How To Use AI Digital Marketing

One of the great things about digital marketing is how much precise data it generates. Instead of estimating how many cars drove by your billboard or the number of viewers of a TV ad, you can see who clicked on which ad, what they did next, what their other interests are, and how they interacted with your company in the past—and that’s only the start.

Consumer data is marketing gold, but it’s too much for a human brain to handle—and nonhuman brains can be part of the solution. Here’s how marketers use artificial intelligence to manage the speed and scale of marketing in the digital age.

What is AI in digital marketing?

AI in digital marketing refers to using artificial intelligence marketing tools to plan, implement, and monitor digital marketing campaigns. It can boost efficiency, lower costs, and provide valuable insights into customer behavior and marketing performance.

How to use AI in digital marketing

• Content creation
• Segmentation and personalization
• Customer service
• Campaign optimization
• Task automation

Marketing teams use AI technology to automate processes, analyze data, and interact with audiences. Here are five examples of what that looks like in practice.

Content creation

Generative AI tools can create, edit, and transform digital marketing content. Marketing teams use them to automate content creation for various types of media including:

• Images. AI image generation tools create images based on user inputs, letting marketers produce realistic images or branded graphics for websites, social media posts, or other marketing applications. You can also use AI-enabled editing tools to quickly transform backgrounds or add or remove objects.

• Videos. Marketers can also use AI to create and edit videos, product demos, or educational material. Video generation tools produce original footage from text, image, or video prompts, and AI editing functions make it easy to adjust color and lighting, remove objects, and generate subtitles. Some tools can even detect key scenes and recommend edits.

• Text. AI writing tools can produce text for web pages, landing pages, marketing emails, social media posts, digital ads, blogs, and basically anything else a marketing team might need. These tools can also edit existing text, optimize it for search, manage translations, analyze voice and tone, and repurpose text for different channels: AI can quickly turn a blog post into a series of Instagram posts or a spec sheet into a product description, for example.

• Audio. AI-powered text-to-speech tools create audio versions of written material. Marketers use them to create video voiceovers, make digital content more accessible, and even launch podcasts: Some tools can turn blogs or articles into podcast-style audio dialogues.

Segmentation and personalization

AI also helps digital marketers tailor marketing strategies, targeting individual customers and customer groups with messages likely to encourage conversion. Here’s how it works:

• Customer segmentation. AI-powered customer segmentation tools analyze customer data, including demographic information, browsing behaviors, purchase history, and engagement patterns. AI tools can efficiently process vast amounts of information and consolidate multiple data streams, creating accurate and granular customer segments and updating them in real time.

• Intelligent targeting. Predictive analytics helps marketers identify the most effective marketing messages for specific customer segments, using machine learning and statistical modeling to forecast consumer behavior. Prescriptive analytics go a step further, recommending the best ways to reach a specified goal.

• Marketing personalization. The endpoint is marketing personalization, letting marketers optimize the timing, content, and delivery of messages for individual consumers.

Customer service

Marketing teams use AI tools to provide efficient, high-quality customer service throughout the buyer journey. Here’s how it helps.

• Data consolidation. AI tools can collect information from emails, chatbots, form submissions, customer feedback tools, call logs, and DMs and compile it in a centralized customer profile, helping service reps provide consistent omnichannel customer experiences. AI tools can also track and summarize interactions linked to specific customer requests, streamlining collaboration on complex tickets.

• Interactive self-service. AI chatbots can help customers navigate self-service options by locating relevant resources or summarizing key sections in response to user queries. They can also walk customers through basic self-service tasks such as making a return, updating an order, or managing subscription options.

• Automated customer support. Generative AI chatbots can also autonomously handle customer support interactions, which can reduce wait times and boost customer satisfaction. Chatbots generate natural language responses to customer inquiries, follow conversational flows, and determine when to escalate a conversation to a human agent. They can also support human reps by quickly locating resources, generating suggested responses, and summarizing ticket histories.

