AI is front of mind in the digital marketing space following the advent of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools that are free to the public and have demonstrated an ability to speed processes that would take humans much longer to execute. While this AI craze has large implications for the marketing industry and many other sectors, what is often overlooked is the fact that other forms of AI have been used in marketing for years and remain a large part of the infrastructure that drives many marketing functions today.
While AI’s impact on marketing extends widely across a number of areas, below we will explore how AI-powered capabilities specifically empower marketers, and more specifically programmatic advertisers, to execute their campaigns with precision and speed. By harnessing AI’s potential in social media, consumer intelligence, new forms of search and campaign optimization, advertisers will continue to leverage AI to elevate their strategies and achieve unprecedented results.
Here are the most common and established types of AI used in marketing today.
Unlocking Insights on Social
AI-powered tools have transformed social media management, allowing marketers to analyze vast amounts of social media data and turn them into insights that can inform strategy. AI algorithms can synthesize information from social media to detect patterns and sentiment, helping businesses understand customer preferences and how the market is changing in real time. Marketers can leverage this information to help them build and ideate content, as well as refine their ad campaigns to improve performance and make the content more relevant. AI-powered social media management tools also assist in automating routine tasks, like analyzing performance metrics and identifying influencers.
Programmatic advertisers also leverage AI to perform predictive analytics and make informed decisions based on real-time data, including data that rolls in from social feeds. These analytics can help advertisers anticipate how individual customers are likely to respond to their messaging and determine the most effective strategies for engaging them. Programmatic advertisers can in turn deliver personalized experiences that resonate with customers without the need to collect personal information.
Understanding Audiences
Another area in which advertisers rely on AI is in ad targeting. AI can help programmatic advertisers improve their targeting by identifying relevant audience segments for a given campaign. In addition to helping better sort through the preferences and behaviors of an audience, AI can be used to categorize and group these audiences so advertisers have a higher level of certainty that they are reaching the right people.
Through AI-powered data analysis, advertisers can track customer behavior across multiple channels and link those activities together to create a more complete picture of their consumers. This process is a combination of identity resolution and AI and is a key focus area for many programmatic advertisers. The result is a more efficient allocation of campaign dollars in the places where it’s most impactful which in turn drives higher campaign effectiveness, and better return on ad spend (ROAS).
Synthesizing Natural Language and Intent
Voice search is a relatively new and growing area within marketing, as users are less and less interested in typing in queries for search. Rather, they are using voice search through Siri, Alexa, Google or other technologies to find the information they’re looking for more quickly.
With the rise of voice assistants and smart speakers, optimizing content for voice search has become critical. AI algorithms play a vital role in this process by understanding natural language patterns and user intent at scale. By analyzing vast amounts of voice search data, AI tools get progressively better at understanding users’ colloquialisms and conversational queries. Marketers then optimize their content to align with these voice search trends, ensuring better visibility and relevancy in voice search results.
Another area growing rapidly in the AI marketing sphere is chatbots and virtual assistants. These AI-powered customer support technologies have revolutionized customer service by incentivizing users to self-fulfill requests by synthesizing queries and prompting users with the information they need. This form of AI allows businesses to provide instant assistance to users around the clock which also frees up businesses’ employees, allowing them to focus on more complex and high-value tasks.
Optimizing Campaigns Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
AI’s ability to process information at scale is one of the reasons it’s at the center of programmatic advertising, and helps marketers purchase, sell, and place online ads in real time. Programmatic advertisers use AI to continuously monitor and optimize their campaigns for peak performance and provide real-time insights into ad performance in the places the campaign is deployed allowing advertisers to refine their strategies. This data-driven approach not only improves lead generation and sales growth, but also maximizes ROAS by eliminating inefficiencies.
Who knows what AI will be able to do tomorrow? For now, programmatic advertisers must build upon the demonstrated successes they’ve witnessed leveraging AI to improve their advertising campaigns. As capabilities evolve in the programmatic industry, embracing AI will continue to be essential for advertisers to unlock new methods to improve campaign performance.
The author, David Finkelstein, is the CEO of BDEX.
