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AI in Marketing: Comprehensive Guide in 2024

Cem Dilmegani
Updated on Feb 22
7 min read
AI in Marketing: Comprehensive Guide in 2024AI in Marketing: Comprehensive Guide in 2024

Thanks to the increasing amount of data gathered from customers, businesses’ marketing strategies become more data-driven. Considering AI is better than humans when it comes to processing and analyzing large datasets, it is not a surprise that AI is becoming widespread among marketers. According to a study, 87% of companies that have adopted AI were using it to improve email marketing. 61% of marketers were also planning to use artificial intelligence in sales forecasting.

Why is AI in marketing important?

Interest in AI for marketing
Source: Google Trends

Level of interest in using marketing in AI is increasing. Marketers are always chasing ways to increase their impact without increasing marketing budgets. AI technologies provide them a way to achieve these. Marketers can combine customer data and AI-powered tools to anticipate their customers’ next move and improve their journey. To do that, they can use AI to:

  • Understand the market better,
  • Create unique content,
  • Perform personalized marketing campaigns
  • Provide accurate insights and suggest smart marketing solutions that would directly reflect on profits.

Below is our initial framework explaining the impact of AI in marketing. We have developed that over time, and you can see our latest view below the framework. To get more information, please visit the relevant page to see references, videos, and detailed explanations:

1-Optimize Pricing & Placement

Dynamic pricing: Businesses can optimize their pricing strategy by using AI to scrape competitors’ pricing data automatically and to maximize revenue by setting competitive prices for products.

Physical placement

Merchandising optimization: You can leverage machine learning and big data to optimize your online or offline merchandising. 

Shelf audit/analytics: Your business can use videos, images, or robots in the retail area to audit and analyze your use of shelf space. You can identify and manage stock-outs or sub-optimal use of shelf space. One of the most leading-edge examples in this area is Lowe’s autonomous retail service robot. It will explore how robots can meet the needs of both customers and employees. Meet the LoweBot

More mainstream solutions in this space include leveraging images taken by employees to manage and analyze shelf space. Trax Image Recognition explains their solution in this space in detail.

Digital Placement

Product Information Management: Businesses manage and improve all product information centrally to improve product discoverability and appeal. As a result, they automatically modify and update the product description, box description, and all other related information.

Visual Search Capability: Businesses can leverage machine vision to enable their customers to search for products by image or video to immediately reach their desired products. In the today’s world too easy to ensure customer’s desires with the AI algorithms thanks to the lots of snapping and sharing images. For example, Flipkart, one of India’s largest online retailers, uses visual search.

Image tagging to improve product discovery: You can leverage machine vision to tag your images, taking into account your users’ preferences and relevant context for your products.

2-Optimize marketing communication

An optimized marketing communication reaches customers at the right time at the right channel with the right message. There are numerous emerging AI companies specializing in these areas. For example, companies like Appzen track customers’ cross-device behavior to ensure that your messages target customers at the device they are using at the time of your marketing communication.

Just a few years ago, most messages to customers were handcrafted for specific macro-segments. Today companies like Phrasee suggest personalized messages to ensure that customers receive messages they prefer to read. For example, Dell has increased its page visits by 22% by introducing Persado’s AI-powered marketing tools.

Enablers

Neuromarketing: Your business can leverage neuroscience and biometric sensors to understand how your content impacts your audience’s emotions and memory. You can test your content in private until it achieves the desired effect.

Neuromarketing provides a marketing research method that can be implemented even before a product launch. Let’s take an actual example explained in more detail here; two marketing researchers from Rotterdam made subjects view some trailers of movies while hooked onto an EEG (Electroencephalogram) headset. They later chose which of these movies they would like to see at home. They were also asked about their preference regarding the movies based on the movie trailers. Both the EEG data and the self-report data predicted their individual movie choice equally well. EEG data is much richer than stated preferences, and the exciting fact is that only the EEG data of these subjects could accurately predict the box office success of the movie.

Context-aware advertising: Context is crucial to marketing. Consider these advertising experiences: You watch a video of a plane crash interrupted by an airline ad. You are reading about a specific phone model exploding when overcharged, and you see the ad for that model on the same page. There are horrible, yet relatively innocent examples. There have been numerous cases when brand ads were shown in-between videos of hate-groups. Context-aware advertising companies leverage machine vision and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand the context where your ads will be served. Protect your brand and increase marketing efficiency by ensuring your message resonates with its context.

3rd Party Data: Businesses leverage 3rd party data to understand their existing customers better and target potential customers. They can expand their target audience by identifying possible leads. This situation increases precision by using the numbers from external sources.

Omnichannel: Businesses can personalize marketing communication across different paid marketing platforms. They can create a coherent strategy for the overall marketing strategy and analyze comparatively the impact on different platforms.

Retargeting: You can retarget customers who have already expressed interest in your products or services. As a result, sales numbers increase by engaging the right customer.

Channel specific optimizations

Content generation: For content creators, it is always a challenge to come up with a matchless marketing strategy. In this field, AI can provide creative solutions. From the topics chosen for content marketing, Natural Language Generation models can create unique content and deliver creative suggestions. You can read more about content generation by reading our article.

