4 Ways Marketers Can Start Using AI for Better Results
Artificial intelligence is no more the future of marketing; it is pretty much at the moment. Consider all the ways AI technology has already started contributing to our everyday lives. Starting from those show recommendations on Netflix and song recommendations on Spotify to those smart replies in Gmail and the intelligent voice assistant in our smartphones. Artificial intelligence is progressively becoming a central part of numerous industries and has various use cases, particularly in marketing. All businesses, big or small, have begun using AI to some extent to upgrade their website, products, and customer experience over time. If reports are to be believed, the top-performing organizations are more than 2x likely than their peers to use AI for marketing purposes. One thing can be said for sure that artificial intelligence is much more than just another marketing jargon. If truth be told, it is a bandwagon that, as a marketer, you should undoubtedly get on.
Even though AI has numerous use cases in marketing, here are four ways you can start using it for better results.
#1 Improve Customer Service With Chatbots
Chatbots are nothing new in the marketing industry. One can easily spot them on numerous business sites, and the most useful chatbots are powered by AI.
Today’s customers often lack the patience to wait for assistance over email or on the phone call. An AI-powered chatbot on your website acts as an incredible customer service tool that facilitates customer self-service by giving immediate answers to the most frequently asked questions about your company, products, or services. This eliminates the need for people to fill out an entire form or wait for a response over email or phone.
Since chatbots are available 24×7 and immune to exasperation that unsatisfied customers could bring about, they help minimize delays and mistakes in customer service and guide users to different website sections. This lets you automate the tedious facets of customer service and focus your time and efforts on tasks that will help move the leads further down your marketing funnel.
With that said, smart chatbots are not just restricted to customer service interactions, but they can also help in offering personalized marketing proactively. Take Sephora’s Kik bot, for example. It opens with a fast quiz to get to know the makeup preferences of the visitor. Moreover, it also presents a dialogue box with various quirky options for prospects interested in discovering more about a particular product.
As you can see from Sephora’s Kik bot example, intelligent chatbots powered by AI can facilitate TOFU (top-of-the-funnel) marketing. Exploring the B2B domain, AI-powered chatbots are taking a deeper dive into the marketing funnel by improving lead conversions.
Businesses typically pay a fortune for lead generation. These leads often get lost in the deep sea of customer relationship management since the sales representatives and business development representatives don’t have the bandwidth to follow up with each of them. So, a smart AI assistant that does all the lead nurturing and qualifications for you can generate extraordinary value for businesses that deal with hundreds and thousands of leads.
#2 Enhance Website Search
Intuitive navigation has become an indispensable aspect of all modern-day websites, and a functioning search box plays a significant part in ensuring this. Many users visit your site with a particular aim in mind, and often they would utilize your search bar to quickly navigate to that specific part of your website, product, or content.
A successful site search experience produces an improved customer experience, making a positive brand impression in the visitors’ minds.
The drawback of traditional search is that it doesn’t go beyond the exact matches of the search terms (or their variants) and fails to grasp the user intent behind the specific query. As humans, users often tend to make typos or are unaware of the literal words for what they want to search, meaning with the traditional search, they won’t receive relevant results.
However, an AI-powered semantic search can effortlessly identify the user intent and contextual meaning behind the query, thus offering more accurate results to the searchers. Moreover, suppose the products the user is searching for are out of stock or currently unavailable. In that case, it can recommend highly relevant products available on your website to retain those prospects and convert them into customers.
#3 Optimize Your PPC Ad Campaigns
Often marketers face difficulties while deciding when and where they should place ads and tend to struggle with ascertaining the type of keywords and content that works best for their campaign’s goals.
Artificial intelligence can help in audience and competitor research, identifying keyword opportunities, placing bids smartly, creating optimized headlines, and most importantly, it can even write an ad copy for your campaign.
There are some AI-powered tools available in the market today that can help marketers generate ad copy. These platforms examine your ads continually and produce new ad variations, thus eliminating the need for you to write a new ad copy manually every time.
Just think about how much time and efforts you can save if you don’t need to write keyword-optimized ad copies on your own,
#4 Personalize the On-Site Experience
According to a recent study, around 1/3rd of the customers want their shopping experience to be more personalized than it already is. AI incorporates predictive personalization in which you can automatically offer dynamic on-site experiences and product recommendations that will most probably appeal to separate audience groups.
Think of the eCommerce giant, Amazon. Its product recommendation engine is powered by AI, which uses browsing and purchase history data and products that are either related or frequently bought together to build a personalized list of items that prospects are most likely to be interested in buying. In fact, this product recommendation engine accounts for Amazon’s 35% of the total revenue, according to reports.
You can use this on-site personalization for content as well. Using an AI-powered recommendation tool, you can show various types of content to individual cohorts as per their past behaviors and personal preferences. Doing so will help enhance their on-site experience and therefore improve user engagement.
Wrapping It Up
To summarize, you might postpone using AI-powered solutions in your overall marketing efforts, but your competitors won’t, and with each passing day, they are getting steps ahead of you. We are almost sure that you wouldn’t want that to happen. So, it’s time to embrace AI-powered tools as marketers to generate incredible results. From delivering prompt customer service and on-point product recommendations that are sure to grab the visitors’ attention to enhancing your site search and optimizing your ads, there’s so much you can do with AI to upgrade customer experience and increase conversions.