Six months ago, bustling cities with flourishing businesses and communities across the globe came to an unprecedented mandatory halt. As consumers everywhere adjusted accordingly to their new way of life, so changed their preferences, purchasing decisions — and almost every other daily activity as we know it. As cities begin to reopen, businesses everywhere must adapt to these changes to properly understand and connect with the 2020 consumer. To stay ahead of the competition and fill the gap in productivity and innovation that online workforces now face, many organizations are looking to Artificial Intelligence, and the pandemic continues to shed light on the value it can bring.
Industry experts continually look for innovative ways to capitalize on AI and Machine Learning, specifically to leverage existing and future (consumer) data. Now, with a pandemic that has forced everyone online there has never been more consumer data this easily accessible in history, and the use of AI in marketing is accelerating at a tremendous speed.
According to a 2018 study by MemSQL, more than 60% of marketers say that Artificial Intelligence is the most important aspect of their data strategy. So, how does this all work?
We have narrowed it down to 6 of the most interesting existing use cases for AI in marketing:
Recommendation engines most likely appear in your day-to-day online activities. This form of Artificial Intelligence predicts what current and potential customers might like, especially when there are a lot of product choices. McKinsey has estimated that 35% of consumer purchases from Amazon originate from product recommendations. Another e-commerce giant, Alibaba Group, utilizes recommendations based on customers past transactions, browsing history, product feedback, bookmarks and other online behavior. This powerful AI tool has proven to have a strong ROI as we see it being used amongst many major brands including Netflix and Youtube.
Typically, marketers utilize historical data to forecast future purchasing behavior. However, with machine learning assisted forecasting, marketers are able to access up to the minute data for more accurate predictions. While this seems very granular, this type of forecasting allows marketers to get ahead and predict the future of purchasing decisions with far better accuracy.
Ah, to be a content marketer in 2020. The content marketing industry is a force to be reckoned with, predicted to be worth over 412 billion by 2021. Given the circumstances we all face with the global pandemic, content creation, digital marketing and everything in between is even more important for a strong marketing strategy. Content creation can be utilized to build brand awareness, connect with existing and future customers and to establish relevance and authority in any space. Artificial Intelligence leveraging text generation or assistance as natural language processing — reading, deciphering, understanding and making sense of the human languages — is becoming more mainstream. The content marketing institute reveals that when comparing content marketing to paid research, content marketing gets 3x the number of leads per dollar spent.
Tools like Wordsmith and Quoll are being used by Forbes and Associated press to write content using templates and fill in the blanks to enter relevant data and keywords.
