In a race to stay ahead of the curve, multinational corporations are taking stock of their operations, bringing in artificial intelligence (AI) to replace traditional systems and to automate mundane tasks, improve overall employee performance, and deliver improved productivity. Among these big-league players, small-to-medium enterprises are catching wind of the trend, and steadily jumping on the AI bandwagon.
Data collected by the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council (SBEC) found that a growing percentage of small businesses are starting to use artificial intelligence to improve their efficiency, reduce costs, and improve their product and service delivery.
Survey results showed that nearly half, or around 48 percent of small businesses have already started using AI tools in the last 12 months, with an additional 29 percent saying they’ve been using these tools for one to two years. The majority of surveyed business owners all agree on one thing – AI tools can offer more cost-effective solutions, helping to improve profitability and reduce unnecessary expenses.
Taking a small to new heights, with the aid of artificial technology has become a winning antidote for many business owners, and in one arena – digital marketing – these tools are revolutionizing the way in which small businesses engage with clients and create more personalized campaign messages.
The Rise Of AI In Marketing
The development of artificial intelligence continues to skyrocket. For business owners, this presents them with a new opportunity to leverage these digital tools to help enhance their marketing efforts and to preside over effective strategies that can help lock in more client engagement and effectively manage marketing tasks.
Globally, there’s not a single marketing expert or professional who’s not currently using some form of artificial intelligence in their day-to-day activities. Roughly 88 percent of marketing professionals currently working with AI models have said that these tools helped improve the personalization of the customer journey, especially across multiple platforms.
Even more than this, over 80 percent of marketers have started integrating artificial intelligence into their online marketing campaign activities. These applications have not only helped improve customer engagement, but further helped increase awareness of previous mistakes, allow them better access to data helping them make more data-driven decisions, and revitalize content strategies that align better with search engine best practices.
Use Of AI In Marketing
There are multiple AI tools currently available on the market, however, despite the surge in new technology coming to life in recent years, there are only two distinct categories of artificial intelligence in digital marketing that are helping transform how marketers work and build their campaigns.
Content Creation and Brainstorming: Generative AI applications can help marketers produce new content ideas, including videos, images, and social media captions. Specific tools can now help with other content generation ideas such as for email marketing campaigns, and help analyze customer conversations and create personalized responses.
Data Analysis and Forecasting: Aside from using Gen AI tools to help brainstorm ideas, artificial intelligence can monitor and analyze campaign performance and deliver valuable insights that can be used to make more data-driven decisions, and aid in predicting possible forecasting models.
Across the board, it’s becoming more clear that AI tools have an important role to play for marketers, however, this doesn’t mean that small business owners have to receive the short end of the stick.
By leveraging these valuable tools for content generation and tracking campaign performance, small business owners and entrepreneurs can build and launch marketing campaigns with effective strategies for optimized results.
How To Use AI In Marketing To Boost Online Campaigns
Using artificial intelligence for online marketing can be a valuable tool, however, small business owners need to understand which tools will be most effective for their strategies, and how these applications can drive engagement, and enhance the overall customer experience.
Customer Data Analysis
Before considering which AI applications to use throughout your digital marketing campaign, you will need to have a firm understanding of your customers and where to meet them.
One of the best ways to approach this is by using artificial intelligence to deliver in-depth customer insights, helping you uncover where your customers are coming from, what they’re searching for, and how you can provide the most relevant results.
By leveraging AI tools for customer analytics, you can start building more detailed customer personas, enabling you to create tailored campaigns that speak directly to your client’s needs and deliver the results related to their queries.
For instance, when your customers search for specific words or phrases you want to be sure that you are ranking for those keywords, but more importantly know where they may be located.
You might receive several thousand hits coming from Los Angeles, California, but at the same time notice an uptake in other parts of the country or the world. For instance, you might see an increase in mobile data traffic coming from Toronto, Canada, which could be due to Toronto’s population growth exploding in recent years, and this might be an indication that you need to optimize search results for more mobile users in this region instead.
By conducting analysis, and understanding how each group of customers may be interacting with your business and specific webpages, you will have better insights into delivering quality results.
Developing customer profiles enables you to create more personalized campaigns, and further promotes the message your customers are looking for. These tools become valuable assets for the long-term outlook of marketing campaigns, delivering accurate insights and providing you with the ability to make more informed decisions.
Content Ideation
Once you’ve started understanding the customer journey, including where customers are searching the most for your business, and which touchpoints they frequent most often, you can begin working with AI applications to help develop content ideas that are unique to your brand and the platforms you want to work with.
Using Generative AI tools, whether it’s to write email campaigns, come up with new content ideas, or even develop a posting strategy for your social media accounts can help save a lot of time, while delivering improved productivity output.
In fact, many marketers using Gen AI tools have found that these applications can save them at least five hours per week, equating to over a month saved per year. On top of this, a robust 71 percent of marketers have said that using Gen AI will not only help them save time but allow them more freedom to focus on strategic work.
By collaborating your efforts with Gen AI it’s possible to create more lead-driven content that can help boost online traffic and potentially turn into sales. As a small business, it’s important to keep these aspects in mind, especially in industries that are already heavily saturated.
