Digital marketing is continuously evolving. This means that it’s becoming increasingly critical to optimise your digital marketing strategies to stay relevant and competitive online.
One way to do this is with AI.
From all the press it’s received recently, it’s clear that the advances in AI technology are going to have a drastic impact on all industries.
Marketing is no different, so now is the time to take advantage of it, if you haven’t already, as it offers numerous advantages.
With AI, it's quick and easy to create targeted effective campaigns.
AI-powered predictive analytics can develop data-driven insights into customer behaviour, anticipate buyers’ preferences, and deliver more personalised ads.
AI can also automate a variety of marketing tasks. This includes searching for keywords, optimising landing pages, and managing ad campaigns.
But as powerful as AI technology is, it’s important to note that an overreliance on AI can have negative consequences.
AI-generated content that is generic and potentially condescending to your audience could result in you losing potential customers - so although it can simplify many arduous tasks - it’s critical that you use it as an aid to help do your job more effectively rather than to do your job in its entirety.
In this article, we'll look at seven ways you can optimise your digital marketing strategy with AI and highlight some pitfalls you should be aware of if you decide to utilise them.
7 ways to optimise your digital marketing strategy with AI
1. Research your buyer persona
Researching your buyer persona is an essential part of optimising your digital marketing strategy.
Luckily, it’s easier than ever to capture and analyse market information to get a better sense of which channels they use.
By understanding who your buyer persona is, you can create customised messaging that resonates with them.
You can also send out this message to the right places, such as social media platforms or email lists, instead of wasting money on advertising methods that may not be effective for reaching your buyer persona.
Researching your buyer persona will help you make sure that you’re targeting the right people with the right message in the most cost-effective way possible.
Image source: Dynatrace
AI-based analysis tools like Dynatrace can monitor and analyse online behaviour, enabling you to gain valuable insights into the interests and needs of your target personas.
Through machine learning algorithms, data points such as demographics and psychographics can be analysed to accurately predict customer preferences, which allows you to create more tailored campaigns that are better suited for your buyer persona.
For example, AI can set up automated campaigns based on certain user attributes (e.g. geographic location or gender). AI software can also generate comprehensive reports on the performance of campaigns and assess what channels and content types perform best in terms of lead acquisition or conversions.
AI tools also allow for personalisation at scale so you can deliver highly relevant messages across multiple advertising platforms with ease, resulting in improved customer engagement and higher ROI from your marketing efforts.
2. Leverage data and analytics
Data and analytics is another key focus area if you want to optimise your digital marketing strategy.
This will give you valuable insights into how your campaigns are performing and help you make adjustments as needed.
Image source: Verfacto
AI-powered tools like Verfacto can improve the efficiency of analysing your data and metrics.
For example, they can help identify patterns and trends that give insight into how customers interact with a website.
You can use this information to create targeted campaigns specific to each customer segment. You can also leverage this information to provide personalised experiences tailored to their unique interests or needs.
You can also track the performance of your campaigns with AI.
This gives you actionable insights into conversions, CPC, ROI, and other important metrics that allow you to understand the effectiveness of your strategy.
Finally, AI can also alert you if there are any sudden changes in user behaviour, such as a decrease or increase in signups, activation rates or feature usage. This allows you to take necessary corrective actions quickly and efficiently.
3. Focus on SEO
SEO is an essential part of any digital marketing strategy.
While the primary goal is to create content that is relevant to your buyer persona and optimise it for keywords related to your company, you also need to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and algorithms used by search engines.
AI can be a powerful tool for helping with SEO.
It can help automate a variety of search engine optimisation tasks. This includes analysing website content, creating meta tags, and optimising keyword density.
It can also be used to monitor competitor activities, make suggestions on long-tail keywords that could give better results, and analyse your website's overall technical performance.
By using neural network algorithms and natural language processing algorithms, AI can accurately predict which keywords or phrases are likely to bring more traffic and their potential value in gaining online visibility.
Image source: OpenAI.com
However, with the launch of tools such as ChatGPT, it has also become easier to create content that is more likely to rank on the first page of Google.
The problem with relying on such tools, though, is that your buyer persona will likely never click on such content, as it will be too broad and basic.
A second problem with AI writing assistants, such as ChatGPT, is that they base their output on a lot of different sources all of which include their own biases.
As a result, you have to verify its output against numerous sources to ensure that it doesn't contain these biases or inaccuracies.
This means that content needs to be opinion based and add value to your persona, instead of primarily catering to search engines.
4. Establish yourself as a thought leader
Establishing thought leadership is another vital component of optimising your digital marketing strategy.
It helps demonstrate that you are an expert in your field that can provide valuable guidance and insight to audiences.
For thought leadership to reach its maximum potential, it needs to be tailored towards your buyer persona's wants and needs so that you can gain their attention and ensure that it stands out from your competition.
Additionally, for the content to be truly effective it should demonstrate your company's values, capabilities, and accomplishments which lends credibility to them.
