Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming part of our everyday lives. There have been numerous developments, and many businesses across the globe are already benefitting from these developments. AI can be used for automating tasks that are time-consuming or manually intensive. Without getting too technical about it, let's just say that using AI to boost your marketing efforts is a step in the right direction.
Consider these new statistics on how AI is expected to affect business (Source: 2021 State of Marketing AI Report)
- McKinsey Global Institute estimates up to a $5.9 trillion annual impact of AI and analytics on marketing and sales.
- PwC sees a global effect from AI, with an estimated 14 percent lift in global GDP possible by 2030, a total contribution of $15.7 trillion to the world economy, thanks to increased productivity and increased consumption.
- In 2021, Gartner projects AI augmentation will create $2.9 trillion of business value and 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity globally.
- IDC states that efficiencies driven by AI in CRM could increase global revenues by $1.1 trillion this year and ultimately lead to more than 800,000 net-new jobs, surpassing those lost to automation.
The promise of AI is exciting. It is the next step to modernizing current marketing programs. You can use some tools in your efforts today, and there are some exciting use cases on the horizon. Here is a list of marketing AI applications that we think you can use today and actually make a difference.
- Content creation – Pundits promote AI's ability to create content. Wouldn't that be great? In our experience, it doesn't work. We trial content generators regularly and have found that most spit out a bunch of nonsense filled with grammatical errors. Sure, you can get some usable copy, but it is nowhere ready for prime time. What does work? AI-powered grammar checkers. We use a tool called Grammarly, and it is instrumental during the creation of all of our content. It highlights incorrect grammar, punctuation, and plagiarism and makes suggestions on how to correct it. It isn't 100% correct, and sometimes the suggestions muddy the message, but overall it is a great tool.
- Chatbots - Chatbots enable individuals to interact with digital applications as if they were communicating with a real person. Chatbots provide prospects and customers with a self-service option to deliver specific content, book a meeting, create a customer service ticket, and even capture new lead information during self-service. Many businesses use chatbots today, and they are getting smarter every day.
- News tracking and social listening at scale - Marketers have large amounts of data to sift through to track news and social performance. AI makes it easy to spot new trends and negative sentiment so that you can newsjack or take a proactive approach to head off any negativity that may impact your brand.
- Predictive analytics – Predictive analytics leverages historical data and customer behavior to make predictions. Predictive analytics are used to create sales forecasts, anticipate prospects' behavior, and provide better customer insight for more effective campaigns. For example, HubSpot's predictive lead scoring uses machine learning to sift through thousands of data points to identify the best leads.
- Optimize content for search engines – AI is an excellent tool for analyzing data for designing an effective SEO strategy. SEO has moved beyond basic keywords, and the focus is now on relevance, quality, and value of content. Today AI SEO tools can help you choose keywords and topic clusters for content optimization, analyze existing content for gaps and opportunities, and present personalized experiences. In the future, AI SEO will automatically optimize content for search engines.
Learn how six companies used new marketing tools to modernize their marketing below.
