Artificial intelligence (AI) is trendier than ever. It was on the agenda of the January 2023 World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting, where attendees used ChatGPT, a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology while highlighting ethical and regulatory concerns about the impact of AI. Originally launched on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT 4 became available within three-and-a-half months resulting in an open letter by technology experts asking developers to pause their AI experiments for at least six months. The letter was signed by, amongst others, Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
The good news is that we, as a company, have been keeping an eye on AI. We wrote a blog on the impact of AI on marketing decisions in 2017 and, as an early adopter of ChatGPT, published an eBook titled Unlocking the Potential of ChatGPT: A Guide to Embracing AI in Your Business and Life earlier this year.
The reality is that digital marketing exists in large part due to AI. Artificial intelligence (AI) is working behind the scenes on every social media app, whether Facebook or Twitter, to customize users’ feeds. Chatbots are used on many corporate websites, and search engines such as Google continue to function due to the effectiveness of its artificial learning technologies continuously adapting to understand user needs.
What Is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
IBM, in an article on artificial intelligence published on their website, uses John McCarthy’s 2004 definition as a reference to answer the question–what is artificial intelligence?
"It is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable."
Thinking about the impact of AI is not a recent development. In fact, the history of AI goes as far back as 1950 when Alan Turing published a paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” But the reality is that AI development is moving so fast that its history is being written daily, and its definition continues to evolve.
How AI is Personalizing Marketing Efforts for Individual Consumers
Customers expect brands to understand their personal preferences and needs, making personalization a standard business requirement. To deliver such personal experiences at scale, and predict future behaviors, requires extensive data collection and analysis only made possible by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies.
Netflix and Amazon are two companies conquering the personal marketing challenge. Netflix states freely on its website that they use multiple large-scale machine learning and recommendation algorithms to drive personal search experiences. It is so personalized that the way videos are organized into pages and rows, and even the artwork displayed, is unique to the targeted customer. How does Amazon use AI? They offer personalized product recommendations based on previous purchases, browsing history, and analysis of images uploaded by the customer.
AI-Powered Marketing Automation: Streamlining Campaigns and Boosting ROI
Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms are also used to automate marketing activities, revolutionizing the way marketers approach their campaigns. It analyzes extensive amounts of data to gain insight into customer behavior and preferences allowing for personalization, cost savings, and increased efficiency. AI also boosts return on investment (ROI) by helping marketers improve customer engagement, optimize ad spend, and identify new growth opportunities.
To fully utilize marketing automation, you need automation tools and platforms best suited to your organization’s needs. For WSI, that tool is HubSpot. It boasts an all-in-one Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform covering sales, inbound marketing, and service software. And in continuation of the artificial intelligence revolution, Hubspot recently launched two AI-powered tools - content assistant and ChatSpot.ai.
Analyzing Big Data with AI: Extracting Actionable Insights for Better Marketing Strategies
According to Google, big data helps drive impactful decision-making. How do we extract actionable insights for better marketing strategies from big data? By leveraging the right tools, such as the web analytics tool Google Analytics 4 (GA4). GA4 is fundamentally different from the previous versions of Google Analytics and offers, among other features, Analytics Intelligence. This feature uses advanced modeling techniques to help users better understand and act on the available data.
Analytics Intelligence will analyze your data automatically and provide insights on major data changes, you can create your own set of rules to generate insights, or it can analyze your data and predict future actions end-users may take. Since actionable insights are conclusions drawn from data turned into a response or action, it is going to be interesting to see how our marketing strategies can be improved.
In Conclusion
The world of AI is moving quickly—more quickly than 99% of businesses can keep up with. That's why it's so important to partner with a digital marketing agency that's on top of the artificial intelligence game.
WSI is the world’s largest and most experienced digital marketing agency network. Do you want to know how you can expand your marketing strategy to incorporate more artificial intelligence tools? Contact WSI today and find out.