Thought leadership serves as an important tool for brands to both gain recognition among potential customers and build trust with existing ones which ultimately leads to increased sales and profits.
AI can be used to help build thought leadership by generating in-depth and actionable insights into customer behaviour, current trends, and emerging markets.
By leveraging advanced analytics such as big data and machine learning algorithms, you can rapidly identify important customer segments and tailor your message accordingly to establish yourself as a credible thought leader in the industry.
In addition, AI can analyse data from different sources to detect potential risks or opportunities that you may not have been aware of before, allowing you to establish yourself as a forward-thinking innovator in the field.
Finally, with automated tools like NLP, you can create content that's tailored to your buyer personas and optimise it for search engine ranking, helping them increase brand awareness amongst potential customers.
However, as mentioned above, when using AI tools such as ChatGPT to create content targeted at your buyer personas, you need to ensure it is not too basic or condescending by creating content primarily for them and not search engines, and by basing the content on a thought leader, rather than regurgitating online research.
5. Take advantage of automation
Marketing automation tools are nothing new, having helped marketers automate repetitive tasks for years.
Aside from planning and scheduling your campaigns, these tools can also track their performance, allowing you to make better operational decisions, and be used for other tasks such as automated email campaigns, tagging and segmentation of prospects, customer relationship management, analytics and reporting.
In recent years, marketing automation tools have benefitted from rapid improvements in AI and machine learning.
For example, AI-powered software can analyse vast amounts of customer data to identify trends.
This can help you better target your audience with personalised messages and more accurately detect when leads are ready to convert into paying customers.
AI-enabled automation tools also give you far greater insights into the behaviour of your target audience than ever before, allowing you to craft campaigns that speak directly to individuals' needs and interests.
With AI technology embedded within marketing automation systems, your teams can now free up time for more creative outreach activities like content production and strategy refining as well as speed up processes like lead qualification.
As well as helping automate mundane or repetitive tasks, AI enables you to quickly collect essential information about customers’ preferences that would otherwise not be accessible unless invasive manual processes were carried out.
These advanced insights make AI an invaluable partner for skilled modern marketers who need efficient ways to stay on top of the ever-evolving landscape of customer tastes.
6. Unlock the power of social media
With social media, you can reach out to your buyer personas directly, engage with them in meaningful conversations, use it to build relationships with customers, and create brand loyalty.
Social media also allows you to track customer feedback and measure the success of your campaigns in real-time, helping you make informed decisions about your digital marketing strategy and optimise it accordingly.
AI can be particularly helpful when it comes to social media, with tools such as chatbots and automated post-schedulers that can be used to interact with customers, gather data about their preferences and interests, and automate post-scheduling for optimal engagement.
AI can also track the performance of campaigns better so that you can focus on the ones that are performing well and adjust those that are not yielding the desired results.
AI can also help you identify trends more quickly and adjust your campaigns accordingly to stay ahead of consumer behaviour trends.
Finally, AI-based algorithms can analyse large volumes of customer feedback data from social platforms to uncover customer sentiment insights which are valuable for you in understanding how consumers feel towards a product or service offering.
This helps inform which content should be promoted on which channels at what time to maximise engagement with your target audience.
7. Examine your competition
By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, you can develop a more effective marketing plan and increase your market share.
A SWOT analysis is a great way to gain insights into your competitors and compare them with your performance.
With this information, you can make informed decisions about how to best position yourself in the market or identify potential opportunities for collaboration or partnerships with other companies to further grow your business.
Here, once again, AI can be a powerful tool, helping you to understand and analyse your competition.
AI-driven analysis can scan through billions of web pages and data points to uncover patterns, previously unidentified weaknesses or strengths in competitors' business practices, or even discover new opportunities.
This kind of big data analytics can quickly identify competitors' pricing strategies, product ranges, and marketing campaigns that give them an edge in the marketplace.
Finally, with NLP, you can snap up snippets of information from your competitors' sites and social media profiles to gain knowledge on their objectives, plans or major initiatives, helping you gain a competitive advantage in today's highly saturated markets.
Will AI shape the future of digital marketing?
AI is bound to have a major impact on the future of digital marketing.
Data analysis can reveal previously unseen patterns and trends within complex data, giving you actionable insights, while it can also automate certain tasks so that you can dedicate more time to initiatives with higher returns.
Despite the potential cost and time savings, no automation can take the place of human creativity when creating engaging messages and campaigns, while AI-powered content creation tools can even potentially deter your buyer personas from further interacting with your content and company.
This means that while AI is a powerful way to optimise your digital marketing strategy, rather than relying solely on AI in digital marketing, you should use it as a tool to extend your capabilities.
If you’re looking to optimise your digital marketing strategy with a human touch, our digital marketing consultancy services are based on more than 10 years of experience in using data-driven strategy to develop and continuously improve the marketing of hundreds of companies.
