By: Divya Dixit
In today’s fast-paced digital marketing landscape, AI and Machine Learning (ML) are transforming how businesses connect with their audiences. While large organizations, of course stand to benefit with their vast pools of data, AI and ML are game changers for smaller setups that have limited resources and tight turnaround times as they optimize marketing efforts and costs. The key lies in using it well and not considering it as a threat. There is so much that AI bring to the table but herein I have tried to speak atleast about a few critical aspects.
Revolutionizing Customer Insights & Data Analysis: AI and ML excel at analyzing large datasets quickly, identifying patterns and insights missed by human analysts. This capability enables more informed decision-making, helping fine-tune strategies and meet ambitious growth targets across various ventures. They also provide deep insights into customer behavior and preferences. Traditional marketing often missed individual nuances, but AI processes real-time data for targeted strategies. AI lets marketing track consumer’s browsing habits and recommend products/videos in real time that has a better purchase decision chances. At ALTBalaji, AI analysis of viewing patterns drove a 100% growth in direct subscriptions YOY since 2017 and 10 million monthly active users.
Enhancing Personalization: AI algorithms can deliver personalized content and experiences by analyzing user data that goes beyond basic personalization, creating unique journeys for each user. Marketers can send personalized offers and product recommendations to customers by analyzing their past behavior with the platform. This can be further personalized in the form of AI-powered chatbots that answer questions quickly as well as recommend products and assist in transactions. As I write this I am currently creating one for the health tech and ecommerce platform that I am helping create.
Optimizing Ad Spend: Ad budget optimization via predicting the best channels, times, and messages for maximum ROI is another AI and eventually ML capability. Programmatic advertising, driven by AI, targets audience segments with precision, maximizing reach and minimizing waste. AI algorithms and A/B testing can identify patterns and trends in large data sets like customer behavior, purchasing habits, and demographics and the real-time optimization technology can monitor the performance of advertising campaigns and make adjustments on the fly to optimize the effectiveness of the campaign. Chatbots can collect email addresses and phone numbers for lead generation and marketing effectively lowering the cost of data. This approach used was one of the key factors in achieving 3X subscriber targets at Zee5.
Predictive Analytics: ML-powered predictive analytics forecast future trends, customer behaviors, and campaign outcomes by analyzing current and historical data available on the platform about consumer subsets, product and many other factors. This foresight helps marketers proactively adjust strategies of spend, content as well as targeting consumers. Predictive analytics has been instrumental in planning effective content and marketing campaigns right from targeted advertising to personalized content to assisting in consumer retention to insights on product development as well as pipeline forecasting and allocation of resources to customer satisfaction metrics.
Content Creation and Curation: Generative AI today not only generates content ideas, optimizes headlines and writes basic content but can also write complete scripts and create extensive video content and we are already seeing the uproar across content industry. These algorithms also curate relevant content based on past viewer interactions, crucial for business whether Ott, healthtech, edutech or ecommerce platforms while driving higher engagement rates. AI-powered content generators are also quite economical as they save on time, efforts and money as well as can write product descriptions, blog posts, and social media content customized basis user behavior. For example A chatbot can use AI to personalize responses based on a user’s past brand interactions and sell/ recommend specific user choice products.
Improving Consumer Experience: AI based voice search Siri, Cortana, and Alexa are already changing habits as to how people search for information and marketers are optimizing website content for voice search increasing visibility and consumer acquisition. AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants revolutionize customer service with immediate responses and efficient task handling. This 24/7 availability enhances customer satisfaction and frees up human resources for complex issues, supporting impressive subscriber growth and retention rates.
Designing a winning AI strategy is a simple path of clear vision, what is the value you wish to derive from it, what is the cost you are willing to pay for it and what cost do you wish to proportionately save, what are the risks you are willing to take and how will you get it massively adopted for a larger transformation. AI tools are not a threat to digital marketers but rather powerful allies. They enhance efficiency, provide valuable insights, and streamline processes. However, a balance between automation and the human touch is crucial for successful digital marketing campaigns.
(The author of above article, Mr. Divya Dixit,Business Strategy & Growth Advisor. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Entrepreneur Today, its management, or its members)