Using AI to Gain and Keep Customers

With so many different channels available to businesses today to communicate with prospective customers, it can be hard to know which is best and where to spend the marketing dollar.

But advances in Artificial Intelligence can make the arresting spend stretch that much further as by incorporating AI into your content marketing, you can gain a competitive edge.

The big businesses in the tech world – Google, Netflix and Amazon as well as many others – have already firmly built AI systems into the very fabric of their technology and today AI tools are becoming ever cheaper and easier for smaller firms to utilise in their own marketing.

For example, AI is now being used to change the direction of the classic pay-per-click internet advertising strategy. While Google’s AdWords and Facebook are not going anywhere – together they represent 60 percent of digital advertising – an AI-based PPC campaign can uncover new channels of communication your competitors are probably ignoring, and fully automate a process traditionally done by people.

A carefully built algorithm can engage website viewers by personalising a website for the person looking, by grabbing valuable data about the user and displaying focused offers and content, or even using this for future push notifications.

And content creation is increasingly coming under the remit of AI technology – currently these tools can automatically create content by following set formats and straightforward rules to promote content such as stock market data, hotel descriptions or business reports. It is not at the stage of writing a bestseller but is progressing fast.

Chatbots are built and powered by AI technology and many of us interact with computer chatbots when we visit websites of many of our favorite brands. She may tell you she is called Jenny but she is probably computer code, and is often more helpful than a human as she can access the company’s whole database quickly and efficiently, as well as making maximum use of the data sets you provide, as well as cross referencing your problems with potentially millions of other customer queries.

And AI can make mass marketing email blasts far more personal than a team of humans – by using algorithms to understand what individual consumers like and want, content can be tweaked to be highly individualized.

These are just some of the advances and inroads into traditional online marketing that AI is making – with much more on the horizon. As costs of AI fall and its abilities grow, it is a great time to consider how your business – and your customers – can benefit by integrating AI into your marketing plan.