A new year means new and innovative trends in marketing, particularly in the tech space. Instant communication is rising. Online consumer behavior is changing. Businesses are adopting tools that will advance them ahead of their competitors. One trend that’s likely to have a huge impact on all the above is AI in marketing.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides better insights into audiences. It offers the ability to spot online trends and conversations more quickly. Brands that want data-driven strategies for a better return on investment need AI-powered systems.
Why is artificial intelligence so important for marketing in 2024? What is it about these new, innovative systems that will enhance marketing strategies? Let’s take a deep dive into why AI-based analytics and insights are essential for marketing this year.
Table of Contents:
Why AI Marketing is a Top Trend in 2024
What Can AI Solutions Do in Marketing?
How Other Brands are Using AI in Marketing
The Present and Future of AI Technology in Marketing
Why AI Marketing is a Top Trend in 2024
The integration of AI and marketing is growing. More and more companies are turning to AI-powered technology for everything from raising venture capital to connecting with new audiences via chatbot or email marketing.
Learn more about AI as a key 2024 marketing trend in our guide!
It's also becoming a powerhouse in directing content ideation and generation. Brands are becoming more invested in personalized offers and communications because savvy consumers no longer want to feel like they’re being marketed to. Rather, brands need to offer them something useful in return for their information.
The key is to showcase your expertise and stay relevant. Provide insights and personalization that matter to your specific audience. Machine learning marketing pulls information from data on the web. That information guides ideation and creation to better target a particular audience.
For instance, AI-powered Scoop.it supports a more refined and strategic content curation process. It analyzes audience sentiment and hones in on attention-grabbing niche subjects.
Meltwater helps marketers understand more about their audience and brand. Insights include:
- How a brand and its competitors are being perceived in the market
- How effective their content is
- What customer sentiment is
- Who’s talking about them
- What is trending in different markets and for different audiences
Predicting trends before they peak offers marketers a major advantage. They can identify opportunities and establish their authority on a subject early on.
(See how Impossible Foods uses Meltwater to inform their market entry strategy).
Understanding these trends and conversations can help marketers optimize campaigns. Today, AI can collect online customer insights to build profiles and use them to create more relevant marketing.
Tip: Check out our infographic on AI in marketing, learn how Meltwater uses AI, find out more about Meltwater's AI-Powered PR Assistant, and check out Meltwater’s AI Writing Assistant for social media managers.
What Can AI Solutions Do in Marketing?
There’s no doubt that AI will continue to rise and play an important role in marketing.
Let’s look at how the intersection of AI and marketing is transforming the marketing landscape in 2023.
Visualize and collect customer conversations
While “digital marketing” and "content marketing" may be the top buzzwords right now, marketing as a whole goes far beyond the online world.
Marketing is the process of products and services moving from concept to the customer. In other words, marketing is about creating a demand among customers for what your business has to offer.
Now, where does AI digital marketing fit into this? To create demand for a product or service, you need to understand who the customers are that you’re creating demand for. There is no point in wanting to market fitness products to customers more interested in the travel industry. You need to learn what your customers want, what appeals to them, and the kind of content they enjoy.
This starts by first knowing and understanding who your audience is. From there, you can create buyer personas or segments using AI tools, like news media monitoring or social media listening.
Social listening helps you collect customer richer data. Monitoring customer conversations gives you the ability to craft a better marketing strategy. You no longer have to depend on a “one-size-fits-all” approach that may fall flat.
In 2023, data segmentation won’t be the only trend to track in AI. You can improve your marketing strategy this year using intelligent audience segmentation. That segmentation relies on understanding customer behavior throughout the total customer journey.
See the PR Sparks Before the Blaze
Artificial intelligence marketing helps you see the conversations taking place online. This allows you to get a real-time sense of what your customers say, think, and feel about your business.
The key phrase here is ‘real-time.’ In PR and Communications, when a crisis strikes, time is of the essence to get ahead of the heat and extinguish it before it flares up.
In 2023, PR and Communications are about strategic prevention of a crisis instead of just knowing how to avoid one. AI transforms your PR and Comms strategy by enabling you to take quick action based on real data.
Brands of all sorts and sizes have experienced a disruption in their usual PR and Comms strategies because of social media. Online conversations spread quicker. Bad press reaches wider. Giving simple statements and "mea culpas" are no longer effective.
With the way that online ‘cancel culture’ is growing, so is online activism on social media. Brands are being boycotted when they don’t live up to their values. For PR and Comms teams, AI systems can help spot online conversations during a crisis. AI can see who is influencing public opinion and what the perception is of your brand during a crisis.
