How AI is Impacting Digital Marketing

In today’s lightning-paced digital landscape, technology is rapidly evolving. This is especially true in the world of digital marketing, with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and its revolutionizing impact on the industry. 

By 2030, the worldwide AI market is projected to surpass $1.5 trillion in value. A Fortune/Deloitte survey found that 79% of CEOS “believe generative AI will increase efficiencies, and half of CEOs surveyed (52%) believe it will increase growth opportunities.”

To gain and maintain a competitive edge, it’s vital for marketers to incorporate the latest tools and core strategies to improve their companies’ potential for success. Read on to learn more about some of the ways in which AI is changing the face of digital marketing.  

The Importance of AI in Digital Marketing: Brief Overview

AI has been powering digital marketing technologies for decades in the form of machine learning. The emergence of the internet and e-commerce created new opportunities for gathering and analyzing data. They also allowed for a novel type of advertising and targeting. Early AI tools such as content recommendation algorithms and email marketing software enabled digital marketers and webmasters to utilize this data and engage customers online.

Developments such as cloud computing, natural language processing, and deep learning paved the way for an emerging era of AI implementation. Marketers now use AI to create content, craft campaigns, improve conversion rates, forecast results, enhance the customer experience, and more. 

AI is radically changing the way brands and consumers interact and communicate with each other. Over the years, AI has become recognized as the most influential technology for business. And it all feels like just the beginning.

So, What is all the Talk About GPTs?

GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. It is important because it does a few important things including:

1. Generative Capability: GPT models can generate human-like text based on the prompts they receive. This ability to create content—from articles and social media posts to customer support responses—is transformative for various industries, including marketing, content creation, and customer service.
2. Pre-training Advantage: The “Pre-trained” aspect refers to the extensive training these models undergo on vast amounts of text data before they’re fine-tuned for specific tasks. This pre-training enables GPT models to understand and generate text with a deep understanding of language, context, and even some nuances of human communication.
3. Transformer Architecture: The “Transformer” part of GPT refers to the model architecture, which is highly efficient at handling sequential data (like text) and capturing context over long passages. This architecture allows GPT to produce coherent, contextually relevant text, making it a powerful tool for generating content, translating languages, summarizing documents, and more.

How AI Is Used in Digital Marketing

GPT’s importance in marketing lies in its ability to automate and enhance content creation. It can help marketers draft compelling copy, personalize customer interactions at scale, and generate insights from large datasets. This leads to more efficient marketing strategies, better customer engagement, and ultimately, a stronger brand presence. Here are some examples of AI in digital marketing to improve processes, automate repetitive tasks, and tailor content to better reflect customers’ needs. 

Content and Communication

Content creation

When it comes to content creation, AI can improve creative quality and effectiveness because this content can be created and customized by refining large amounts of data. Essentially, this data is perpetually distilled to produce increasingly enhanced content. 

AI technology also helps marketers save time and energy. Using external data and user preferences, AI-powered content creation tools can generate more relevant content automatically. AI-focused software can suggest topics, optimize headlines, and modify output based on real-time user feedback.

The production and tailoring of content more efficiently is a testament to the accessibility threshold for AI technology decreasing and its ubiquitous, expanding presence in the world of marketing.

Customer service

AI-enabled communication has also been shown to help customer service interactions. According to McKinsey, AI-powered customer service creates proactive experiences that promote consumer engagement.

Generative AI aids in customer service content generation and can review user feedback, analyze key details, and compose responses that mimic human interaction to improve customer satisfaction and speed up reply times. 

Chatbots driven by AI have become significantly more conversational and compelling, and they now play an important role in supporting digital marketing campaigns. They “provide personalized customer support, gather data for lead generation and analysis, and enhance engagement and customer satisfaction.”

Analytics and Optimization

Data analysis

The use of AI in data analytics can help predict future trends with impressive speed and efficiency, which in turn helps shape digital strategy. According to The Alan Turing Institute, AI for data analysis allows for processing at speeds and quantities that lead to more accurate business insights. Having access to this information and being able to transform it into practical knowledge is one of the many benefits of using AI.

By leveraging AI-powered text analytics tools, digital marketers can also analyze and assess unstructured data—including reviews and social media comments—to provide key insights into customer preferences. AI has proven to be a practical tool that helps analysts minimize many tedious, time-consuming tasks and free up their time to focus on strategic endeavors. 

Consumer targeting

AI has allowed for nuanced segmentation and targeting within larger audiences, which enables companies to address individuals’ specific needs. As more data becomes available, AI allows marketers to keep pace with consumer demands. 

According to research from McKinsey, “Advanced algorithms can leverage patterns in customer and market data to segment and target relevant audiences. With these capabilities, businesses can efficiently analyze and identify high-quality leads” and generate highly optimized lead-engagement strategies directly for them.

AI has given marketers an opportunity to fill in the gaps of traditional targeting. It can identify overlooked data points based on criteria such as demographics, behavior, and purchasing patterns. Generative AI can then draft content leveraging these insights. Harnessing AI for segmentation has the potential to boost conversions, retention, and return on investment. 

Personalization and Customer Experience

Customization

As we can see, AI is helping marketers “transcend the limits of manual interactions and personalize marketing to their consumers.” 

In addition to generative AI content creation that can be fine-tuned for each consumer, AI is adept at handling visual content such as images and videos. It can recognize people, places, objects, and other details, which helps facilitate automated tagging and enhanced search functionality. The technology helps streamline the organization of these assets and further aids in customization. 

As AI continues to advance, it’s also being used to run personalized experiments for companies’ customers based on product suggestions, specific pricing strategies, and optimized incentives. In today’s world, customers expect brands, especially the ones they use the most, to understand their preferences on a personal level. 

Advance Your Expertise with a Graduate Degree in Digital Marketing

There’s much to explore when it comes to artificial intelligence and digital marketing. Stay at the forefront of digital marketing’s evolution and cultivate your leadership skills at Wake Forest University. 

The online Master of Digital Marketing program at the Wake Forest University School of Professional Studies (SPS) was designed and is taught by industry experts and thought leaders. This graduate degree is 100% online, so you can complete it on your own time and schedule, all while surrounded by a like-minded community of marketing professionals and faculty.

Learn more about the robust mix of in-demand skills and knowledge needed to become a digital marketing leader by connecting with a Wake Forest student success manager.

Request information today to get started.