Source – https://www.forbes.com/
Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) is now commonplace in marketing. Tools, platforms, and services put sophisticated audience targeting and segmentation tools at marketers’ fingertips, making it easier than ever to connect your products and services to customers.
As organizations grow more sophisticated in their adoption of AI, they can start to look beyond core uses cases and solutions such as the basic targeted advertising tools offered by Google and Facebook. Today, consistently finding new applications of data and smart algorithms is essential to building and maintaining a competitive advantage.
It’s important because if you’re simply using AI to do the same as everyone else then your results won’t differentiate you from your competitors in the eyes of potential customers. On top of this, core AI marketing tools (such as Adwords or Facebook advertising) are often described as “pay-to-win” – put simply, companies with bigger marketing budgets will generally get better results and take potential customers from smaller businesses. This is because they can afford to bid higher for the most important keywords.
Thinking smarter about alternative and emerging use cases for AI in marketing (or any business function) can help mitigate this. Here are a few ideas for getting ahead of the curve and ensuring your AI-driven marketing strategy is always evolving to become more efficient.
Intelligent advertising design
AI enables highly personalized design, meaning individual elements of advertising materials and marketing campaigns can be automatically tailored to specific audiences or even individuals. Individual elements of marketing campaigns – down to the style of design or the color schemes used – can be determined by algorithms to ensure they have the best likelihood of grabbing your audience’s attention and prompting further engagement. Algorithms can then assess the performance of different combinations of design elements and audiences and determine where tweaks could bring better results.
Thinking smarter about alternative and emerging use cases for AI in marketing (or any business function) can help mitigate this. Here are a few ideas for getting ahead of the curve and ensuring your AI-driven marketing strategy is always evolving to become more efficient.
Intelligent advertising design
AI enables highly personalized design, meaning individual elements of advertising materials and marketing campaigns can be automatically tailored to specific audiences or even individuals. Individual elements of marketing campaigns – down to the style of design or the color schemes used – can be determined by algorithms to ensure they have the best likelihood of grabbing your audience’s attention and prompting further engagement. Algorithms can then assess the performance of different combinations of design elements and audiences and determine where tweaks could bring better results.
Another powerful use case is trend analysis. Here AI can help you pick out changing habits and behaviors that might influence how your customers and potential customers are engaging with providers in your market. As well as your own visual messaging, you can more easily assess the effectiveness of your competitors’ campaigns and judge how customers react to different moods, color palettes, and scenery.
Image recognition (along with NLP as mentioned above) can also be used to create automated descriptions for sales copy, from pictures of items. Additionally, you can use it to protect your brand, by having it automatically alert you to anyone who might be misappropriating your creative IP, branding, or messaging for their own ends!
Try-before-you-buy with AR
Ikea lets customers view products in their own homes – to check how a new sofa or table might fit with their existing décor – by offering augmented reality (AR) tools that superimpose computer-generated graphics onto real-world images. Here, AI is used to create realistic-looking composite images, generally in real-time, as the user is looking through the camera on their phone. In the same manner, beauty brands such as L’Oreal let users try out make-up and other products and see how they will look on them, using the same technology. While big players have been making this sort of functionality available to their customers for a while, it is increasingly offered “as-a-service” through platforms such as wearfits.com that make it usable by retailers of any size.