In this piece for RetailTechNews, Ian Matthews (pictured below), ‘data evangelist’ at NGDATA, explains how AI can help marketers excel at spotting intent, anticipating intent, and then creating optimised campaigns that are effective in closing the sale to the targeted consumer. 

If you’re thinking of adding AI to your arsenal of marketing weapons, there’s no better time than now. Taking this one step further, in the very near future, AI will have the capability to go beyond voice, using sight, touch, and hand gestures to decipher customer expectations and needs. Very soon, we will be in a world of conversational systems, where marketers will be able to design solutions that will delight and engage customers in ways we don't yet comprehend.  

Okay, we get it, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the ‘technology landscape’. AI-enhanced security, AI-enhanced data analytics, AI-enhanced beer-pouring robots; they’re all great. However, as a marketing professional, I can’t help but feel that we’ve been somewhat left out as an industry, or at least not had the recognition we deserve. In short, marketers use AI too. Very well, I may add. The question is how?

Ian Matthews, ‘Data Evangelist’, NGDATA

AI is enabling customer experience to be more personalised than ever before. Organisations are using AI to create videos, as well as generate social media posts, personalised emails, and web content tailored specifically towards meeting the unique requirements of the customer. With AI, each and every client interaction can be used for optimisation. Furthermore, this personalised consumer experience can cost significantly less than money spent on traditionally high-investment campaigns.

Here are three ways marketers can leverage AI to improve personalisation.

Create individual customer personas

AI solutions keep marketers abreast with what customers are saying, thinking, and feeling about the brand in real time. Savvy marketers can quickly harness this data to change branding and messaging for maximum effectiveness in almost real time. For example, not every middle-aged man loves football, fishes, or plays golf. There’s probably a significant percentage of those who do, but it’s not everyone.

Data gathered from AI gives marketers the opportunity to deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time. Customers want to be treated uniquely; and by having an inclination of their preferences based on concrete data and analytics, marketers can create campaigns that spell the difference between a successful campaign and a mistargeted promotion.

Collaborative grouping

AI can aid in the capture of data by using machine-learning algorithms to capture the footprint of a customer on a website and improve their experiences. For example, AI can learn about how an individual visitor navigates the website, the visitor’s engagement based on their interests and the actions they take, the product and service pages they browsed, and more. AI can essentially capture patterns that the human brain can’t see.

After having captured this data, marketers can group multiple site visitors together based on their preferences. Thus, the most predominant characteristics can be used to differentiate visitors into audiences who each have different preferences and behaviours. 

For each audience, AI can help marketers customise content in real time based on that audience and individual's preferences and ensure that the website has new trending topics, posts, and recently published articles geared to the customer’s taste. This generates a fresh, yet highly personalised, curated experience for the visitor.

Similarly, grouping can also help in marketing products to users who may have similar tastes. For example, in the case of websites like Amazon, you’ll see recommendations with ‘users who liked this item also liked X’.

Campaign optimisation

Marketing campaigns are no longer driven by traditional communication involving just a sales funnel and a calendar. First, the dynamic customer journey coupled with the competition leaves no room for the funnel approach (narrowing buying options for the consumer). Second, consumers are no longer willing to go through the barrage of irrelevant advertisements and messages sent during calendar holidays and product launches.

With so many numerous techniques of geographic marketing and digital advertising available, it’s an absolute necessity that the marketer performs an in-depth analysis of the customer database and the competition. Enter AI.

AI aids optimisation in several ways, including: digging through the consumer data collected from social profiles and keyword searches; suggesting smarter personalised and effective digital ads; and more effectively bringing out a desired human-level outcome, without the manual analysis.

Marketing campaigns can then be optimised for individuals based on their likelihood of opting for a particular product or service. AI is even capable of guiding the marketer as to which type of campaign (email, social media engagement, online advertising, website recommendation) is best suited for a customer segment.

AI can also help in the deciphering customer signals. It helps companies excel at spotting intent, anticipating intent, and then creating optimised campaigns that are effective in closing the sale to the targeted consumer. Moreover, AI gives marketers access to consumer variables like real-time location, behaviour, inclinations, and values. All of this put together helps in making the difference in when, how, and what you as a marketer offer, and enables you to offer it in real time to thousands of customers simultaneously.

If you’re thinking of adding AI to your arsenal of marketing weapons, there’s no better time than now. Taking this one step further, in the very near future, AI will have the capability to go beyond voice, using sight, touch, and hand gestures to decipher customer expectations and needs. Very soon, we will be in a world of conversational systems, where marketers will be able to design solutions that will delight and engage customers in ways we don't yet comprehend.