At its core, marketing is about three things: understanding customer needs, matching your product to those needs, and persuading people to make a purchase. These foundational marketing objectives all have something else in common: artificial intelligence (AI) can make achieving them significantly easier. According to a McKinsey 2018 study, AI will contribute more value to marketing than any other discipline.
Truthfully, AI has played a part in managing customer relationships for several years now. Social media algorithms tailor your online experience to your preferences, e-commerce websites feature chatbots that help you complete your purchase, Netflix provides movie recommendations unique to your viewing habits–these are all practices that are driven by AI. Most of the time, we don’t even notice how AI is used in the marketing world, even though it plays a significant role in shaping our digital experience.
Today, we’re breaking down three key areas where AI can improve your productivity and take your marketing and brand management to the next level: metrics & analytics, social listening, and customer relationship management. Implementing AI tools in these areas can drastically improve your firm’s efficiency by automating routine tasks and simplifying analysis processes.
Metrics and Analytics
Today’s most comprehensive social media marketing campaigns encompass Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and more. Across each of those platforms, there are unique metrics to track–impressions, reach, engagements, conversions, streams or downloads. Whether you have a full marketing team or a one-person operation, that’s a lot of data to cull.
Of course, you want to track your social media analytics to ensure your marketing efforts are working, but sometimes, knowing which metrics to even track can be a daunting task. AI tools such as Sprout Social AI take the guesswork out of it for you and generate insightful reports in seconds. This gives you more time to do the things you love–engaging your audience, creating original content, and building your brand! Here are three ways AI can simplify your analytics process:
- Understanding Your Audience: Some 44% of business leaders are using sentiment analysis to understand consumer behavior. AI analytic tools help you understand the most effective ways to engage your audience.
- Social Media Reports: AI algorithms can aggregate and analyze data from several different sources including each social media platform you use and your website. These reports identify exactly which key performance indicators (KPIs) are relevant to your business.
- Keyword Research: Keyword Insights is an AI-powered writing assistant and content generator that provides users with keywords that are relevant to their industry and will deliver results when it comes to engagements, visibility, and search-engine optimization.
Social Listening
Public relations professionals have long used AI to manage large-scale media monitoring projects and track client visibility. AI social listening refers to the process of using artificial intelligence to monitor and analyze what people are saying about your business online. If you have a vested interest in brand management, a clear understanding of the perception of your brand among consumers is essential.
AI social listening tools not only do the monitoring for you, but they automate the analysis process as well. Content analysis involves breaking down the phrases, keywords, and general sentiments associated with your brand. Using AI gives you powerful insights into how these associations change over time.
Customer Relationship Management
Like we mentioned, AI in customer service and relationship management isn’t exactly new. However, there is still a wealth of untapped potential for AI in this area. Specifically, AI has the potential to transform customer relationship management (CRM) programming in three specific ways: predictive analysis, personalization, and customer retention.
- Predictive Analysis: Analyzing historical data and past customer behaviors allows AI to plot the trajectory of your customer relationships. You can increase your conversions or sales by aligning your marketing efforts with these predictions, ensuring you distribute marketing messages with precision.
- Personalization: In today’s digital landscape, personalization is everything. Customers expect an experience with your brand that is tailored to their unique identity. Delivering on this expectation usually translates into a sense of loyalty between the customer and your brand. Luckily, AI can help you personalize your products and services by providing hyper-specific data points about your customers.
- Customer Retention: AI can accurately predict how likely your customers are to churn (leave your brand for a competitor) through advanced analysis of customer behavior, usage, and feedback. Use these tools to your advantage to ensure you maintain a healthy customer retention rate.
There are a variety of AI tools that make market research, strategy development, and digital marketing more precise and effective than ever. At 88 West, implementing these tools into our research and campaign planning allows us to focus our time into our speciality: beautiful, custom designs. Generative AI may be able to come up with ideas and rudimentary images, but nothing compares to a visual identity designed by someone with an understanding of your brand and vested interest in telling your story. If you’re ready to take your branding and marketing to the next level, we want to help! Get in touch today at amanda@88westagency.com or (662) 322-8921.
