Tasks once handled by people are being taken over by AI and becoming automated. Manual labor teams are being exchanged for robotic intelligence. Computer systems are flying jets and operating entire factories. The self-driving car has hit the road and is on the verge of becoming a worldwide phenomenon. The Apple assistant Siri gives us every bit of information we need on the go without ever having to talk to a real person. We haven’t quite seeing the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution just yet, but it’s coming fast. And it’s going to change everything–especially how you interact with your customers.
Change is scary, especially the kind no one really knows how to handle just yet. But we’re already seeing the way it’s changing the world, and it’s changing how people work all the time. This means major innovation for marketing at large, and your own marketing strategy. But change can also be good. Here are a few ways AI will make your marketing stronger.
Voice Search is Making SEO Smarter
Voice search is exactly what it sounds like. Instead of typing words or phrases into a text bar, you simply speak it aloud to your device, and it pulls up the results you would have found via a regular online search. Voice assistants like Amazon Echo and Siri become regular fixtures in everyday life. With voice AI always at hand, people become less inclined to search for things through text. It’s a fundamental change to how we interact with search engines.
The sophisticated technology of voice AI is able to translate what we say to it and input it into search engines. It can match a simple phrase to a countless amount of keyword phrases before narrowing it down to the ones the user most likely wants. This means your SEO strategy will need to become more specific to the person exploring your business. While SEO once meant targeting specific words and keyword phrases, it is now shifting to broader topics and and is concerned more with what the user means. This is known as semantic SEO.
Target a broader topic in your SEO strategy and choose phrases that are related to one another to be as thorough as possible. This lets you catch the meaning of what the user is intending to search for. Semantic SEO is still a relatively new strategy in search engine marketing and one companies are still learning to do. Start now, and you’ll enjoy the power of voice search a lot sooner than your competition.
It’s more work, but it also translates into more customers.
AI Helps Produce More Personalized Content for Customers
AI can make for quite a reliable detective. The more a person interacts with your business, the more AI can learn about what it is they like and what they engage with the most. A popular example of this is Amazon’s “Customers who bought this item also bought” section on each product page. If a person is browsing a product page because it caught their interest, chances are you sell other items they would want as well.
So how can you apply this to your own marketing? AI can report to you the kinds of content your customers really want. This sets the stage that lets you develop more personalized messaging and blogging that will get more views and generate more web traffic. Set up processes that show people content and products that they might be interested in based on their search history of your website. It takes the guesswork out of trying to find customers solutions, and it saves them having to dig through your website to find what they want.
By using the data you have collected about your customers, you can create content for them that assists each stage of the marketing funnel.
AI Helps You Predict Customer and User Behavior
Wouldn’t it be nice to know the likelihood of a website visitor becoming a customer. What about predicting the behavior of a customer ahead of time, or knowing the next step you should take when pursuing a new customer? The predictive analytical power of AI makes this all a real possibility.
AI uses propensity modeling to make these predictions about future user behavior. It makes marketing more proactive, as opposed to reactive. By feeding past customer data into an algorithm, your AI can help prepare you for future moves and strategies, whether it’s for acquisition or retention.
One example of this is lead scoring, in which the model assigns a lead a certain score based on how likely it is to convert. Marketo’s lead scoring system is a favorite among marketing professionals.
This data also makes great tools for sales reps. Reps can seek out the highest-scored leads and contact them, saving time and energy that might otherwise be allocated to leads less likely to buy from you.
Predictive analytics make your marketing efforts more intelligent and resourceful. You will stop having to waste time on leads that amount to nothing and spend more time on cultivating a relationship with people ready to become customers.
AI Produces More Targeted Ads
It’s demoralizing to craft the perfect advertisement, only for it to deliver less-than-stellar results. AI helps you learn from past advertising campaigns to create future ads that are more specific to the people who are more likely to buy.
This kind of data also helps in creating ads that are based on the level of interest a lead shows. A lead with medium interest, for example, will react to ads that differ widely from an ad targeted to a lead with a high degree of interest. If you have ads targeted for each different group, you have all of your bases covered and are guaranteeing that you have done everything you can to convert a lead into a customer, however high or low their enthusiasm may be.
Targeted Sales Deals
Special offers are great for all sorts of reasons:
- Selling off excessive supplies
- Generating hype for a product
- Persuading people to buy who might not have otherwise
Even with as great as they are, however, the discounts that come with these deals can have unintended consequences.What if you are missing out on big profits, or even worse, cutting into the profits you have already made?
The AI concept called dynamic pricing can rectify this. Equipped with data that tracks user and customer behavior, you can offer the deals only to the people who those deals would influence to buy. This can be the trick you need to catch people who only displayed a low or medium level of interest in buying from you–another way of making a more targeted ad. Dynamic pricing also lets you capitalize as much as you can on highly interested leads who don’t need any additional persuasion to buy.
Chatbots
You have probably come across a lot of these on other companies’ websites already. When you navigate to a page on a website, a chat window will pop up with a message that resembles a normal, friendly message, like what you’d expect from a real person. But the power of AI is the engine behind these chatbots. AI chatbots are becoming tool in customer service initiatives, and they will soon be the norm.
You might think a chatbot couldn’t possibly be advanced enough to talk to a human website visitors and gauge their interest in what the company has to offer, but years of trial and error have made chatbots highly intuitive and adept in versatile scenarios. They can interpret the words and text of anyone who types a message into the box and then reply with something that is compatible with what the user wants.
But why would you want to develop a chatbot for your site when you have employees who are ready and capable of providing that much-needed customer service and support?
A chatbot saves both you and your staff a lot of time. Not every person who visits your website is going to become a worthwhile lead, let alone a customer. A chatbot can quickly round up the visitors who express high degrees of interest and pass them onto your sales reps. This lets you spend more time and energy on the people who will end up becoming important to your business.
Chatbots are also awesome customer support reps. If you know your customers well enough, you know the typical kinds of problems and complaints they have when they talk to your staff and the solutions that are usually prescribed. A chatbot automates the process of solving these generic problems. This frees up your team to focus on solving more complex issues.
Chatbots also make website navigation easier. If a user is looking for a specific product, the chatbot can send them links to the right pages.
The automated power of the chatbot saves you hours of tasks that you can spend on more serious matters. You might think that chatbots are reserved with bigger businesses with more of a budget, but lots of affordable solutions exist, and some are free. Talk to a developer about what needs to happen to have a customer-friendly chatbot established on your website.
There is still a lot to discover and understand about how artificial intelligence will change the landscape of marketing, and of how we conduct business as a world. New advancements are happening all the time, and limits keep getting tested. One thing we know for sure is that, as it stands today, the power of AI is helping companies optimize their marketing strategies with automated, simplified processes. If you think AI solutions might help your business’s marketing, chat with us today.