Marketing technology will undoubtedly become more valuable to a brand's reputation over time. With a tool like Meltwater’s Alerts, you’ll be the first to know on developing stories where your brand is involved. From there, you can decide how to create the right message at the right time.
Analyze Your Metrics to Understand Your Success
Now you have keywords, trending themes, and profiles of social influencers. What are you going to do with this information and social media data? Analyze the data you collected, of course, but do this using an AI-powered tool. The advantage you gain is a deeper insight into your quantitative data.
Vanity metrics are less important. Likes don’t matter so much anymore on platforms like Instagram and Twitter. To understand the true success of your social media campaigns, your social data needs to go deeper than the number of likes and comments.
This is where using an AI-powered tool can make a difference in your marketing. The quantitative metrics don't always determine whether your marketing strategy was successful. Social media intelligence tools provide deeper insights into those metrics. These tools help you learn what people are saying and where they are saying it.
Proving your ROI becomes easier because of the analysis that tools like this provides (for example through image recognition. Check out the best image recognition software.). Instead of cherry-picking data, marketing teams get insights spelled out for them. Tools such as sentiment analysis and heat maps offer visual representations of metrics. Those visualizations help you to better understand the success of every campaign.
Take Action Based on Facts, Not Fiction
If you conduct data analytics and analyze your audience, you’ll begin to see certain patterns emerge. According to Forbes, one AI trend to look for today is predictive analytics. Predictive analytics identifies patterns in your data to improve your marketing strategies.
Here's an example of how identifying patterns might help you design effective campaigns. South Africans nicknamed January “Januworry” because of how long the month feels. South African social media users began to share their humorous feelings and experiences of the month. Meltwater found that South Africans were already speaking more about “Januworry” in 2020 when compared to 2019.
How could a South African company use that information? The company could create a campaign aimed at engaging with ‘Januworry’ conversations on social media.
Your marketing becomes part of conversations people are already having. You reach this point by using real data to gain insights from facts.
How Other Brands are Using AI in Marketing
Machine learning marketing is already making an impact on real brands. It's improving business processes with artificial intelligence and generating more effective marketing campaigns.
It's not industry-specific either. It’s spurring complete revolutions in how companies across industries start and operate. See these AI-driven lawtech startups, for example.
Let’s look at a few examples of AI advertising and marketing at work.
Influential uses AI to transform influencer marketing
Influencer marketing remains one of the most dynamic channels for effective consumer engagement. However, it’s difficult to predict ROI on influencer campaigns.
Enter Influential, a Los Angeles-based AI platform powered by IBM Watson. Influential’s Social Intelligence platform analyzes many variables for brands. The platform assesses the effectiveness of marketing campaigns with contextual relevancy and psychographics.
Influential uses augmented intelligence and machine learning to match brands with relevant influencers in their markets. The platform uses data to help brands home in on core audience characteristics.
This approach to using AI in marketing is similar to how Spotify delivers relevant song, artist, and playlist suggestions. Learn more about its algorithm and how AI is helping Spotify lead the music streaming world.
Hyundai Motor America turns to influential to launch kona
Chief Marketing Officer for Hyundai Motor America, Dean Evans, leveraged Influential for the launch of the brand’s small SUV ‘Kona’ model.
Based on previous research, the brand was going after the active millennial group as its ideal audience for the new vehicle. Specifically, the brand targeted millennials who are into the outdoors, adventurous, and potentially live outside the city.
However, looking at data from a beta version of Influential’s AI-enabled social intelligence tool, the brand soon realized the audience it targeted wasn’t behaving in the way they were often portrayed in other advertising.
Thanks to insights from its campaign data, the team at Hyundai ended up refining the way it defined its audience to focus more on “urban dwellers” vs. the hikers and adventurers, whose lifestyles were more aligned with its product vision.
The Present and Future of AI Technology in Marketing
Rich insights like those from Hyundai, personalized content, and one-to-one customer experiences are all now possible thanks to AI. AI infuses natural language processing into its data points to deliver accurate, relevant, and human-like analysis.
As a result, customer service comes easier. The customer experience is more authentic. Marketers can better engage their audiences, streamline market research, and maximize the potential of big data. They can create content that feels much more organic, personal, and relevant as they continue to move away from outbound, push-style marketing and further toward contextual relevance.
The marketers that will win in the future will be able to leverage external data insights about their industry and their consumers to inform their next steps.
See how Meltwater combines social media intelligence, brand management, and marketing research under the marketing AI umbrella. Get a demo today!
