AI is rapidly advancing and changing the norms in the field of digital marketing. According to HubSpot’s State of AI 2024 report, 62% of marketing professionals agree on using AI and automation in their roles. From search engine optimization to content marketing and social media marketing, AI has been widely adopted to boost personalization, improve targeting, automation, and more. However, it’s important to draw a line between using AI effectively and blindly. In this blog post, we will discuss how to use AI in digital marketing optimally. Let’s get started!
What is AI in Digital Marketing?
Using AI in digital marketing is all about leveraging its capabilities to collect data, analytics, and attribution modeling for the purpose of personalization and automation.
By employing AI in your practices, you can effortlessly gain insights into customers’ behaviour. This data can be used to create highly personalized targeting and campaigning plans.
Many believe that using AI in digital marketing means entirely depending on it to perform your tasks, which can be disastrous. It’s just a productivity tool and an assistance that can improve the efficiency of your work.
For example, you can use AI-driven tools to create and send email campaigns. If you rely solely on the tool to generate content and select target audiences without any human oversight, you might fail to consider the context or nuances of their audience. As a result, the emails could miss the mark, using language that doesn’t resonate or targeting the wrong demographic. This could lead to low engagement rates and, ultimately, a loss of potential customers.
On the other hand, if the marketing team utilizes the AI tool to analyze data and suggest ideas while still applying their expertise to craft messages and strategize, they can harness the strengths of both technology and human creativity. This balanced approach can lead to more effective campaigns and better overall results.
So, basically, you can employ large language models and machine learning to analyze the big data and extract practical findings from it and then plan and execute your marketing efforts using it.
How to use AI in Digital Marketing?
Here are some roles where AI can give a boost to productivity:
Data Analytics
Having a hard time exporting large data sets and making sense out of it? AI models can help you with predictive analysis and sentiment analysis.
You can use AI data analytics to analyze enormous data sets, scale trends, and uncover detailed insights. Tools like these can support, simplify, and automate each stage of the data analysis journey. In simple words, you can ingest data from various sources and prepare insights in organized patterns. This can help you understand trends and make informed decisions.
Is AI reliable for data analysis in marketing?
Yes, when you are dealing with a large volume of data, AI can help you save time and resources in identifying patterns and trends. Using AI, you can even monitor the performance of your campaigns or any kind of marketing efforts in real time and spot the areas for improvement. AI will automatically adjust the strategies for better results.
An effective approach to using AI should be combining its strength with human expertise. This is because AI lacks contextual understanding, bias, and fairness. Moreover, AI’s outcomes are reliant on the quality of input data, so there is no guarantee you may extract a helpful analysis from it.
Therefore, you should use AI just to automate routine tasks and generate initial insights to work on. Human analysts can interpret the results, validate findings, and make informed decisions.
Examples of how AI can be used in data analysis
- AI algorithms can analyze enormous amounts of past data to identify patterns and trends. This may include customer demographics, purchase history, and browsing behaviour. This enables marketers to predict future customer behaviour, such as product preferences and purchase timing.
- AI can automate A/B testing by rapidly testing multiple ad variations and analyzing the results in real time. Machine learning algorithms can identify the most effective ad creatives, targeting audiences, and bidding strategies, leading to higher conversion rates and lower costs.
- There are AI-powered tools that can analyze the sentiments of the audience. They allow you to effectively work on customer feedback and spotting emerging trends.
Customer segmentation
By using AI, you can analyze loads of customer data, identify patterns, and group people into segments more efficiently and accurately than doing it by hand. This means you can tailor your marketing efforts to different groups, making them way more effective.
Let’s say you run an online store selling clothes. Instead of blasting the same ad to everyone, AI can analyze all sorts of customer data—like browsing behaviour, purchase history, location, age, and even social media activity—to create segments. For example:
| Segment 1 | Segment 2 | Segment 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Young professionals who prefer stylish, business-casual outfits. | Parents are looking for affordable, practical clothing for their kids. | Fashion-forward teens who are into the latest trends. |
Once these segments are identified, you can run personalized campaigns that speak directly to each group’s needs and preferences, increasing the chances of conversions. Maybe you send the professionals an email about a new line of office wear, while the parents get a discount on kids’ clothes.
Once you’ve identified your segments with AI, you should:
- Humans engage with empathy: Create ads or emails that make customers feel like you get them. Use language that resonates with each segment’s lifestyle or needs.
- Creativity is a Just-Human thing: AI might help you target the right audience, but human creativity is key to making your content compelling. Think of catchy taglines, eye-catching visuals, and emotionally engaging stories.
- Make the right decisions during real-time interaction: Use AI for automated responses (like chatbots), but make sure real humans step in when needed, especially for more complex queries or high-value customers.
