If you operate anywhere in the world of marketing, you’ll know that it’s impossible to ignore artificial intelligence in 2021. When it comes to artificial intelligence, it’s the present and the future of advertising. As well as creating ads, businesses can use AI to communicate with customers and optimize ad campaigns.
What started as a luxury has now become a necessity as more businesses embrace the technology. Since this technology makes your competitors more efficient and effective, you shouldn’t go without it this year.
What’s Artificial Intelligence?
Although people might think that AI is a specific piece of technology, a more accurate description would be to say that AI is any technology that is optimized and developed to act like humans. Sometimes seen as a science, the idea is to develop machines that can make decisions like a human.
Since AI technology can process information and quickly identify the best outcome in a scenario, it’s time to finally relieve this burden from marketers and allow these professionals to focus on more important tasks instead.
These days, AI machines can collect and analyze data. Essentially, they read through the data to understand. As an example, an ad optimization tool constantly collects data about what’s happening at any given moment. What ad campaigns are performing? What campaigns aren’t performing? Is there a way to boost conversion rates? Then, it analyses this data and recommends actions to users. If the AI tool is an automation platform, it can even implement the insights immediately.
Yet, artificial intelligence doesn’t need to be this complex. If you use Gmail, for example, you’ll notice that the Smart Compose feature analyses the content of your writing to suggest what you might want to type next. In many cases, the technology finishes your sentences before you know how you’re going to finish them. It may seem a little scary, but it’s just a simple example of artificial intelligence in action.
Elsewhere, although Facebook is removing the feature soon, the platform analyses images that you upload and suggests people to tag. Essentially, Facebook has millions of profiles of its users so that it can recognize them in images.
If you have a mobile device in your pocket, you can talk to Siri, and she can answer certain requests. Once again, this is artificial intelligence in action. In many applications, this artificial intelligence is combined with machine learning so that the quality of interactions constantly improves.
For those who are enjoying reading about these examples, you’ll find AI technology in chatbots, voice assistant devices, self-driving cars, and in many other areas of business and home life.
Accuracy of AI
While all these applications sound amazing, there’s still one question on the lips of the pessimistic among us. How much can you really trust AI?
When using traditional marketing tools, you’ll notice that they gather lots of data and make our lives easier by bringing everything under one roof. Yet, the problem is that you still need to perform all the analysis yourself. What does this data mean? What are our opportunities? While traditional software certainly provides clarity, it doesn’t go any further.
On the other hand, artificial intelligence tools have ‘smart’ features which mean that they can analyze the data, understand it, and then provide actionable recommendations and predictions based on the information.
If you want to assess the accuracy of AI tools, the proof is in the pudding. Or so the saying says since AI can’t actually make pudding just yet (sadly!). As people with AI CRM and ad optimization tools will tell you, accuracy is high and results are continually improving with machine learning and advancements in the niche.
This being said, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that all AI tools are inherently valuable and accurate just because they boast this one feature. For example, an AI tool always needs to use the right data to provide appropriate insights and recommendations.
When considering the argument of accuracy, it’s hard to overlook the importance of machine learning. Assuming all the conditions are in place for an AI tool, machine learning helps the tool to keep learning and increase the accuracy of insights, recommendations, and other services.
Difference Between Traditional Software and AI Software
We’ve touched on this debate a little, but we want to go further with a real example. Since it’s a hot topic right now, let’s use digital advertising as an example. These days, every business wants to advertise on social media whether this is through Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, YouTube, Google, or another platform.
When using a traditional tool, it will gather data for you to assess. But what if you don’t have a degree in marketing? What if you don’t know what the data is trying to say? It could be screaming information, but you don’t understand the language so can’t improve your campaigns.
When using an AI tool, it collects the same data but then goes one step further with analysis. It can compare your campaign performance to previous campaigns and even the campaigns of competitors. Then, it suggests where you can make improvements. As mentioned earlier, automation tools implement the insights immediately, so you don’t even need to keep an eye on the suggestions. Even while you sleep, the AI automation tool optimizes budgeting, bidding, A/B testing, and targeting.
Ad Optimization
If you want to enjoy this luxury for your own ad campaigns, we should bring your attention to Trapica. Once integrated with your ad campaigns (across all social media platforms), it optimizes all the different components of your campaigns. With no manual intervention, your campaigns improve in real-time and take lots of pressure away from the marketing team.
Whether you’re in the marketing team or you admire their work, they spend countless hours currently looking through data and seeking opportunities to optimize the four aspects of their marketing campaigns below:
For many years, marketers have had to answer these questions through trial and error. Now, this is no longer necessary because we have artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to do everything for us. It follows the same steps as your workers - data collection, analysis, implementation - but it achieves the results more accurately and faster than ever.
Content Creation
This year, we’ve also noticed an increase in the number of marketers using AI tools to create their ad campaigns. We’ve seen how the technology manages campaigns, but what about the creation stage? Well, you’ve probably already used AI during this process without even realizing it. For example, have you followed the advice of social media platforms after they recommended a particular ad type?
Elsewhere, third-party tools use NLG (natural language generation) and NLP (natural language processing) to develop written copy that’s more effective than human-generated content. If you feel nervous about allowing AI to write your ad copy, there’s no reason why you can’t use this as a starting point before then making minor tweaks. By doing this, you save time because you’re not having to do everything from scratch.
Since we’ve focused heavily on ads, Australian marketers will also be glad to hear that AI can help with email marketing. Often, we speak to marketers who appreciate the power of email marketing in the modern market but don’t know how to utilize it effectively. Thankfully, you now have access to AI tools that automatically generate winning subject lines and other written content.
Does this mean an end for freelance writers and copywriters? While you might think so, we should treat AI tools more like companions than replacements. Since AI technology always bases decisions on facts and data, writers are still needed to add a human touch to all content. Also, AI tools provide the foundations from which copywriters and other professionals build.
Marketing professionals would be inefficient without AI tools, and AI tools need the help of humans too.
Summary
If you want to dip your toes into the artificial intelligence water, we highly recommend starting with ad optimization AI tools. Why? Because this is currently where you lose lots of time. As we’ve just seen, AI tools make the lives of marketers easier rather than replacing their jobs.
With this, you should now have a better understanding of artificial intelligence and how you can implement the technology into your own business. As well as ad optimization, you can try content creation, chatbots, and various other tools. After the pandemic, you need to decrease marketing costs, and this is one of the best ways of achieving this goal!