How Does Artificial Intelligence (AI) Work?
Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a field of computer science that tries to understand human intelligence through computers. Technology developers build “intelligent” machines that think and respond to information, solve problems, and do technical tasks like a person.
While AI dates back to the 1950s, it gained popularity in the 1980s and began taking the world by storm. From voice search to facial recognition to chatbots, leveraging AI technology opens up automation, effectiveness, and targeted content creation for marketers.
How AI is Changing the Future of Digital Marketing
We live in the digital age. According to Forbes, 84% of marketers now use machine learning technology and artificial intelligence.
AI enables marketers to:
- Better understand customers. Meeting customers where they are on their buying journey, in their chosen channel, and leveraging automation are all key benefits of AI.
- Leverage hyper-personalization. With specific product and content recommendations, AI “learns” what customers want and provides targeted marketing.
- Predict customer behavior. Marketers can create AI-enabled advertising with predictive customer analytics for tailored customer experiences.
- Improve the user experience. With an intelligent way of identifying prospective customers and predicting future actions to improve messaging, marketers can use “conversational marketing” with chatbots and virtual digital assistants for enhanced customer service.
- Increase marketer productivity. Automated workflows for keyword research, social media marketing, search engine marketing, and pay-per-click (PPC) ads can save exponential time and money. Computer science does the work so you can focus on other priorities.
- Monitor effectiveness – automatically. AI allows marketers to receive better data insights to determine what’s working in a marketing campaign strategy.
AI systems deliver more bang for your buck with less effort while boosting customer relationship management, optimizing marketing efforts, and improving the effectiveness of campaigns.
Best of all, AI constantly evolves to enhance productivity by using algorithms.
AI Technology Tools for Digital Marketers
At Digital Neighbor, we were early advocates of integrating AI into SEO strategies to drive competitive advantage.
How do you implement AI-powered tools to ramp up traditional advertising and digital marketing strategies? Here are a few ideas.
Personalized Marketing For Customer Relationship Management
AI personalizes marketing campaigns and messaging based on identifying patterns and trends in customer data, such as browsing or purchasing history. AI can take those insights and re-target customers with chatbots, interactive sites, and emails.
Using AI to personalize marketing campaigns can help improve your marketing’s relevance and impact. A happy customer who gets what they want leads to increased engagement and conversions.
Tools to try: Adobe Target, Lytics
Predictive Analytics For Digital Advertising
AI analyzes customer data to predict their future behavior and eliminate guesswork. This allows marketers to target the right audience at the right time, improving the effectiveness of campaigns to give buyers what they want.
Tools to try: Folloze, Acquisio
SEO Tools that Reach Your Audience & Provide Valuable Insights
AI tools for search engine optimization (SEO) can improve keyword research, optimize your content, identify relevant websites for link building, track performance, and personalize your customers’ experiences.
AI helps with:
- Identifying relevant and high-performing keywords through data analysis.
- Evaluating your website content to suggest changes for search engine and user relevancy and readability.
- Sourcing high-quality websites for link building to boost ranking in Google’s algorithms.
- Tracking a website’s performance with insights on improving ranking and visibility in search results.
AI-Powered SERPs
AI tools are at the forefront of digital marketing players, too. AI can now work behind the scenes to optimize search engine page results (SERPs). In January 2023, Microsoft announced the integration of OpenAi’s ChatGPT into its Bing search engine by the end of March 2023.
Using AI in SEO can help businesses save time, improve the efficiency of their efforts, and ultimately drive more qualified traffic to their website. Given Microsoft’s challenge to Google’s seat as the reigning champion of search engines, it’s likely the industry will see more AI!
Tools to try: Google’s RankBrain, Lumar (rebranded from DeepCrawl), SEMrush, Surfer SEO, MOZ Pro, Ahrefs
Targeted Content Creation Through Automation
Intelligent AI writing bots like ChatGPT produces original content using algorithms to understand the tone and style of a brand and automatically generate social media posts, blogs, or email marketing campaigns.
While AI can’t replace humans in the writing process, AI tools are growing in capabilities. They can even check for plagiarism as well. Our content creators at Digital Neighbor used AI-powered ChatGPT and Surfer SEO in the creation of this blog.
