Still in its formative years in the marketing realm, artificial intelligence (AI) is developing and growing at an exponential rate. Over half of all current marketers use AI in some way in their campaigns with another 27% planning to learn more about it or implement it within the next couple of years. The use of AI marketing is growing.
While it’s hindered slightly by a decided lack of education and transparency pertaining to its implementation, many see its potential value in the analysis, data collation, and customer service which makes AI trends the ones to watch in 2019.
AI Trends to Watch For in 2019
- Helping Humans, Not Replacing Them
When thinking of artificial intelligence in marketing, many go directly to the notion of AI as replacing human involvement in different areas of marketing like customer service. After giving it some thought, one comes to realize that AI can certainly be a huge benefit in customer service, handling basic tasks and answers with chatbots and similar programs. When it comes to individual problem-solving, however, AI isn’t at a point where it can replace human interaction in that way. Human representatives are still needed to handle unique problems that arise and find satisfactory solutions.
The moral of the story? AI can help humans greatly in marketing but it won’t replace them.
2. The Learning Potential of Conversational AI
It’s imperative for businesses to have several open lines of communication so customers can reach them at any time in a way that’s easy and convenient for them. In employing conversational AI, the game is changed as to how, when and where you communicate with your customers. Such conversations may be a fast one-line response or require a longer, more involved engagement.
Conversational AI, aided by tech giants like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM, and Microsoft, is growing at an incredible rate and with frequent technical breakthroughs. With AI conducting some of the conversations with consumers, there’s a great opportunity for learning. While it’s commonly used by traditional marketers for canned responses, enterprising digital marketers know it can be used for so much more like the comprehensive understanding of customer needs and desires.
3. Improving UX
In the future, wise marketers will use AI-powered data integration to trace their consumers’ journeys from start to finish. It is now and will be immensely useful as customer needs today require more personalized marketing processes. Marketers need to harvest in-depth knowledge about their consumers so they can make the right offers at the right time to improve their respective key performance indicators (KPIs).
Marketing AI will help marketers and businesses make better decisions on how to reach out to consumers, how to communicate with them, and what specific areas to focus on. Those using artificial intelligence in marketing have only scratched the surface of machine learning as a way to improve marketing personalization and efficiency. It’s only going to get better.
4. Empowering the Marketer
When speaking of marketing AI, its value isn’t limited to just front line customer service conversations. The real power of marketing artificial intelligence lies in data integration. The time-consuming everyday routines like cleaning and prepping data for analysis is something AI-powered solutions can handle, and do vastly better, allowing marketing teams to focus on more creative and strategic tasks.
5. Data Taming
80% of the world’s data is unstructured which poses a good-sized problem for all businesses in 2019. Marketing artificial intelligence might prove to be the answer to this dilemma.
Unstructured data refers to sets of data that don’t have ‘set record’ formats like audio transmissions, digital images, documents, social media streams, and videos. Given the structure, these data sets would provide a rich source of consumer insights, revealing information on behavior, beliefs, and more that would be incredibly helpful to global marketers.
Such an analysis conducted by AI would perpetually improve as it processed more and more of the same type of information. Any striking differences would be noted and easy to determine, providing insights that would take marketers to the next level in their campaigns.
Takeaway
The significance of AI is growing by the day. More than a niche or a bit of hype, it’s now mainstream and marketers who elect to ignore it are missing out in a big way. In 2019, all businesses and their marketing teams should have AI strategies ready for use. AI marketing can handle the grunt work, the endless details, and the basics so you can unleash your talents on the more creative aspects of marketing.
