AI in Marketing: A Complement To Human Creativity and Innovation

According to Salesforce’s ‘The 6th State of Marketing Report’, published in May 2020, 84% of the marketing managers interviewed were using Artificial Intelligence (AI) for their processes, when in 2018 it was only 29%. Constant digitization, heightened by the pandemic, has pushed this figure up in a department so essential to the promotion of a company’s products and services.

As in supply chain management, the marketing department is one of those that can most benefit from the power of AI for its day-to-day tasks. From data analysis to the creation of immersive or personalized experiences, these are some of the applications of artificial intelligence in this field.

Benefits of Using Artificial Intelligence in Marketing

• Personalization: With the information provided by artificial intelligence after analyzing the department’s data, campaigns can be customized, generating unique experiences for each customer or individualizing the messages that reach them.
• Increased ROI. AI makes it possible to extract data that improve or create advertising campaigns in real time. These decisions, properly applied, improve ROI.
• Improved measurement. AI analyzes the numerous measurable data produced by campaigns and provides insights faster than human analysis (or complementary to it).
• Time and cost savings. And finally, the use of this technology helps campaigns to optimize their budget and the time invested in them: the technology streamlines and refines processes. In addition, AI can also be used to automate tasks, thus saving time and costs.

How to Use AI in Marketing

AI, Marketing and Bots

Bots are put at the service of marketing departments in many different ways:

• Chatbots that answer customer questions 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The information they collect can be used for reporting or trend analysis; for example, what are the most frequently asked questions, and how does this information help to improve the product or service?
• Social Media Management: A bot can send automatic messages to users with offers or customer service information.

New User Experiences and Artificial Intelligence

In 2018, e-commerce giant Alibaba opened a physical store in Hong Kong: FashionAI featured, among other technologies, smart mirrors that suggested clothes to complement those worn by customers, or a virtual closet that links the clothes they tried on in the store to their online account so they can buy them from home. This shows that AI can be used to design immersive experiences that modernize retail stores.

It’s not just consumers who benefit from these kinds of experiences: marketing departments gain data to develop more targeted advertising strategies or consumer trends.

User Recommendations

The famous algorithms that make recommendations on Netflix or Amazon according to our history should be in the spotlight of marketing departments: if recommendations are made to the audience, it saves time in the search for products.

Thus, you can create a search engine, design a chatbot that suggests products after the user answers a few questions or collect information that detects future interests of customers and thus make personalized recommendations.

Price Selection

AI ‘manages’ prices based on demand and competitor data. These prices can be dynamic; for example, those offered by travel comparators, which are different depending on the time of day when we make the query or the proximity to the date on which we want to travel. They can also be fixed, if after analyzing the data it is decided to establish a single price

AI and Predictive Analytics

Using data filtering with AI for predictive analytics serves to enable the company to detect:

• New customers and markets
• Optimize prices according to time of day or day of the week
• Predict and anticipate changes in demand

New Products

Data from traditional marketing research, mixed with data from social networks and CRMs, and filtered through the AI sieve, can be used to create new products.

This is what happened to the multinational Unilever, which has AI data centers all over the world. Thanks to the information analyzed, they discovered that there were about 50 songs in which the apparently antithetical concepts of “ice cream” and “breakfast” were mentioned. The result was to create several Ben & Jerry’s cereal-flavored ice creams.

Copywriting

Through Machine Learning and the ingestion of large amounts of data, technologies can be developed to help copywriters create more persuasive copy.

For example, a machine can give ideas for blog post titles that are attractive enough for a person to read the post to the end. Also, suggest hashtags to position updates on social networks. All of this contributes to irreplaceable human creativity.

At the same time, SEO tools can return long tail keyword results that web surfers search for. With them, a human designs a content strategy and editorial calendar.

Voice Search, Virtual Assistants and AI

The Artificial Intelligence of Alexa, Cortana or Siri is also a good channel for offering products and services, or for customer service functions, such as the chatbots described above. Promotions, sweepstakes, latest news… are some of the actions that can be carried out.

Do you want us to help you implement AI in your marketing department?

From bots to predictive analytics to voice search, there are numerous applications of AI in marketing. Applying technology offers more refined results for developing promotional campaigns and thus attracting new customers or building customer loyalty.

Our experience in various technological fields, such as Data Processing, Web Application Development and Augmented and Virtual Reality, allows us to know which are the best solutions to integrate in a marketing department. Contact us and we will help you choose the best solution.