AI in Australia for Marketing Purposes

Artificial intelligence has gone through a growth cycle similar to Facebook and electronic mail when they first entered the market. At first, all three started as a luxury. People would log into Facebook to check in with their friends and family, and the average session would last just a couple of minutes. Likewise, electronic mail was exciting and allowed people on other sides of the planet to connect.

Read More: The Importance of Email Marketing in 2021

Now, both Facebook and email are essential for businesses and individuals alike. Who can live without Facebook? Who can live without email? We’re guessing that not many people are raising their hands right now. Similarly, it’s becoming hard to live without artificial intelligence in the world of marketing. If you’ve so far managed to avoid all the discussion around AI, 2021 is the year to take note.

AI as a Service — Growth in the Industry

Jump back two decades and people would flinch at the very mention of artificial intelligence. It was assumed that AI would take over the world and humans would be left picking up the pieces. Of course, the movies that portrayed such stories were inaccurate and AI is now a tool to assist marketers and other professionals. Rather than taking the jobs of professionals. AI is an invaluable assistant. It looks after simple, mundane tasks and allows marketers to get on with more important jobs.

However, we want to start with an overview of the whole market. To really understand the niche, it’s important to look at the numbers. Experts have predicted a 36% CAGR (compound annual growth rate) between 2020 and 2025. With this in mind, the demand for AI services has grown exponentially over the last five years, and the trend is set to continue even more.

Various niches have developed as AI has grown, and the marketing industry has profited heavily. In particular, NLP (natural language processing) has been on the mind of businesspeople. In the modern environment, it’s capable of understanding customer intent and user behavior. With this, businesses and marketers get a complete understanding of their customers, and they can use this to boost the user experience. This includes product development, advertising creatives, social media posts, and more.

Read More: AI Tools That You Can Use to Save Time, Scale Up Marketing Efforts, and Improve Customer Experience

Reliance on AI will only increase as third-party data continues to become more unreliable. In recent years, browsers have moved away from third-party data while the recent Apple iOS 14 update has introduced App Tracking Transparency, a feature where users can actively stop tracking for apps.

With all these changes, marketers have less access to consumer data, conversion data, and more. As a marketer yourself, you might be reading this while nodding your head. You might be reading this because it has become almost impossible to navigate all the marketing challenges that you face daily without the help of AI.

In Australia, spending on artificial intelligence in the retail niche increased to US$94 trillion in 2018. In terms of the marketing niche, spending reached US$156 million in 2018. Since then, it has continued to increase, and you’ve seen the CAGR prediction between now and 2025. But what is causing this growth?

Read More: Marketing Campaigns Meet AI: Best Optimization Practices

AI Implementation for Marketing

You’ve seen all the problems posed for marketers recently, and we’ve said that more are relying on AI. But why? What AI tools exist?

PPC Advertising Optimization

Speak to all professionals at a marketing meeting and they’ll all tell you about the pains of PPC advertising. While some struggle to create an effective campaign, others just don’t have the time to monitor and improve targeting, bidding, budgeting, budget scaling, and A/B testing. With all the other tasks you need to do as a marketer, how are you also supposed to monitor ad campaigns continually and ensure that they’re on the right path?

As you’ve probably guessed, the answer is artificial intelligence. Combined with machine learning, clever algorithms can watch over your campaigns and optimize targeting, budgeting, bidding, and all the other areas mentioned previously. Trapica is an exemplar of this type of tool since it integrates with social media campaigns and automatically optimizes all the important aspects of a campaign.

Read More: Trapica Marketing Suite

If it spots an opportunity to move into a more prolific market, it will adjust the campaign. Meanwhile, it apportions the budget based on performance and you’ll always bid the right amount to remain competitive (while not overspending). Just in case this wasn’t enough, it also scales the budget and A/B tests creatives.

Content Creation

One purpose of AI in marketing that has surprised many is content creation, which helps marketers who struggle to put words onto the page. Once again, it’s not designed to take jobs away but rather make the lives of marketers and even content writers much easier. Although you may not have realized it, some of the content you’ve already read online may have been generated, or at least helped along, by artificial intelligence (don’t worry, not this one!).

Examples of AI-generated content include hotel descriptions, profit and loss summaries, sports game recaps, business reports, and stock insights. The technology follows the rules and guidelines laid out by humans then generates content.

Chatbots

If you’ve not read content generated by AI, you’ve almost definitely spoken to AI-led chatbots. The introduction of AI chatbots is music to the ears of customer support staff who spend most of their day answering the same customer questions repeatedly. Though some companies worry about implementing AI chatbots, the idea is to filter customer requests. If the customer has a simple question, you don’t want customer service staff to take time out of their day to answer it when AI can answer it automatically, right?

Read More: Why Chatbots Are Still Relevant in 2021

By implementing AI chatbots, everybody wins:

• Customer service staff have more time to focus on important tasks (they aren’t answering basic questions all day!).
• Customers get a simple and fast experience — AI chatbots are available all through the night, they don’t need toilet breaks, and they don’t even take vacations. Even if your customer messages at 2am, they still get answers. All going well, this will encourage more people to purchase products even while the whole team is in bed.
• The business saves money because the AI handles simple requests, and the more intricate requests are passed onto trained professionals. With this in mind, your customer support team is focusing on those who need the most help.

Insight Generation and Suggestions

As mentioned, it’s harder than ever for businesses to gather data — let’s face it, this is a sentence that nobody thought they would hear even 12 months ago. Changes in GDPR, privacy regulations, and Apple policies have allowed customers more control over their data. It might be great news for customers, but it also means that businesses now don’t know where to start with insights. How do you learn about an audience when data is restricted?

The good news is that there are ways around the new system, and many of them rely on AI. As an example, Bilbi Analytics gathers data and automatically generates insights (even after all the drama surrounding iOS 14). You learn about your audience, receive suggestions for your ad campaigns, and can implement your learnings right across the marketing strategy.

Read More: Bilbi Analytics Tools that Help Marketers

Depending on the tool you choose, you’ll find artificial intelligence and machine learning features that identify the best customer segments for ad campaigns, similarities between customers, the best products to recommend to customers through email campaigns, and the best items to advertise to prospective leads. With this last point, it prevents ads from advertising products that are low in stock. In a dream world, you want to advertise products that have plenty of stock to prevent disappointment. Who wants to click on an ad and find that the product is out of stock? Nobody.

Personalization and Tailoring

If we’ve learned anything in recent years, it’s that customers don’t just appreciate personalization, but they actively seek it, they crave it, and…well, they deserve it. There’s nothing worse for a customer than to feel as though they’re just an unappreciated number. This year, you need to include personalization in your marketing strategy, and one way to achieve this is through AI.

We touched on it previously, but personalized recommendations are always appreciated these days. Netflix has managed to master this art with emails recommending new shows and movies based on the viewing history of users. When sending emails to customers, don’t just use their name in the subject. Go further and actively be part of their lives with birthday emails, tailored recommendations and suggestions, and special promotions.

Read More: Personalize Your Business with Conversational Marketing

Conclusion

AI is growing in Australia, and marketers will only come to rely on the technology more and more. The market will grow at an expected CAGR rate of 36%, and the implementations listed in the second half of this guide shows exactly why this growth will come!