Complete Roadmap to AI in Marketing | Uses|Importance|Tools
“Marketing without data is like driving with your eyes closed -Dan Zarella”
What do we mean by Marketing Analytics?
In Simple words, Marketing is to promote something, Analytics is to identify trends, performance measure and patterns in data to make Data-informed Decisions. As Marketing is every where in the world. The solution is ‘AI’ with a set of metrics that provided meaningful data about marketing’s contribution, so that even for those who might disagree with marketing’s methods, there will be no argument about the results. AI in Marketing enables marketers to measure, automate and analyze marketing performance to maximize its effectiveness and optimize return on investment (ROI).
Importance and why do you need them?
Imagine that you’re investing in stock market. You know where to invest, and you have a general idea of which stock to buy, but you have no dashboard to monitor. You’re completely ignorant of how much quantity of stock you are buying or how much money is in the bank. If you continue without any check then you could land up going bankrupt.
This stock metaphor applies to organizations and the analytics — their dashboards — that help them keep their marketing engines running effectively. A proper implementation of analytics process helps in marketing to avoid consequences. An analytics Process, therefore isn’t just about keeping business out of trouble but helping it to optimize marketing performance. The key to success in marketing analytics is in application, if the output and insights are not applied, then analytics initiative is of no value. When the CEO says, in so many words, “Show me the MONEY,” marketing is able to do so when it has the right analytics data and uses it wisely. Often marketers in particular are increasingly expected to use analytics to inform and justify their decisions.
“Marketing has always been a grueling and competitive sport — not unlike running a marathon. With the changes in the buying process, in media and technology, and managing expectations, it’s like running a marathon as the ground shifts beneath your feet. What was already difficult is becoming increasingly difficult. If you’re going to do it without measurement, it’s like running a marathon, in an earthquake, blindfolded” -David Raab
Benefits of using AI for Marketing!
- AI can hyper-personalize the customer experience
- AI can speeds up production of certain types and formats of content
- Ability to predict customer behavior and identify the most valuable leads
- AI can decide what content to create and when to distribute it
- Ability to process Big data and make accurate predictions
How to use AI for Marketing?
- Know your Customer Lifetime Value(CLV)
Companies cannot make good decisions on how to spend money on acquiring customers unless they understand the value of their customer. After all, If a company continually spends more money to acquire customers than a customer generates, the company often goes out of business. Therefore, it is important to calculate a customer’s lifetime value and use these calculations to increase the company’s profitability. You can calculate CLV, Given the retention rate, discount rate, and profit per period generated by a customer. Through Clustering Algorithms, Clusters can be made according to customer characteristic.
- Predicting and Forecasting
Marketers can use forecasts to gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns, decide which markets to enter and exit, and determine the life cycle of their products. By past sales data and forecasting, marketers gets the idea of when the maximum product/service are most sold during the year. Accordingly, marketers can market in the particular time frame with calculated investment on marketing.
Their are many forecasting methods to forecast sales like Time Series forecasting(ARIMA, SARIMA, GARCH, Prophet, Exponential smoothing), Deep learning algorithm(LSTM-Deep Neural Network).
- Chatbots
Be it for inuring, buying, feedback's, messaging apps have made it easier for customer to reach out to companies and tell them what’s on their mind. It’s free and easy to use. But downside is its hard to reply every customer who sends the message(sometimes same message is asked by many). So in order to reply instantly AI can solve this problem via Chatbots to automate responses by providing potential buyers with ways to find the right product or service. They also drive efficiency by handling unlimited inquiries at the same time and by being available 24/7. Chatbots also retain data, and thus, are able to learn through neural networks and improve the results of future conversations based on past inquiries.
- Content Generation
Manual generation of content is a tedious process. But as advances in AI, it can now generate content by its own. AI writer may not be as perfect as humans are but it can help us to save around 33% of the time needed for text generation.
Check out this interesting paper on content generation (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313247478_Procedural_Content_Generation_via_Machine_Learning_PCGML)
- Dynamic Pricing
We all might have experienced the rise/decline in price, for example Cab fares rises, when demand rises. By automatically raising or lowering prices depending on the real-time values of these variables, and continuously adjusting to consumer behavior and preferences, Machine Learning Algorithms can optimize for maximum profit and inventory. Price and demand is a core estimation when it comes to algorithms. Businesses benefit from less waste, and consumers are guaranteed a more accurate value for their purchase.
Some Tools and Techniques
- Google Cloud AI (It can build chat bots, do analysis of video, images and text. )
- Acrolinx (Enhance content)
- Atomic Reach (Delivers a deep understanding of what makes your content perform and how to perfect it @Atomic_Reach)
- Automat (It helps brands to deliver messaging experiences that are personalized made for each individual customer and dynamically optimizes conversion for the best results)
- Genie (Recommendation engine which provide accurate predictions of consumer purchase behavior)
Final Words
We have a great advantage of using AI in marketing, It won’t rip the jobs of creators rather it will help them to be more creative and productive. It can help drastically to boost Business ROI. AI marketing trends now allow us to analyze mass amounts of data and information gathered from campaigns, social interactions, and engagements.
Please let us know How did you apply AI in Marketing?
Feel free to say hello over LinkedIn, I’m always happy to connect with other professionals in the field.
And as always: comments, questions, and shares are highly appreciated! ❤️