• Personalized product recommendations. AI chatbots can support product discovery by making personalized recommendations based on chat history, behavioral data, and other customer information. Predictive tools can even anticipate customer needs so that service team members can proactively offer support.

Campaign optimization

Marketers also leverage AI to improve existing marketing campaigns, drawing on customer segmentation, data analytics, and real-time analysis to optimize strategy across channels. Here are four optimization tactics:

• Email marketing. AI tools can analyze email performance and make recommendations designed to achieve specific outcomes: A tool might analyze high-performing subject lines, draw conclusions about effective strategies, and rework existing content. They can also analyze information from your email systems, customer data platform, and online sources and automatically optimize delivery timing for specific users or user groups.

• Search engine optimization. AI SEO tools can make specific content recommendations based on real-time search data. They can also automatically rework page content and structure to optimize search performance and increase ranking in search engine results pages.

• Digital advertising. AI tools automatically adjust bids for ad space, using real-time analysis and historical data to maximize return on investment. AI can also improve your ad targeting, and dynamic ad optimization tools (like responsive Google Ads) can personalize ad delivery, adjusting ad content based on performance data and individual information.

• Social media campaign. AI tools can fine-tune your social media marketing by providing actionable insights about what works with your target audience. They can also optimize publication timing and use sentiment analysis to monitor social chatter about your brand.

Task automation

Marketers can use AI to automate marketing tasks, including repetitive tasks (like data entry), and routine tasks (like generating monthly performance reports). Here’s how marketing teams use it:

• Workflow management. AI marketing tools save time and boost efficiency by automating digital project management tasks. They can report on project status, track multiple deadlines, monitor workloads, and re-assign responsibilities, eliminating the need for marketing team members to manually resolve bottlenecks.

• Contact management. AI tools can handle data input, list-cleaning, email sorting, and data validation tasks.

• Campaign management. Marketing automations can also manage and monitor existing marketing campaigns, automatically publishing content, generating reports, and alerting team members to any issues.

Pros of AI in digital marketing

• Increased efficiency
• Data-driven insights
• Personalization at scale
• Increased creativity

An AI marketing strategy can help save time, improve performance, and enable data-driven decision-making. Consider the following benefits:

Increased efficiency

AI systems are fast: A marketer can locate an industry report, extract key insights, brainstorm related blog topics, generate a blog, and optimize it for search in less than an hour. In one survey, almost three out of four marketers said that AI systems will save the equivalent of one month of working time annually.

Data-driven insights

AI-powered marketing tools amplify your team’s data-driven capabilities. They can process enormous amounts of data and use multivariate analysis and statistical modeling to spot otherwise undetectable trends, providing valuable insights into consumer behavior and marketing performance.

Personalization at scale

Personalization is a heavy lift, but AI software makes it possible. AI’s ability to gather, process, and manage data, generate content, and respond in real-time to changing inputs can help marketing teams use personalization across the entire customer journey.

Increased creativity

Marketing is a creative endeavor, but digital marketers spend a lot of time on routine tasks. Using AI for rote work can free up humans to innovate, explore and maybe even come up with something new.

Cons of AI in digital marketing

• Bias and inaccuracy
• Content quality
• Copyright issues
• Reduced authenticity

Relying on AI to guide your marketing efforts has a few potential drawbacks that require careful consideration:

Bias and inaccuracy

AI outputs reflect the biases in training data, which can lead to inaccurate, slanted, or even offensive results.

Content quality

AI can reproduce errors, generate misleading responses, or even hallucinate. It also lacks an aesthetic sensibility, so without skilled creative oversight, AI-generated content can feel repetitive, inauthentic, and generic.

Copyright issues

Generative AI is a new technology, and it’s not entirely clear who owns the rights to AI-generated content (or if you could be held liable if your AI output violates intellectual property law).

Reduced authenticity

Your company is made up of people, and your customers are people too. Replacing human-to-human interactions with human-to-AI ones eliminates an opportunity to build an authentic connection between consumers and your brand.