Can AI help in achieving marketing goals?

Alibaba’s fashion AI store in Hong Kong recently grabbed the newspaper headlines because of its use of artificial intelligence to streamline the fashion retail experience. Consider a store with smart mirrors that show you all the details about the garments you’ve chosen. In a usual store, you stay clueless, wondering where to go to find a blazer. Alibaba Fashion AI displays you a “you are here” type of map that can direct you to certain items in the store. How easy life would be with this!

The Alibaba Fashion Store is equipped with intelligent garment tags which sense if the garment is touched and smart mirrors which display garment details and give suggestions to customers. The crux of the whole wonder is AI marketing, which uses AI technologies to make automated decisions based on data collection, analysis, and other economic trends.

Even though people nowadays actively hear and talk about artificial intelligence as a technological wonder, few try to fully understand the concept and its nuances. The “AI Marketing Era,” as it may be appropriately labeled, entails fundamental changes to the manner in which marketers interact with customers, the tactics and tools they use to achieve their goals,the skills they regard highly in the workplace, and the nature of their day-to-day responsibilities.

AI in marketing enables a host of capabilities that improve the ability of marketers to first understand their customers on a comprehensive, individual level, and then create and distribute content that is personalized and relevant to them at the right time and place. Brands of the AI Marketing Era can stage highly customized experiences with their customers in real-time to delight them and form long-lasting relationships.

Through smarter data intake and management using AI, marketers can achieve insights into their customers that reveal a much more comprehensive view of their behavior, interests, needs, and wants. These profound insights can then be paired with AI-powered omnichannel strategies that allow marketers to reach customers where, when, and how they would like to see advertisements contextualized in a way that cookies could not achieve.

Further integration of AI in programmes offers solutions to many of the issues faced by marketers. For one, AI allows for improved pattern recognition, insights into the sentiment and context of a website’s content, and predictive analysis that can guide advertisers into making smarter partnership decisions. These capabilities are crucial in fighting brand safety and advertisement fraud issues.

By targeting customers based on their history with a brand’s website activity, previous marketing efforts, search engine query history, or geographical location, marketers can create highly detailed segments. AI can optimize retargeting advertising frequency. Machine learning algorithms can accommodate the ideal number of exposures to an advertisement that customers receive to provide more of what retargeting advertisements are good for while avoiding an annoyance level.

AI will not be automating creative job roles soon, but it does offer solutions to many of the pain points related to creativity in marketing.

For marketers, AI can augment creativity. The romanticized view of creativity being a gift reserved only for peculiar artists who never run out of inspiration is not factual. The reality is that creative endeavors are filled with repetitive tasks to execute properly, as well as a taxing mental burden that can lead to burnout or creative fatigue. AI will not be automating creative job roles soon, but it does offer solutions to many of the pain points related to creativity in marketing.

Large and small brands alike stand to benefit from localizing their marketing efforts using AI.AI-powered chatbots (text-based conversational applications that let a human user talk with a bot that replies automatically to them and which are available for customers to access 24/7) Utilize Natural Language Processing to understand what a user is saying, then respond like a human.Furthermore, purchases can be made directly through eCommerce chatbots as well. Having an intelligent technology like this that is capable of communicating with customers in a human-like manner opens many opportunities for marketers.

Businesses can now have robots and specialized systems perform many tasks, which decreases the amount of human resources required at any given time. Also, this reduces the need for complicated equipment that constantly needs repair and maintenance. As a result, operations become much more efficient and less costly to run, which benefits businesses on all levels.

Actualizing their potential requires the inevitable next step of AI. However, blindly adopting AI will yield poor results if no goals, plans, or systems are in place to ensure success. Firms seeking high-involvement AI solutions will need to customize their systems to meet their needs, and having a clear end-goal will allow this to happen. High involvement AI solutions are not plug-and-play; they require considerable effort to enable their full potential to be actualized day-to-day.

Thus, humanized technology places the onus on humans to actualize its potential. Advanced AI that is easily accessible to marketers is not useful if they do not know how to use it as a tool to galvanize their ideas. Similarly, the quality of ideas that marketers use AI to automate arguments which can become the critical differentiating factor in the era of AI marketing. AI is currently nowhere close to being able to replicate the creative abilities of humans. It is up to us to provide it with the direction and ideas to create impactful experiences and deliver the fantastic results of which it is capable. Emphasizing the development of creative thinking skills,metacognition, and improving the ability to create frameworks to engage with the world can allow marketers to hone in on their innately human qualities that will deliver value using AI.

-Yadhu Krishna V