Mobile Marketing: With mobile marketing, businesses can create personalized, individual messaging based on each customer’s real-time and historical behaviors. Most of the users are active in mobile platforms, develop your strategy to gain a greater share in mobile traffic.

Email Marketing: Email marketing includes emails that are tailored to individual behavior. Detect which email type performs better with your product and customer. Customize by including the necessary email structure and images.

Video Commerce: You can make videos with embedded products shoppable by inserting relevant links and auto-identify products in videos.

Advocacy and Loyalty Marketing: Businesses can use advocacy system and referrals to introduce and create a customer base via personal connections. They leverage the power of connections by providing the right referral campaign and estimate the possible sales figures in their marketing strategies by using the impact profile of customers.

Improved engagement: Every time you execute a search on Google, your reaction is recorded. If you click the top result and stay, it would be a successful search. On the other hand, when you click to the second page of results or type in a new search string without clicking any of the results, search results can likely be improved. Such feedback loops can be built on many apps and websites, improving the user experience.

3- Personalized Marketing Strategies

Marketing personalization

You can reach the right customers, at the right time, through the right device and channel with the right message. Surprising your customers with your personalized marketing will increase customer satisfaction. For example, according to ActionIQ, terms like “web personalization” or “email personalization” are outdated. A correct personalization solution that can scale needs to leverage data from “any” channel and help advance the personalization of marketing & products across “any” channel.

Vendors in this space first solve data-related problems and provide an interface that is flexible, fast, self-service and enable marketing and analytics team to test different website layouts for specific customer segments. For instance, Facebook launched a campaign where millions of users were shown ads for a beauty product that were targeted to their personalities (based on their history of Facebook likes), on average about 1.5 in 10,000 people that viewed the ads bought the product. Though 1.5 in 10,000 people don’t look like a lot, personalization of ads increased the likelihood of a purchase by 50%. For more on marketing personalization techniques to improve conversions, feel free to check our comprehensive guide on conversion rate optimization.

Recommendation system

Businesses can leverage customer data to reach customers with personalized recommendations via email, site search, or other channels. These systems ensure your company to make the right offer taking into account all

  • digital and analog interactions (page views, purchases, email opens…) of that customer with your brand
  • that customer’s interactions on different web properties
  • interactions of similar customers

These are all designed to lead the consumer more reliably towards a sale and support companies to increase their revenues. 

If you are looking for vendors in the space, feel free to check our transparent, data driven vendors lists on the topic:

4- Connect & Leverage Customer Feedback

Social media monitoring and optimization: Businesses can leverage machine learning to optimize the channel, target audience, message, and timing of social media posts. For example, The Economist has achieved a 290% increase in clicks per tweet by allowing SocialFlow to reach the audience at the right time by analyzing its online habits.

Emotion Recognition: You can capture the emotional state of your customers by analyzing micro gestures and mimics. Computer vision will help you to capture the details and provide you with the real emotions of your customer.

5- Analytics

Analytics: You connect all your marketing data and KPIs automatically. AI tools enable you to manage campaigns, trigger alerts, and improve your marketing efficiency. AI-powered marketing analytics can lead companies to identify their customer groups more accurately. By discovering their loyal customers, companies can develop accurate marketing strategies and also retarget customers who have expressed interest in products or services before.  

Channel specific analytics

Social analytics & automation: Businesses can leverage Natural Language Processing and machine vision to analyze and act upon all content generated by your actual or potential customers on social media, surveys, and reviews.

PR analyticsYou can learn from, analyze, and measure your PR efforts by using AI tools for marketing. These solutions track media activity and provide insights into PR efforts to highlight what is driving engagement, traffic, and revenue. With the increasing demand in digital media to specify the targets will more easy for the brands in competitive marketing.

If you believe you can benefit from AI in your business, you can view our data-driven lists of AI Consultants, and AI/ML Development Services

Now that you have checked out AI applications in marketing, feel free to look at our AI in the marketing section. You can check out AI applications in salescustomer serviceITdata, or analytics. And if you have a business problem, we can help you find the right solution to resolve it:

Find the Right Vendors
Access Cem's 2 decades of B2B tech experience as a tech consultant, enterprise leader, startup entrepreneur & industry analyst. Leverage insights informing top Fortune 500 every month.
Cem Dilmegani
Principal Analyst
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Cem Dilmegani
Principal Analyst

Cem has been the principal analyst at AIMultiple since 2017. AIMultiple informs hundreds of thousands of businesses (as per similarWeb) including 60% of Fortune 500 every month.

Cem's work has been cited by leading global publications including Business Insider, Forbes, Washington Post, global firms like Deloitte, HPE, NGOs like World Economic Forum and supranational organizations like European Commission. You can see more reputable companies and media that referenced AIMultiple.

Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised businesses on their enterprise software, automation, cloud, AI / ML and other technology related decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade. He also published a McKinsey report on digitalization.

He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem's work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider.

Cem regularly speaks at international technology conferences. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.

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1 Comments
Aanchal Iyer
Feb 22, 2019 at 11:00

Informative Read, Artificial intelligence in digital marketing is being employed by every business nowadays.

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