Weaving an AI marketing strategy into your overall business plan is swiftly becoming the norm as marketers get more and more familiar with the various AI-powered tools available today.
The artificial intelligence boom over the past few years has led to some amazing efficiencies in digital marketing. Perhaps the biggest improvement is AI’s ability to crunch data and offer valuable insights through predictive analytics into audiences, markets, and competitors.
This, coupled with automation and personalization techniques, means AI in marketing is already here to stay.
If you’re only just becoming accustomed to what an AI tool can do, then this guide is here to help. We’ll take you through the steps to create an AI strategy that uses data analytics to extract valuable insights on your audience or customer base. We’ll look at how you can integrate these AI marketing tools and automate tasks. We’ll also tackle some of the bigger challenges you’re likely to face when executing your AI marketing strategy.
Understanding AI in Marketing Strategy
AI marketing strategies are designed to help you work better and more efficiently. AI-powered tools can’t take the job off your hands completely, but they can give you:
Better data collection access
Quicker audience and market analysis
Content suggestions based on data
Content creation
Machine learning to improve future decisions
Better sourcing and tracking features
Customer segmentation to divide your audience into specific groups for targeted marketing
In essence, the AI part of any marketing strategy aims to guide you, not overtake what you’re doing.
Should I Start Using AI Marketing Tools?
Before we dive into our guide, it’s important to understand what you might want from an AI marketing strategy and whether it’s right for you. As we’ve explained above, the AI aspect is there to help you make smarter choices and improve efficiency.
However, it’s not simply a case of pressing a big green button and letting the AI take over your marketing campaigns. Even with the top AI-powered tools like CisionOne, you’ll need to spend a bit of time getting used to what’s being offered. These tools can assist with predictive modeling to forecast marketing outcomes, helping you to better plan and execute your strategies.
If you want a very, very quick fix to your marketing strategy then you might be better off reading these marketing communication strategy tips first.
In This Guide:
Setting Goals for Your AI Marketing Strategy
Choosing the Right AI Tools for Marketing
Integrating AI Into Existing Marketing Workflows
Personalizing Customer Experiences With AI
Automating Marketing Tasks With AI
Monitoring and Optimizing AI-driven Campaigns
Utilizing Natural Language Processing for Customer Insights
Challenges of Implementing AI in Marketing
Frequently Asked Questions
Setting Goals for Your AI Marketing Strategy
Like with any marketing plan, an AI marketing strategy needs to have some goals included. This way, you can steer the AI in the right direction.
Start by looking at your overall business objectives. If you work as part of a wider content or marketing team then you'll need to understand your goals and that of the wider business.
What are you trying to achieve? More sales? Better customer service? Increased brand awareness?
Next, break these down into specific, measurable targets. For example:
Boost website conversions by 15%
Reduce customer service response times to under 1 hour
Increase social media engagement by 25%
Check Your Goals
After this, double check your goals are feasible. Make sure they align with your marketing budgets. If you want to increase social media engagement by 25%, then that probably means doing more, better social media campaigns. Can you afford this, even with AI helping?
After all, AI tools can be pricey, so you’ll need to weigh the costs against potential benefits.
Consider how much you’re willing to spend on AI-powered marketing solutions and think about both short-term and long-term goals. You might be able to deliver some quick wins without needing AI – but don’t forget about bigger picture objectives that may be more beneficial in the long run.
Remember, as well, to set realistic timeframes for each of your goals. AI can work wonders, but it’s not magic. Data crunching can take up a large chunk of time and energy for AI-powered marketing tools, so give yourself enough time to implement them, train your team, and see results.
Lastly, decide how you’ll measure success. What key performance indicators (KPIs) will you track? These might include:
Conversion rates
Customer satisfaction scores
Return on ad spend (ROAS)
Predictive analytics can help you set realistic timeframes and measure success effectively. By using predictive analytics, you can forecast potential outcomes and adjust your strategies accordingly. This ensures that your goals are not only ambitious but also achievable.
Choosing the Right AI Tools for Marketing
Now that you have your goals in place, you can begin to look for AI-powered tools that will help you deliver your projects. Look for digital marketing tools that fit your needs and budget, especially those that help in analyzing large data sets and leveraging analytics.
Remember, AI is there to help do the jobs you can’t do yourself, or those that are incredibly time-consuming. So, start by looking at what you’re trying to achieve with your marketing but aren’t able to. Do you need to find a competitive edge? CisionOne can help you analyze the media and see where your marketing strategies should focus on using machine learning algorithms.
Perhaps you need to understand your audience? If so, then CisionOne is perfect for scanning social media platforms and understanding what customers think about your brand.
Do you need help creating content? Tools like Jasper.ai can help you write blog posts, while Canva is great for image creation.
Of course, Surfer SEO is the go-to AI marketing option for anyone who wants to optimize their content for search engines like Google. It integrates with WordPress and Google Docs for easy use.
