How AI Can Make Your Digital Marketing Agency More Efficient
Leveraging the Power Of Artificial Intelligence In Your Digital Marketing Agency Today
AI: Understanding the Big Picture
Imagine being able to reach into the marketplace of your choice, pick out the consumers or decision-makers that are ready to purchase today, present them with your most powerful sales pitch, and leave everybody else for the competition to deal with. If you've been paying attention to recent developments in artificial intelligence as they apply to digital marketing, then you know that this dream is becoming a reality. On the other hand, if you're just now starting to learn about the power of AI and what it can do to make your marketing dollars go further, then prepare to explore a whole new world of possibilities.
Artificial Intelligence Is Marketing Automation on Steroids
Digital marketing is all about leveraging the power of automation but automating an ineffective advertising campaign can vaporize your budget in a hurry. With the right artificial intelligence in your agency's hands, however, your marketing campaign can literally adjust itself on the fly by learning from every interaction and course-correcting as necessary.
No longer do you have to worry about manually analyzing the early results of a campaign and figuring out how to adjust your advertising spend. The best marketing automation platforms available today all use advanced feedback loops to analyze your campaign's results in real-time and distribute your budget among various marketing channels accordingly. If your campaign performs well on Facebook but not so well on YouTube, for example, then AI algorithms can decrease your YouTube spend and put a higher percentage of your budget towards scaling your Facebook campaign without you having to lift a finger.
Some AI-backed software, such as IBM's Watson interface, is even capable of creating an entire PPC ad for you and automatically revising the messaging in your campaign as customer sentiment changes over time. Experts expect that Google, Facebook, and every other major advertising platform will eventually be capable of literally plugging in some basic information about your business and deploying an entire campaign for you from start to finish without any manual input, but we aren't quite there yet.
Streamlining Your Market Research With AI
Segmenting your target market into prospects who are ready to buy today, prospects who are not ready to make a decision yet, and prospects who are still researching their options is one of the most time-consuming tasks of any marketing agency. Fortunately, AI algorithms can quickly sift through reams of data to produce real-time insights that help your agency understand market trends. Programs that listen for keywords on social media, for example, can use machine learning to quickly figure out the traits of people that are currently in the market for a given product or service. Auris, a market intelligence platform powered by AI, analyzes news publications, social media channels, and forums to produce automated intelligence reports in several different industries.
Using AI To Supercharge Your Sales Funnel
Leads generally fall into the following two categories:
Market-qualified leads (MQLs)
Sales-qualified leads (SQLs)
Market-qualified leads are people or companies that fit your ideal buyer profile but might not be ready to make a purchase today. On the other hand, sales-qualified leads represent the segment of your market that is ready to have a serious conversation with a member of your sales team right now. Of course, the ideal advertising funnel starts with identifying the largest possible set of MQLs and systematically whittles this set down to the best SQLs.
In addition to doing most of the heavy lifting for you when it comes to finding the best SQLs in a given market, AI can also help you split test different elements of your sales funnel to optimize each step. For example, you can use advanced campaign automation software like Pardot from Salesforce test a lead-nurturing sequence of three emails against a lead-nurturing sequence of three text messages and run advanced statistical analysis on the results. Salesforce Einstein, the platform's AI interface, does everything from designing your split tests to interpreting the results and offering recommendations for improvement.
The real kicker, though, is that the best machine learning and AI algorithms can tease out correlations between a prospect's traits and which advertising sequences they are more likely to respond positively to. For example, leads that come to you through Facebook may need a different customer journey than leads who first become aware of your agency by doing a Google search. Market research and market testing have traditionally been separate processes, but AI merges the two together to improve your campaigns while they run.
The Two Biggest Benefits Of Implementing AI In Your Marketing Today
The Ability To Deploy More Personalized Advertising To Prospective Customers
It's well-known to marketers everywhere that a small majority of customers account for the majority of revenue in any business. In years past, this phenomenon resulted in companies targeting their ideal prospects to the exclusion of everybody else. As machine learning algorithms continue to improve, making a tradeoff between the depth and reach of your campaigns is becoming unnecessary. AI can use first-party and third-party data on your prospects to deploy laser-focused campaigns that reach a specific person at a specific time.
2. Automating Multichannel Campaigns
You know that your consumers are spending their time on multiple advertising channels these days, and there's a lot of pressure for brands to be everywhere. With that said, manually designing and implementing a multichannel marketing campaign can be overwhelming and fraught with pitfalls. The good news, though, is that marketing automation platforms like HubSpot, SharpSpring or Marketo help you manage everything from your budget to your creative assets. These cloud-based platforms make it easy to manage multiple advertising channels from a central location, and you can leverage their embedded AI capabilities to dynamically adjust your budget based on what's working and what isn't. If you have a creative asset that you've designed for a campaign on Google and want to see if it will perform better on Facebook, for example, then you can easily run multichannel experiments to your heart's content.
Key Takeaways
While marketing automation eases the pain of manually recreating certain tasks over and over, the real power of artificial intelligence is its ability to make real-time adjustments and improve its capabilities over time. In the world of digital marketing, this power manifests itself as the ability to design campaigns that literally run themselves.
While it's true that we're still a few years away from AI being able to do everything literally for you as a marketer, agencies that get on board with this technology today are giving themselves an enormous competitive advantage.