AI MARKETING AND THE HUMAN ELEMENT
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is growing in popularity and playing an increasingly larger role within digital marketing. AI writing tools seem to be popping up all over the place. How many ads have you seen on social media that state “AI wrote this ad!” or words to that effect?
The question is: can AI marketing work effectively and can it replace good, old-fashioned copy written by a human? Can it replace images crafted by a designer? Can it get the results that an experienced SEO professional can?
What is AI marketing?
First of all, we need to define what AI marketing is.
Essentially, AI marketing is implementing artificial intelligence to optimise marketing efforts where possible.
AI in marketing can help brands and marketing departments:
- better understand customers’ behaviour
- optimise campaigns
- personalise content
- predict ad performance
- track brand mentions online
- analyse data
- automate mundane and repetitive tasks
All of this is incredibly useful to marketers and brands alike and can speed up many processes within the digital marketing landscape, helping businesses make more informed decisions, increase efficiency, and drive conversions.
So, AI marketing is good, right?
When it comes to automated marketing processes and data analytics, yes AI marketing can be great and it can free up your marketing staff, sales staff, or customer service staff for more important and complex work.
Take AI chat bots, for example. Before AI, brand representatives or customer service agents handled a larger percentage of basic queries and uncomplicated requests both on the phone and online. A lot of answers to questions fielded to customer service staff could be found on the company’s website – the information was all there for the customer to find but the customer found it easier or more preferable to talk to someone.
Chat bots are capable of handling most frequently asked questions and simple queries. Depending on the programming, they can also leverage past interactions and historical data to continue to learn and provide highly personalised answers to customer queries.
With the introduction of AI chat bots, customer service staff have been freed up for more complicated enquiries, problems, and complaints that require a little more understanding, effort, and human nuance. AI (at least current AI models) is currently unable to replace the more human side of marketing such as the nuances of human language, human emotion, and empathy etc.
In short, AI is still a long way off from replicating the human element within marketing.
What can’t AI marketing do?
AI marketing is incredibly useful, constantly improving, is capable of fulfilling many repetitive marketing tasks, and can assist marketers by simplifying processes and providing invaluable data for better informed decision making, it cannot replace humans in every aspect of marketing.
Humans have certain qualities that AI-driven marketing simply cannot replicate.
Humans have a better understanding of the many nuances of the language used within marketing campaigns and material. Humans are far better equipped to detect, understand, and implement subtle shifts in tone, emotion, and meaning to create more effective messaging. Humans can also create more unique and personalised experiences that AI-driven marketing can’t due to the human ability to better understand the needs of their customers.
Arguably the most important reason why AI will never be able to replace the human element of marketing is that humans have the ability to empathise with and relate to their customers and build relationships with them. This human touch, understanding, and interaction is vital to delivering successful marketing campaigns.
Using AI generated content on your website. although allowing you to produce pages at an astronomical rate should be considered carefully. Google’s John Mueller explains why AI generated pages may not be the solution for ranking in SERPs:
How to use AI marketing effectively
AI marketing is a powerful tool, but it is still a tool nonetheless and will never be able to completely replace the human element in marketing.
As AI technology develops, there will undoubtedly be new and exciting ways in which marketers can implement it into their campaigns alongside human marketing tactics.
Whilst AI cannot replace human marketing it can definitely augment marketing processes and assist brands with many elements of their marketing strategy.
5 ways to incorporate AI into marketing
Here are five ways you can use AI effectively as part of your marketing strategy.
- Use AI to collect customer data. Automate the task of collecting data from customers to gain insights into customer behaviour, preferences, and needs to create more targeted campaigns, personalise content, and better segment customers.
- Process automation. Automate those mundane and repetitive tasks like email journeys, social media posting, and other task scheduling. This will free up marketers time and resources to focus on higher value marketing activities.
- Analyse data. AI can analyse data and discover patterns and trends faster, allowing you to identify customer segments and create highly tailored campaigns.
- Utilise AI-driven marketing tools. Incorporate AI tools like chatbots or virtual assistants online to directly engage with customers, helping them along the buying cycle, and increasing conversion rates.
- Measure and analyse. Use AI analytics tools to measure and analyse the performance of your marketing campaigns to help you make more informed, data-driven decisions and better optimise campaigns.
Because AI certainly is a powerful marketing tool, at Marketing Rocket, we utilise it in various areas of our business to simplify and automate processes, provide valuable insights, and improve our overall marketing campaigns’ performance.
You can read more about how we utilise AI Advertising on Amazon to help improve profitability.
For more information on the services we offer and how we can help drive growth for your business, get in touch
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