Marketing Campaigns Meet AI: Best Optimization Practices
In the last decade alone, we’ve seen a great deal of changes in the world of marketing. As more businesses seem to enter each industry, it’s become evident that they need to be efficient with spending while also reaching out to their target market more effectively. Rather than following one or two strategies, as would be the case with traditional marketing, we can now have several different campaigns across a variety of channels.
What’s more, consumers now demand personalization and offers that resonate with them. As a result, marketers need to adjust their campaigns in real-time. With this in mind, it is clear that optimization is more important than ever.
Marketing Optimization — An Introduction
These days, optimization is bolstered by machine learning and AI. Traditionally, we would run campaigns, analyze their success or failure, and spend hours trying to reach out to the right people at the right time. Now, this is done on our behalf. With so-called ‘analytical optimization’, we take advantage of algorithms and artificial intelligence so as to utilize every last cent of our marketing budget.
Some programs actively assess the market, assess our goals, and then make decisions based on these factors and the budget. Suddenly, something that years ago would have taken hours is achieved in seconds.
Would your campaign perform better by changing ‘x’? Rather than risking it all and making the change, we can test them side by side and work out whether or not the change would be positive. Thanks to features containing machine learning and AI, marketing is undergoing a phase of transformation. Whether it’s analyzing big data, micro-segmentation, or spotting patterns in consumer behavior, they help us to achieve goals faster than the competition.
Best Practices
If you aren’t willing to optimize your marketing campaign with tools like AI, there’s only one outcome: getting left behind in this constantly evolving landscape. You might find some success, but your campaigns won’t reach their full potential and much of your budget will go to waste. Instead of refining your target market and reaching out to them with the right content, you’ll be taking unnecessary risks and allowing your competitors to step in and outperform you.
Campaign optimization is incredibly valuable to your marketing strategy, but where should you start? Here are some tips:
1. Devise a Strategy
How do you get a crisper picture of your market and how to advertise to them in the right way? Every day, we see people starting with the channel. For marketing agencies all over the world, their clients want the first conversation to be about social media, email, and other types of marketing. Instead, it should be about strategy for your integrated marketing campaign.
Before anything else, you need to decide on a marketing strategy. Once this is in place, then you can think about breaking it down into various channels in order to achieve your goals faster. Over time, you’ll decide to pay more or less attention to each channel. Regardless, everything will work towards your strategy which, in turn, contributes to your goals.
2. Consider Metrics
Which metrics are most important for your strategy? If you aren’t tracking your campaigns, how do you know whether or not they’re performing well? Without tracking, we can’t highlight the reason for failure or success, and thus are impeded from improving future campaigns; we’ll always be shooting in the dark and hoping for the best.
Set your KPIs, UTM parameters, and keywords from the beginning. Make sure to set up your machine learning and AI tools so they can learn and optimize from day one. Depending on the tool you use, this may be covered automatically.
Read More: Marketing Metrics That Actually Matter
3. Optimize for Each Platform
Every platform we have available works in different ways. If you look at companies who dominate in marketing, they don’t have the exact same message across every channel. No, they consider their respective strengths and use them to their advantage.
At the moment, everybody is talking about social media—but social media isn’t the be all end all for everything. Its primary function is simply building relationships with customers. On the other hand, if you want to engage your customers and educate them, this goal will be better served by content marketing.
Don’t try to force something that won’t happen with individual platforms. For example, don’t continue to push for sales on your blog when there are other channels that will do this more efficiently.
For the fourth optimization practice, we need to collect data from previous and existing campaigns to customize and personalize future campaigns…and this is where machine learning and AI come in. There are two clear benefits:
- Firstly, you gain deeper insights into your marketing efforts and how to improve them over time.
- Secondly, you create marketing campaigns that resonate with your audience. Whether it’s personalizing an email or developing a nuanced and engaging tone, customers feel valued and are more likely to maintain interest.
These days, there is a variety of ways to customize. While some like to use names in email marketing, others prefer ad retargeting using previous set visits as the main parameter. If somebody clicks on your website and leaves, they’ve still shown an interest. By retargeting this group of people, you reel them in again in order to tempt conversion, whether the goal is subscription or purchase.
Read More: Retargeting 101
The deeper you go into your niche, the more you’ll find. These days, there are tools that create a list of relevant products for those who have visited a page or clicked on certain items. This way, the product and brand stay fresh in the customer’s mind.
The Importance of Testing
As promised, we want to delve into the world of testing—where efficiency improvements take place in marketing.
In marketing, there tend to be two extremes, and you might just see yourself in one of them;
- Hit and Hope — In sports like pool and snooker, the ‘hit and hope’ shot is where the player hits the cue ball as hard as possible and hopes for a good result. In marketing, it’s possible to emulate this by launching several campaigns and hoping for the best. It’s always possible to strike gold using this method, but it will only be luck, with no guarantee of long-term success.
- Refined — On the other side, we have people who will let a campaign run even while it’s not making money. They continue to optimize and cut away at the bits that aren’t working in an attempt to improve the efficiency of their campaigns. Again, this has the potential of being successful, but the major problem with this is that not all companies have the money to allow campaigns to run at a large loss for an extended period of time.
Which do you choose? There are pros and cons to both, and it’s fair to say that there’s no universally correct system. In reality, it seems a combination of both will allow for the right amount of optimization and success without breaking the bank. Either way, one thing that every marketer will need is testing.
Types of Testing
There are two main types of testing, and they will prove pivotal in your journey to more successful marketing campaigns. With A/B testing, the idea is to test and compare two variants. With a landing page, for example, half of your visitors are sent to variant A while the others will go to variant B, and you can compare the results.
Secondly, we have multi-variant testing. This is where several variants are set up simultaneously. If required, you could send your traffic equally to four different landing pages. Again, we can compare the results to see which is most effective; of course, the results will take a little longer with more variants involved in the test.
The beauty of optimization is that there’s no single path to follow; there’s no right or wrong way. Yet, there is one important factor: consistency. Be consistent with testing, allow campaigns enough time to gather data (even when performing poorly), and try to avoid refreshing the statistics pages every couple of seconds. We know it’s tempting!
When it comes to testing, there are a great number of choices.
You can test:
- Landing pages
- Offers
- Angle (story)
- Ad creatives
- Targeting
- Placement
- Bids
Even after all that, we find tremendous value in testing page loading speed and other factors that affect efficiency and the customer experience. As long as you take your time, allow AI and machine learning tools to work for you, and remain consistent, you will reach your goals faster and optimize your marketing spending better than ever before.
Bonus! Marketing Tools:
2. Bilbi AI: Daily Marketing Campaign Insights