When it comes to images, Canva and Adobe Sensei can generate images and videos based on specific inputs and parameters. You simply type in what you want to see, and poof! The idea comes to life.
Tools to try: ChatGPT, Articoolo, Wordsmith, Jasper AI, SurferSEO
Targeted Image & Video Recognition
You can also use AI to analyze images and videos for website content optimization to improve your website’s visibility and ranking in search results. The analysis process can target advertising more specifically. For example, you could use image recognition to target outdoor gear ads for hiking enthusiasts who have recently posted social media images of themselves camping or pitching a tent on a mountain.
Image and video recognition are also great for customer service, allowing customers to upload pictures of products and receive information or assistance related to those products.
Tools to try: CloudSight, Clarifai
Email Marketing Made Easy Through Automation and Customization
So much email these days gets marked as junk. AI can help marketing teams optimize email marketing effectiveness and efficiency by harnessing the mounds of data generated from email marketing campaigns. You can optimize the send times, craft more targeted campaigns, and even email customized newsletters.
AI algorithms can understand the tone and style of your brand as well as help to ensure that your emails reach your target audience and don’t get marked as SPAM. It can also analyze content – for example, you can assess the effectiveness of different subject lines to use the best ones for your emails. Additionally, it can spare you from culling your email lists by cleaning up out-of-date contacts from your databases.
Tools to try: Lyne.ai, Magic Sales Bot, Conversion.ai (now owned by Jasper), Snazzy.ai, Lavender’s AI, SmartWriter.ai, Lola AI, Seventh Sense, Drift
Optimizing Your Site for Voice Search and Voice Virtual Assistants
Optimizing your content marketing for voice search and voice-based virtual assistants is critical, given these technologies are now mainstream.
To ensure that your website is visible in voice search results, you will need to optimize content for long-tail keywords and natural language and ensure that your website is mobile-friendly and has a fast loading speed.
Customers often use voice search for local searches, so optimizing your website for local SEO is essential. This can include claiming your business on local listing websites and optimizing your website for local keywords.
Also, be sure to create content that is optimized for voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s Assistant with clear and concise answers to common questions.
Using voice search for digital marketing can improve the visibility and ranking of your website in search results and drive traffic to your website.
Tools to try: Google Analytics, Google Search Console
Human Intelligence and Chatbot Technology
AI-powered chatbots for digital marketing can provide customers with instant assistance on a website or social media platform and drive engagement and conversions.
Chatbots offer much more than traditional customer support. They are an intelligent solution for answering customer questions, identifying prospects, predicting future customer actions, as well as improving your marketing messaging. Chatbots can provide simultaneous support to multiple customers. They also do not need to be trained.
Additionally, you can integrate your bot with website and social media channels to harness omnichannel strategy.
Tools to try: customers.ai, ManyChat, Chatfuel
How Can You Design an Effective AI Digital Marketing Strategy?
Integrating AI technologies into your customer journey and digital marketing can feel overwhelming if you’ve never done it before, but collaborating with a digital marketing agency can help you implement a strategy that drives results. Here are a few tips to get you started:
- Try some task automation. Craft automatic email replies or use a simple chatbot for customer service with simple decision trees.
- Move to machine learning. Fuel your programmatic buying with online advertising, recommendation engines, and CRMs like Salesforce or Cogito.
- Combine machine learning with automated applications. Get the full effect once you have a comfort level with AI technologies and have built your business to a place where it justifies the expense.
- Partner with the experts. Teaming up with experienced digital marketing experts can help you maximize AI powerful tools with a cohesive strategy.
A few key pieces to keep in mind: remember that AI is data-fueled, so you’ll need to have some data foundations built to “feed” your AI tech with information. Also, ensure that whatever tools you use comply with privacy, security, and data ownership. Being able to opt out is a biggie here.
Additionally, check in with a digital agency partner on your data analytics tools to keep your AI on track. You need to monitor regularly for what works to maximize the use of your AI tools.
Contact Your Friendly Digital Neighbor Experts Today
Digital Neighbor is a full-service SEO digital marketing agency based in Tampa, Florida. We’re a team of friendly marketers who love bringing Nextgen tech like AI to businesses looking for measurable results. Book a meeting with us today, so we can create a tailored digital marketing strategy for your business!
