When ChatGPT burst onto the scene late in 2022, it heralded a new era for artificial intelligence. It was the first time that generative AI seemed to work as it should. Open AI suddenly became a household name.
Since then, we’ve been looking for ways to use this useful technology. It’s proving helpful across multiple business areas, from human resources to inventory management.
The SupportYourApp team wanted to investigate its capabilities. However, considering how many things you can use AI for, they decided to focus on marketing in particular.
In this post, we’ll look at how you can use AI to boost your marketing efforts.
Social Listening
You can use AI-based tools to monitor social media conversations and analyze the sentiments behind them. This allows you to understand what your customers are thinking in real-time. You can formulate the correct response quickly and efficiently.
This should improve your customer relationships as they feel that you understand them. This can engender better trust and brand loyalty.
While it’s possible to hand this task over to your marketing team, automating it makes sense. AI can sift through thousands of comments and seconds to deliver actionable insults. To have a human team do the same amount of work would be prohibitively expensive.
Content Personalization
We’ve already experienced some form of this during our leisure time. For example, Netflix bases its recommendations on information collected by AI. The system looks at your viewing history, stated preferences, and demographics to suggest shows you’ll probably enjoy.
Customer support tools, such as Enhance by AI Assist, can go much further. They analyze the tone of the incoming message and draft responses that should resonate with a client. This includes looking at the type of language the customer uses and mirroring them.
Naturally, it won’t swear back at a client who uses foul language. However, it may use simpler English when it notes the consumer does. It also suggests highly relevant recommendations.
This makes the experience more pleasant for the person because they believe the company knows them well.
Market Research
One area where AI is especially useful is in dealing with large datasets. Most large companies collect swathes of data from their clients. This is a goldmine that, up until now, we couldn’t really exploit. It’s too expensive and time-consuming to sift through the data manually.
AI can sort through thousands of pages online or in company records, or both, in seconds. It’s adept at recognizing patterns, which makes it useful for revealing:
- Market trends
- Customer preferences
- Opportunities
The upshot is that you can make your business decisions based on empirical evidence. You might also have had to rely on assumptions in the past. Now, you can rely on data.
Instead of polling a small sample size, you can gather data from thousands of interactions. You can also ask AI to search through systems from different departments like sales, marketing, and billing to identify useful opportunities.
Content Generation
We all know that valuable content is a way to show your expertise. It can also gently convince clients that your product or service is the solution they’ve been looking for all along. However, it can be difficult to keep up with all the content you need to create.
You need to think about:
- Product descriptions
- Blog posts
- Social media posts
- Newsletters
- Email marketing campaigns
- Guest posts
- Website content
You might need to post to social media two or three times a day. In addition, you’re looking at at least one blog post a week and several guest posts. With newsletters, you can usually get away with one a week or a month.
That’s a lot of work to do. And, considering that it’s ongoing work, it’s easy to fall behind. After all, there’s only so much you can write about plumbing or whatever service you offer.
So, where does AI come into the picture? It’s simple; it can be a great resource for your content team.
We don’t recommend using it to create blog posts in full unless you carefully edit them afterward. AI tends to create grammatically good work, but it doesn’t read as well as that of a human writer. You’ll see a lot of repetition, and the system will use your chosen keywords too much.
There’s also the issue that AI can make mistakes. It’s not great at fact-checking, so you have to go over the work it produces.
You can use AI to:
- Suggest content ideas
- Create blog post outlines
- Write product descriptions, emails, and newsletters
- Check the tone of your work and make sure it matches that of your brand
- Proofread your work
- Create draft articles that you will then go and edit
Competitor Analysis
Get ready for a new era when it comes to competitor analysis. Your AI-based software will analyze pages of data on your competitor’s sites to see how they differ from yours. It’ll be able to give you detailed insights into their strategies and your customer perceptions.
It can track a range of metrics across various platforms to provide a complete analysis. This includes things like:
- Audience growth
- Engagement
- Post volume
This allows you to benchmark your social presence against that of your competitors. It gives you a clear picture of your share of voice and how engaged your customers are. It also helps you identify key strengths you can exploit and weaknesses you need to work on.
Thanks to all the data points the software can check, you can establish which content works best. You can also find useful information about the optimal posting times and even how to tweak your content to make it more effective.
International Marketing
Are you planning to expand into an overseas market? If so, AI can be extremely helpful in analyzing sentiments in different languages. It can also provide insights into cultural differences and provide language support to your team.
Predictive Analytics
AI is useful in forecasting trends and consumer behavior. It can predict how customers might react to a particular advertising campaign. It can help you get ahead of trains so that you look like a forward-thinking company.
In any event, this is very useful when it comes to making all kinds of decisions. You can see when to increase your marketing spend and when to rein it in.
Targeting Decisions
Who is the most appropriate audience for your marketing message? Do you know all the types of customers that might benefit from your product? Most companies make decisions based on market research. However, the sample size is generally small, which makes the research more manageable.
Therefore, you may miss out on a particularly lucrative target market. AI uses data from social media, sales, website traffic, and other sources to pinpoint the most appropriate audiences. It’ll look for high-converting leads and previously untapped markets.
Media Buying
Large corporate companies already use AI to get a return on their advertising spend. The software can analyze the different channels and placements to find the best ones.
Conclusion
There are clearly many ways to use AI in your marketing strategy. At the very least, it’s time to take advantage of its data processing capabilities. Doing so gives you an edge over your competition because you’ll have empirical evidence on which to base your business decisions.