Let’s face it: Artificial intelligence isn’t going anywhere. Even though AI has been around since the ‘40s, it has started really ramping up over the last decade or so. Now, it seems like AI is playing a role in our everyday lives, from using the navigational applications on your phone to asking ChatGPT for recipe recommendations. It’s also impacting many industries, including digital marketing.
Regardless of how you feel about AI, it can be a useful tool in many ways. In the world of digital marketing, AI can be used to create fun photos for social media, edit your blog posts, and identify your target audiences, just to name a few.
If you want to see the AI trends that are making waves in the digital marketing world, keep reading to learn about what’s working these days and how you can incorporate them into your own strategies.
Trend 1: AI-driven customer segmentation
Customer segmentation helps you to personalize your marketing efforts to appeal to the subgroups of your demographic. Being able to target these different “segments” showcases your relevancy and customer-first attitude. AI can be used to target your customers with its highly advanced data analysis based on ever-changing customer behaviors.
With a thorough analysis of your customers’ behaviors, such as purchase history and social media engagement patterns, AI can help you recognize the different segmentations within your customer database.
Benefits of using AI for customer segmentation include:
- Recognizing patterns that have slipped through the cracks
- Saving time and resources on doing manual analysis
- Trying a new process can result in fresh ideas
Trend 2: Enhanced personalization
The importance of personalization in digital marketing shouldn’t be underestimated. Not only does it help to improve engagement and conversion rates, but you’re also showcasing how much you prioritize your customers’ wants and needs. Nobody wants to be seen as just another customer.
You can use AI to boost the personalization of your digital marketing in a few different ways. For example, you could use AI tools to brainstorm new email subject lines or to find the pain points that are interfering with a customer moving on in their journey with you. With effective, data-backed personalization, you’re likely to see improvements in the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you’re tracking, such as email open rates, click-through rates or customer retention metrics.
Using AI to enhance the personalization of your digital marketing has several advantages, including:
- Compiling a large variety of data across the board, from target demographic behaviors to browsing history
- Reducing the back-and-forth of choosing ideas within the team
- Gathering real-time data for relevant efforts
Trend 3: Predictive analytics
Don’t you wish you could just know what the future looks like for your company? While AI can’t predict the future, it can give you an idea of what to expect. That’s what predictive analytics is all about.
Predictive analytics for digital marketing refers to using past customer data to identify patterns and provide forecasts for the future. You can use that insight to stay ahead of customer preferences and keep your marketing efforts as relevant and fresh as possible.
Here are a few ways that predictive analytics can be applied in digital marketing:
- More precise targeting for your efforts
- Optimize your efforts for specific distribution channels
- Get ahead of potential issues, such as roadblocks in the customer journey
Trend 4: AI in content creation
Creating content has become one of the main uses of AI over the last few years. A study shows that approximately half of marketing teams use AI as part of their content creation efforts, and 40% use it to think of content ideas.
In digital marketing, content creation plays a significant role in search engine optimization. By creating content that aligns with what the algorithm is looking for, you’re likely to be ranked high on relevant search engine results pages.
However, there are many advantages and disadvantages to using AI in content creation that are worth considering.
Pros:
- You can use the same guidelines in every prompt for consistency across the brand.
- You’re able to explore different creative approaches that are outside of your wheelhouse.
- AI is a cost-effective way to create engaging content.
Cons:
- Consumers who are against using AI for content may look down on your brand.
- If you’re not transparent about using AI, it can impact your credibility and authority.
- Content created by AI is still prone to mistakes or misinformation that may go unnoticed.
Trend 5: AI-powered chatbots and customer service
It’s no secret that the ease of using search engines and AI technology has made people accustomed to getting their information in the blink of an eye. But if they have a particularly niche concern, such as a question about your cancellation policy, chatbots and customer service tools that use AI can come in handy. They can be built to have a conversational tone. These tools can also be programmed to answer a library of FAQs and use personalized greetings.
Implementing AI chatbots to help with customer service can provide quite a few benefits, including:
- Supporting your customers 24/7 for an improved customer service experience
- Increasing customer engagement
- Gathering data about customer behaviors and personalities
Trend 6: Social media marketing automation
The goal of all technological advancements is to make your life just a little bit easier. And automating processes is a great way to ease the stress of a task, or even remove a task completely.
Automating your social media marketing processes can boost your consistency, reduce the risk of human errors and decrease costs.
AI can be used as a way to streamline your social media marketing strategies through automation. A few automations that can help your social media efforts include:
- Setting up automatic posting schedules
- Using bots to engage with comments
- Posting across multiple platforms
Trend 7: Performance measurement and optimization
There’s always room for improvement, but you have to know where that room is in the first place. AI can help you track the performance of your digital marketing efforts, such as KPIs, and give you ideas about where optimization is possible.
You can leverage the power of AI to gather data that can help inform your decisions. For example, if AI is showing you that your social media posts aren’t leading to engagement, then you can use that information as a reason to switch up the tone, wording or formatting of the CTAs in your captions.
AI can help you make continuous improvements by helping you always stay on top of what’s working and what isn’t.
Are you trying to navigate the complex world of AI in digital marketing? BURG+CO. can help
If you’re having trouble embracing AI into your digital marketing strategies, the trends above showcase why it’s in your best interest to use its power to your advantage. When it’s used in an ethical way, you can use AI to ease your workload and get the best results possible from your efforts.
At BURG+CO., we use AI as a tool to help enhance our services, not as the whole process. From SEO to content creation, we use AI as a form of support to provide you with digital marketing strategies that are designed to contribute to your overall growth.
Our team has years of experience in helping healthcare brands improve their digital presence to attract new patients and retain existing ones. If you’re looking to perform better in search engine results and attract more potential patients to your site, we’re ready to talk to you to see how we can help.
Contact our team today for more information about our digital marketing services or to schedule a complimentary consultation.