Remember, the best tool depends on your specific goals. There’s no single tool that can look after all your AI marketing efforts. However, they all aim to save you time and resources by doing jobs that aren't easy to do yourself.
When selecting a tool, make sure you think about how they:
Integrate with your current systems
Fit your budget
Provide customer support
Offer training resources
Don’t be afraid to try free trials before committing. You can always walk away if you don’t feel it’s working for you.
Integrating AI Into Existing Marketing Workflows
It’s quite likely that you already have a marketing strategy and are now starting to think about integrating AI tools into your daily workload. If this is the case, then this section will help you understand how you do this seamlessly by creating automated workflows for your marketing tasks.
Before you begin, assess your current processes and identify areas where AI could genuinely help. This might include customer segmentation, content creation, or campaign optimization. You might even want to use AI to take reporting off your hands.
Whatever it is, make sure you make a plan for how you’ll use the AI each day and what outcomes you want to get from it.
Next, research the best AI marketing tools to find one that’s suitable for your needs. Even something as simple as Pixlr’s AI assistant could be perfect for improving all your imagery and photos ahead of a big marketing campaign launch.
Once you find the tools you need, include them in your overall work processes and look into each tool to see how they can be integrated into your current systems. For example, CisionOne integrates all your social media accounts in one place to make AI analysis much easier. It also can pull in media contact lists and data on where your brand is most visible, with AI helping to crunch the numbers.
Don’t forget about personalization, too. AI can help deliver the right message to the right person at the right time across your marketing channels. These personalized marketing campaigns – such as email marketing and targeted advertising – are really difficult to do without AI-generated data analysis helping to guide your decisions.
Always remember that AI is a tool to enhance your team’s skills, not replace them. Encourage your marketing team to learn how to work alongside AI. This is all part of integrating AI into your work structure.
Training sessions are essential. As your team gets comfortable, you can expand your use of AI across more marketing workflows. This gradual approach helps ensure smooth integration without overwhelming your team.
Personalizing Customer Experiences With AI
We mentioned personalized content in the above section – now it’s time to look at it in more detail.
In the past few years, AI has changed how brands connect with customers. It helps you understand their needs far better and create tailored experiences. It’ll never replace traditional research, but AI can spot gaps in your data collection and suggest useful data-driven insights.
So, how does the machine do this? Well, the right AI marketing tool looks at customer data to spot patterns. This lets you predict what people want before they even ask.
AI can also enhance the customer journey by analyzing interactions at each touchpoint. You can then use this info to make personalized content – whether that be marketing material, special offers, or even entirely new products.
There are various ways to obtain information on your audience. You might use a tool like CisionOne to analyze the media landscape and spot missing audiences. Social listening could help you understand your customer experience and gain a deeper understanding into how your brand is perceived. You could even use a tool to create content, see what works best, and replicate successful posts.
Social Media and Personalized Customer Engagement
AI works particularly well with social media because audiences are willing to share things on these platforms. An AI tool can help split audience demographics in minutes and aid marketing teams in their messaging.
In fact, social platforms now provide the most direct access for marketers to understand their audiences. The AI capabilities of your research tool are able to squeeze further data analysis from said audiences, including sentiment analysis to gauge audience emotions and improve your campaigns.
All of this means you can create more targeted and effective campaigns. This helps you build stronger relationships with that audience, and potentially grow it.
Automating Marketing Tasks With AI
Marketing campaigns require a lot of work and teams can often become stretched as they seek to deliver maximum impact. The trick is to begin automating repetitive tasks via AI.
Generative AI tools, for example, can create content quickly. You can use them to write social media posts, email subject lines, and ad copy. This speeds up your content creation process – all you need to do is check for quality.
AI helps personalize marketing messages too. It analyzes customer data to tailor content for each person, meaning everything from social media ads to newsletters can be directed to the right people.
We also need to mention AI chatbots here. These can handle basic customer service tasks and are now used by companies all over the world. They answer common questions and guide customers through sales funnels, troubleshooting help, and complaints procedures. Even if the AI chatbot simply directs someone to the right place, it at least frees up your team to tackle more complex issues.
Data analysis also becomes easier with AI. It spots trends and gives insights you might miss, which helps you make smarter marketing decisions. Using the data means you can tailor marketing efforts, optimize your ad spend, and improve the customer journey with predictive analytics.
Remember, AI tools are helpers, not replacements. They work best when paired with human creativity and strategy.
Monitoring and Optimizing AI-driven Campaigns
Being able to use AI in any campaign should lead to better results – but you need to keep a close eye on your AI marketing campaigns to make sure they're working well.
This means tracking key metrics and ensuring the AI is doing what you need it to do. Whether that's creating the right visuals for a campaign, running predictive analytics on your audience, or dealing with customer interactions.