In short, AI helps you get smart with your targeting, but the human touch makes sure your marketing feels authentic and connects with people on a personal level!
SEO
AI is a total game-changer for SEO, and it can seriously make your life easier. Basically, AI helps you figure out what people are searching for, what’s working, and how to rank better on Google. Here are some examples that explain this well!
- Keyword Research: AI can analyze huge volumes of search data to figure out which keywords people are searching for. It can suggest long-tail keywords (those longer, more specific phrases) that you might not have thought of. For example, instead of just targeting “SEO Toronto,” AI might suggest “best SEO company in Toronto for restaurants,” which could be a niche you can dominate.
- Content Optimization: AI tools can help optimize your content by suggesting improvements based on what’s ranking right now. If you’re writing a blog post, AI can tell you things like:
- Adding certain keywords at specific places (like headers and titles).
- Optimizing your meta descriptions to be more click-worthy.
- Recommending related topics to cover, so your content is more comprehensive and relevant.
- Content Creation: AI can even help generate content ideas and outlines for blog posts, making it easier to come up with topics your audience cares about. For instance, if you run a fitness blog, AI can help you spot trending topics like “workout routines for beginners” or “how to stay fit while travelling” based on search trends. It gives you that extra boost when you’re feeling stuck!
- Competitor Analysis: AI can quickly analyze your competitors’ websites, content, and keyword strategies. It shows you what they’re doing right and where there might be gaps that you can fill. If your competitor’s page is ranking for a keyword, AI might suggest ways you can improve yours (better headlines, more detailed content, better backlinks, etc.) to outrank them.
- User Experience (UX) & Site Optimization: AI tools can assess your website’s user experience, from loading speeds to mobile responsiveness, and suggest improvements. Google loves fast, mobile-friendly sites, and AI helps ensure your site is in tip-top shape for SEO.
Why the Human Touch Still Matters:
AI can help you optimize your content and figure out the right keywords, but it’s a human who knows how to write content that engages people emotionally. Google’s algorithm might like the technical stuff, but people like stories, humour, and real-life examples. AI can’t replicate that human touch in writing!
AI can give you insights, but you still need to make the final call on your strategy. SEO is not just about getting rankings; it’s about aligning your content with your brand’s voice, your audience’s needs, and long-term business goals.
SEO trends and algorithms change, and AI might not always keep up in real-time with every new tweak that Google makes. Humans stay up-to-date with trends, shifting audience behaviour, and fresh strategies and can adapt quickly.
Pay-Per-Click
In PPC, AI helps automate many tasks, saving time and improving results by analyzing tons of data and optimizing your campaigns. With AI, you don’t have to spend hours tweaking your ads or guessing who might click.
One of the most powerful ways AI helps in PPC is through targeting. It analyzes user behaviour, demographics, and browsing history to predict who’s most likely to convert. For example, if you’re running ads for a travel agency, AI can identify people who’ve recently searched for things like “best vacation spots” or “holiday deals.” It will prioritize showing your ads to those people, making sure your budget is spent on the most likely converters rather than a broad, untargeted audience. This boosts the efficiency of your spending and drives better results.
Another area where AI shines is ad copy creation. Instead of manually writing and testing different ad versions, AI can automatically generate multiple headlines, descriptions, and calls-to-action (CTAs) based on what’s worked in the past.
For example, if you’re advertising a new collection of shoes, AI might test ads like “Shop Trendy Shoes” vs. “Find Your Perfect Fall Pair.” It will then track which version gets more clicks and conversions, automatically adjusting your ads to the winning version. This continuous optimization saves you a lot of time and effort while ensuring your ads perform at their best.
AI can also help with bid management. It can adjust based on how well your ads are performing, ensuring you’re not overpaying for clicks.
Let’s suppose you’re running a PPC campaign for a local cafe. AI can detect that people are more likely to click on your ad around lunchtime, so it will increase your bid to ensure you appear at the top of search results during that time. When demand drops, AI will lower your bid to save money, ensuring your budget is spent wisely.
AI can also handle budget allocation. It takes care of where your money goes by analyzing the performance of your different campaigns and reallocating funds to the ones that are giving the best results. Like you’re running ads on both Google Ads and Facebook for a product launch, AI will track which platform performs better and automatically shift your budget toward the best-performing one. This saves you from constantly monitoring your campaigns and ensures your budget is used efficiently.
Bottom-line
The key to success lies in finding the right balance between AI and human expertise. At Kinex Media, we harness the power of AI intelligently, ensuring that our marketing team scales operations effectively while remaining mindful of AI’s limitations. With our advanced AI-powered digital marketing services, we are committed to delivering ROI-driven results that align with your business goals.