By Christina Nguyen
A creative endeavor such as marketing may sound like something that’s a far cry from the typical uses of artificial intelligence, but marketers have known for a while that it’s not true. AI has long been used in marketing for data analysis, as much of marketing is data-driven, and data can take a long and tedious time for humans to analyze. Even on the creative front, the algorithms of AI have been evolving to learn from writers, artists and other creatives to generate artwork and writing that nearly resembles the talent of an experienced human.
However, this doesn’t mean AI can completely replace the work of every marketing professional — rather, it’s intended to supplement and streamline their work. So here are a few different ways marketing professionals in small businesses can use AI to boost and inform their marketing campaigns to produce relevant, tailored, segmented strategies and results.
Create social media and website content
Recently, chatbots have been able to write articles as expressively and eloquently as humans. A notable example of this is ChatGPT, which can write short articles if you just simply type in a query such as “Can you write me an article on TikTok trends?” Other AI writing tools, such as Rytr or Canva Magic Write, can help write creative content, such as social media captions, that can be used in marketing. Midjourney can be used to generate photos. You can use these tools to help you write blog posts, emails, CTAs, website copy and more.
However, it wouldn’t be ideal to rely on these AI writers for your content alone ‒ you still need to imbue the content with your brand’s unique touch! Doing so is necessary for your content to reflect your branding and to avoid suspicions of letting AI do all your work. The latter may spark sentiments of plagiarism. Even though these softwares have been passing plagiarism checkers, plagiarism checkers may soon evolve to detect when writing has been AI-generated. In the meantime, your customers might notice. AI-generated content should just serve as inspiration rather than being the final product.
It’s also important to take SEO into consideration with AI-generated content as well. Although the content may appear high-quality, ChatGPT doesn’t have any knowledge discovered after 2021, so its results may be outdated, negatively affecting SEO. As other companies learn to tweak and manually improve AI-generated content, the content alone won’t be considered high-quality enough to be ranked highly.
Crunch customer data and glean meaningful insights for predictions
One of the more common benefits of AI in marketing has been its ability to analyze and synthesize customer data. So if you haven’t been using it for data analysis, it might be an investment worth checking out! Data analytics software uses AI to synthesize data such as website views, clicks, time spent on a page and other helpful metrics.
The more advanced data analytics software gets, the more it can develop insights with the data it’s fed. For example, using the right analytics software can help you uncover actionable patterns in your data you may have missed otherwise, such as different spending patterns from returning customers compared to new customers. This can help you reconfigure your targeted ads and other marketing materials for that segment.
Gathering live customer data with chatbots
The data collected doesn’t just have to be numerical insights from your website. Chatbots can help you collect more qualitative data about your customers. Before ChatGPT, chatbots had traditionally been used to interact with customers to take some of the load off of live agents, but they can be built for more than this.
Aside from lightening the workload, another benefit of using chatbots is the automatic collection of customer data. In addition to directing customers to the suitable agents and answering simple questions, chatbots have been used to book reservations, give product suggestions, collect user data by asking survey questions, and more. More advanced chatbots can even use sentiment analysis to understand how a customer feels without directly asking them. All this can lead to valuable data that reveals consumer preferences and other information to help your team better tailor your marketing to your audience’s needs. It can also help you save money by directing your budget towards strategies that have been proven to lead to better conversions.
Deliver more personalized journeys, particularly in e-commerce and ads
The data AI gathers can help you deliver a more personalized customer journey, particularly with products and ads individually displayed to each customer based on their browsing and shopping history, demographics and other information you collect from them. Targeted ads have been proven to be twice as effective as generalized ads. Displaying tailored recommendations can help increase sales for you and convenience for the customer, making it more likely they’ll return.
This tailoring should extend to your email marketing as well, as customers are more likely to open emails with headers relevant to their specific needs and their location along their customer journey. You can then use AI to analyze patterns in customer engagement with those emails, such as which emails are more likely to be clicked through and which are more likely to lead to further purchases.
As artificial intelligence evolves, all industries it affects will evolve with it. However, it’s important that your organization is careful not to rely too much on AI for your marketing content, as other organizations are also picking up on it. Without the personalized, emotional touch of your human marketing team members, your AI-generated content will probably just look generic and too similar to the content of other organizations who aren’t editing their artificially-generated materials. So think of AI’s work as simply the foundation of yours rather than the finished product itself.
What are some ways AI can supplement small businesses in their marketing strategies? Feel free to let us know in the comments below!
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About Stingray Advisory Group LLC: Stingray Advisory Group LLC is based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and is a proud member of Local First and the West Michigan Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. We help businesses grow. By creating customized solutions, we empower businesses and entrepreneurs with the tools to further their development.
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