To do this, look back at your original goals and assess how AI has helped or hindered those efforts. Has your output improved since using AI? If so, create a report and look at the data to see where you can grow. If the AI isn't helping, look at the reasons why. Perhaps it's too complicated to understand, or it's analyzing data that you don't actually need. Maybe it's complicating the customer experience by sending potential customers down the wrong sales funnel. It might even be creating social media posts that don't align with your target audience.
Whatever it is, if the AI isn't aiding your marketing efforts then you need to make changes to optimize its use. Otherwise why bother with it?
Challenges of Implementing AI in Marketing
Now, let’s look at the issues marketing teams can come up against when trying to weave AI into their workflows.
Many companies find it hard to make AI work smoothly with the systems they already use. That’s why tools like CisionOne – which also acts as a social media planner – are really useful because everything is pulled into one place.
Data quality is another big hurdle because AI needs lots of good data to work well. If you’re a small brand in downtown Dallas that has a tiny target audience, then the AI might not be much use because your data set is too small. Data privacy concerns can also affect the quality of data used by AI, as restrictions on data collection and usage can limit the available data.
Meanwhile, if your data is messy or incomplete, your AI results won’t be great.
As for introducing AI to your team, this is the sort of thing that can create pushback and dissatisfaction. Technology isn’t meant to replace workers, but anyone who introduces an AI marketing strategy to their team without offering an insight into why AI is being used could face hostility.
After all, some folks worry AI will take their jobs. It’s therefore key to show how AI can help, not replace, your team members.
Another big challenge, especially for small companies or individuals who have to oversee a brand’s marketing efforts, is cost. AI tools can have a large up-front cost and you may need skilled people to run them. Tools are getting easier and easier to manage, but companies need to allocate a budget both for the tool and for the person who operates it.
Finally, AI generated content won’t always get your brand voice right – no matter how much it learns. If audiences spot that you’re creating things with AI then they might turn away. We’re used to AI chatbots these days, but we still trust human-made images, videos, and audio much more than the machines.
You’ll need to watch closely to make sure the AI fits your brand’s tone and style.
Frequently Asked Questions
AI marketing strategies can revolutionize how you connect with customers and boost your campaigns. Yet any good marketing strategy also needs checks and balances to ensure you don’t become overly reliant on AI.
Machine learning is still in its infancy and digital marketing is steadily catching up with the power of AI generated content, data, and analysis. Predictive analytics is a key component of machine learning in AI marketing, helping to forecast trends and customer behaviors.
With that in mind, there are still plenty of questions that users have about AI marketing. Let’s therefore explore some key questions about using AI to supercharge those marketing efforts.
How can marketers integrate AI into their existing marketing strategies to enhance customer engagement?
There are some quick ways to get started here. You can begin by using AI-powered chatbots on your website and social media channels. These bots can answer customer questions 24/7, freeing up your team for more complex tasks.
AI can also help you create personalized email campaigns based on customer behavior and preferences. By leveraging predictive analytics, you can analyze customer data to forecast future behaviors and tailor your email content accordingly. Give the AI access to your mailing list and its data analysis will give you plenty of pointers on how to refine your emails.
AI can also aid content creation, analyze feedback from social media, and loop the data back into a report. This means you can improve your digital marketing strategies based on trusted data-driven insights.
In what ways can AI marketing tools improve the analysis of consumer data for better targeting?
AI can quickly sort through massive amounts of customer data to spot trends and patterns using predictive analytics. A job that might take an analyst a day to undertake can be done in a matter of minutes. You can use these insights to create more targeted ads and content.
Automating repetitive tasks, such as analyzing campaign performance, deciphering data, and matching your campaign performance against marketing spend is also possible with AI tools.
They can also predict which customers are most likely to buy your product or service – whether that’s by assessing your sales funnel, overseeing your digital marketing campaigns, or perhaps even listening in to social media conversations to see which demographics like your brand.
How do AI algorithms contribute to the personalization of customer experiences in marketing?
AI algorithms are constantly learning, which means they’re getting better and better at personalized content. This machine learning, combined with predictive analytics, helps you track customer behavior across platforms, use this data to create tailored experiences, and predict what customers will do next.
You might use AI to show different website content to different visitors based on their interests. That’s the sort of thing that raises your AI marketing strategy to a whole new level.
Can you recommend any free AI tools that boost the effectiveness of marketing efforts?
CisionOne is the ideal tool for improving efficiencies in your AI marketing strategy. The tool uses predictive analytics to crunch millions of data points and assess your brand’s reputation across traditional and online media platforms. You can request a demo to take a look and see what you think.
Brandwatch also has a demo option and is a great tool for AI marketing on social media, as it oversees conversations across the likes of X, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. It can then guide your content creation decisions, point you to which demographics you need to target, and help you spot issues with your customer experience.
As for other tools, Google Analytics uses AI to give you insights about your website traffic. Canva and Pixlr use AI features to help you create eye-catching images. Grammarly’s free version uses AI to check your writing.
These tools can help improve your marketing without breaking the bank.
