marketing platforms also excel as a result of experimentation, and they can conduct thousands of tests while incorporating a huge number of variables in a very brief window of time.
All this doesn’t just reduce the time marketers spend on manual tasks, but exponentially increases the amount of information that can be reliably converted into actionable insights. The algorithms powering these tools aren’t just capable of making more decisions, but more accurate ones, deciding everything from what messaging is most effective to how much budget should be allocated to various channels for nearly every interaction it makes.
How it Works
To manage campaigns from the audience research phase all the way through to execution, A.I. marketing uses your pre-established database of users and interactions to create innovative, efficient new campaigns. It breaks down potential customers into hundreds of micro-segments, each with their own unique combination of demographics, interests, and observed behaviors to bring you the closest approximation of 1:1 interaction that can be achieved in modern marketing.
The platform tests and launches “micro-campaigns” directed at these small segments, seamlessly integrating the creative materials you provide. Identifying, for example, that a group of 18-to-29-year-old men follow both sports content publishers and fitness outlets on Twitter, the software will place a high bid for the most promising media space, before displaying the messaging you’ve designed for athletic sneakers. It then monitors the activity and decisions user make, and develops relevant recommendations based on its observations.
Perhaps most importantly, A.I. marketing gives you a more nuanced look into the attribution and journey discovery elements of a given campaign. By helping you pinpoint not just which ads are seen where and when, but the influence that each individual interaction has on a user’s eventual conversion, you get a much more holistic view of your entire audience and your presence across channels.
Integration with Your Current Technology Stack
A.I. marketing performs similar tasks across all channels by connecting with each and every one of your data streams, including your CRM, analytics platforms, and price/inventory feed, to provide invaluable insights into the performance of a specific message. Because it easily integrates with your current tech stack, a true A.I. marketing platform immediately understands every single one of your users across all devices and channels. By analyzing where and when your users make their decisions, the software actually learns who they are and can therefore more accurately predict their future behavior.
When integrated with data sources like your content management system, A.I. marketing can also swap out creative aspects of your campaign in real-time to match what it anticipates a given user will want. A hotel could offer real-time updates on pricing for available rooms within a display ad, for instance, making it easy for users to instantly convert.
Don’t think of A.I. marketing as just another piece of software: think of it as the best hire your marketing team could make. A platform based on machine learning constantly improves and optimizes your campaigns over time, making smarter decisions from planning to execution to analysis. In short, A.I. software liberates marketers from the pain and complexity of the modern marketing landscape.