Generative AI can deliver valuable insights from various platforms and ensures that you can stay ahead of your competitors by creating more engaging content that directly speaks to your target audience.
Campaign Messaging and Personalization
Creating captivating content requires you to understand your brand, product, or service and your audience. More than this, delivering on these expectations would mean that you will need to create a personalized message that resonates with your customer’s fundamental needs.
Think personalization isn’t important? That’s perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions, and one study found that roughly 71 percent of customers now expect companies to deliver personalized experiences. More than this, a robust 76 percent will get frustrated with companies should they not deliver the personalization they are looking for.
By using artificial intelligence to create more customized messages, your business can improve its unique selling point (USP), while further growing your customer engagement through frequent interactions.
Additionally, Gen AI can now help craft messages and email copy within seconds, and newer tools allow you to customize these responses based on your customer interactions. This could mean that as you begin to better understand your clients, you can put together more engaging segments with tailored messages.
By applying this strategy, you enhance your online presence, while engaging more effectively with your clients. These interactions can help promote your awareness of customer needs, accurately delivering the results that they have queried about, and ensuring you meet them exactly where they are most likely to be.
Content Optimization and Keyword Research
In the past, marketers spent an enormous amount of time and resources creating optimized content and conducting keyword research for their campaigns. Though these activities are still an important part of the overarching marketing strategy, automating these tasks can help save time and money, and using AI tools could potentially deliver more accurate results.
Research from 2023 showed that 84 percent of marketers are using AI marketing automation to help improve Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rankings. For your small business, boosting your position on search engine results pages can help drive better engagement, increase brand awareness, and help raise revenue over the long term.
More than these changes to Google’s search engine algorithm have meant that ranking in the top positions of results pages has changed, and instead, Google crawlers are looking to rank those pages higher that provide a more optimized user experience such as faster website loading times and overall user-friendliness of webpages.
AI applications such as Semrush, Ahrefs, and Google Analytics help to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how you are performing online, and where you might need to make improvements.
Fortunately, these tools can help with additional actions such as keyword research, and finding the most relevant search terms users are looking for while looking for products and services online. By using these recommendations you can build a more robust strategy that focuses on delivering quality leads, increasing site traffic, and boosting overall engagement.
Competitor Analysis
In the past, business owners looked at physical aspects of their business such as product availability and service quality as distinct characteristics that set them apart from their nearest market competitors.
Although these qualities remain an important factor of the business, having the ability to know exactly what your competitors are doing to improve their online presence is part of building an award-winning digital marketing campaign strategy.
Integrating software tools such as Ahref, SpyFu, BuzzSumo, and Similarweb, among others will allow you to have a peek at what your competitors are doing to rank higher on search engine results pages, which keywords they’re targeting, and what type of content they’re generating to optimize their websites.
Another valuable tool is ChatGPT, which can handle various tasks, including industry analysis, keyword research, and content ideation. Combining ChatGPT results with other software applications will give you a better idea of where your strategies require further work, and what improvements you can make to stand out in the crowd.
For small business owners, this might seem daunting at first, but it’s possible to leverage tools such as ChatGPT to help you learn techniques to use certain platforms more efficiently or even make recommendations based on given results.
Social Media Management
Another practical use of artificial intelligence is for social media management. One might think that scheduling posting on specific platforms is perhaps the epitome of digitalization, however, there is more than what meets the eye.
For instance, AI applications and plug-ins can now read social media posts to help compile more in-depth analyses and provide more clear analytical results. These efforts can help you identify potential trends, search for relevant keywords, and engage with your target audience more effectively.
Additionally, these tools can help measure campaign effectiveness and performance, meaning that in the near term, you will have the ability to make adjustments to your strategy or perhaps see which parts of your campaign are least effective.
Managing social media accounts, responding to queries and comments, keeping track of campaigns, and boosting posts can be an overwhelming exercise for even the most experienced professionals.
Instead, it’s possible to harness AI tools to help automate certain tasks such as responding to messages, creating more personalized content, and perhaps brainstorming new ideas based on trend analysis.
These are all effective ways to help create a more engaging platform and ensure that your online presence is noticed by your target audience. Having an active social media presence can ultimately boost organic traffic to your website, which in the long run will translate into better sales, improved revenue, and a better customer experience.
Why leverage AI in your online campaigns?
Using artificial intelligence to bolster your online campaigns has become a game-changer, ensuring more effective data analysis and enabling you to make more informed decisions. Furthermore, AI has become a driving force for marketers, helping them work through a tremendous amount of data, and better understand the customer journey to improve their online experiences.
By using artificial intelligence, you can create effective strategies that are focused on delivering personalized experiences, something that was once unimaginable. AI helps business owners automate various tasks throughout their day-to-day, allowing you to focus on more strategic work, and minimizing the need for various resources.
To wrap up, by incorporating AI as part of your online marketing strategies, you allow yourself the opportunity to grow and improve your digital footprint. You seek to create more engaging content that directly speaks to your audience and improves your return on investment for marketing campaigns.
AI can help you stay on top of new trends while allowing you to experiment with various solutions and deliver more business-relevant results.
