How To Leverage AI In Your Marketing Strategy

Artificial intelligence has been a major driver of innovation in nearly all technological fields in the past couple of years. Chief marketing officers have been some of the first to take stock of that phenomenon. AI-focused marketing technologies offer creative ways to target customers, personalize their experience, and establish sounder metrics. 

It’s not just large corporations using these new technologies. Small and medium businesses also benefit from AI, which makes their marketing strategies more efficient and cost-effective. If you’re still unclear on what AI looks like in the field of marketing, don’t worry! This article will explore what AI marketing technologies do and how you can start using them to improve your marketing efforts dramatically.

A Quick Introduction To AI MarTech

MarTech is short for ‘marketing technology,’ a category of innovative tools and services designed to help companies and businesses reach their business goals. 

New MarTech innovations include tools that can create analytics and metrics based on a company’s data. Other tools automate marketing processes such as buying ads or publishing content. Some tools are even more ambitious, striving to give each customer a fully personalized experience when shopping online. 

Today, top CMOs report their three primary uses of AI MarTech as the following:

• Content Personalization
• Predictive Analytics
• Targeting Decisions

From 2018 to 2019, top marketers in the United States implemented 27% more AI or machine learning technologies for their companies. Meanwhile, in 2019, an average of 29% of companies’ marketing budget went to MarTech. It’s easy to see why: AI can be a huge money saver—and help marketers do much more with their limited budgets. Artificial Intelligence also provides data-driven insights that help marketers make real-time decisions based on the market's needs. 

Ultimately, the main reason why MarTech is such a booming market is that it saves time, money, energy and takes a lot of doubt out of the equation when launching a new marketing campaign. 

How to Build AI Into Your Marketing Strategy

Chances are, you’re already using AI-based technologies for your marketing. But to leverage their full potential, you should build your marketing strategy around MarTech. While it might seem intimidating, getting set up with some great AI tools is fast and easy.

Here are a few tips on how to get started.

1. Establish Your Business Goals

Any marketing campaign starts with establishing SMART goals. SMART goals are specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound. 

MarTech can help with any of the top marketing goals you may lay out for your business; such as generating more leads, gaining customer loyalty, and growing your company’s social media presence.

Once you’ve established your goals, recruit the AI tools you’ll need to achieve them. For example, you could start using social media management software to become more active on all platforms and gain a following. 

In addition, if your goal is to retain more customers, you could use Feelter’s Customer Testimonial tool to leverage the power of social proof and increase the time users spend browsing your products. 

2. Leverage The Data You Already Have

AI can help you collect data that improves customer experience and gives more direction to your business’s marketing goals. With that being said, your company already has a lot of data, and the first step is to learn how to use it more efficiently. Ignoring the metrics you’re already collecting can mean you’re missing out on impactful customer insights.

For example, you could start using a CRM (customer relationship management) software which can help you manage customer relationships. While gaining new customers is vital, strengthening your relationship with existing customers is even more beneficial to your business. A CRM software helps you manage contact with customers, send regular newsletters, track conversations, create better customer segmentation and gain crucial business insights. 

3. Focus On Customer Experience 

In theory, a lot of internet users are reticent about giving companies too much of their data. But in practice, companies can leverage customer data in order to create better customer experiences and strengthen existing relationships with their customer base. 

A strong AI marketing strategy should focus on improving customer experience (CX). While there are many great tools out there for maintaining customer relations, here are the top AI tools that can help your business improve customer experience, service and relations.

• Chatbot Tools — Offer 24/7 customer support at critical customer touchpoints.
• Personalization Tools — Helps customers find the best products or services.
• UGC Displays — Answer customer questions and strengthen social proof. 
• Survey Tools — Collect feedback in order to ensure users feel heard and valued.

4. Make The Switch to Data-backed Advertising

Once you have your goals laid out and tools onboarded, the next step is to start leveragingAI in your advertising efforts. As marketers know too well, targeting the largest number of people possible is an impractical goal that doesn’t yield reliable results.

Advertising MarTech tools can help you achieve your targeting goals by: 

 Segmenting your customer base into actionable customer personas

• Personalizing ads shown to your target audience(s)
• Auto-buying advertising spaces when it becomes available
• Providing real-time analytics about the success of your campaign activity

Essentially, AI marketing tools make it much easier to determine and achieve the micro-goals laid out in a marketer’s KPI strategy. That’s why it works so well for advertising and makes for such a powerful tool.

5. Don’t Forget Transparency

A word of warning: AI is still a scary word to a lot of consumers. While customers enjoy the benefits of AI, such as personalized websites and improved customer support, they don’t necessarily feel comfortable having their personal data mined. 

More recently we can see the impact of data privacy trends on advertisers and big tech giants. In February 2022, Meta’s stock price plunged after its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Apple’s new privacy regulations in Europe would deeply impact company revenues after only 24 percent of Apple’s iPhone users worldwide consented to being tracked by advertisers.

With customers demanding more control of the use of their data, businesses are expected to be more open and transparent with customers about the AI tech they’re using. Tell customers exactly what data you are collecting, how you are using it, and how you plan to ensure its protection. 

Top AI MarTech Tools to Use In Your 2022 Marketing Strategy

With MarTech taking off in popularity, it’s impossible to ignore. Companies that don’t leverage AI in their marketing strategy for 2022 will be missing out on lost business opportunities. 

While it’s difficult to gather a complete list of all AI marketing tools. Here are just a few of the most common MarTech tools available to budding businesses looking to integrate AI into their marketing strategy.

Chatbots

AI chatbots are getting increasingly better at analyzing customers’ questions or concerns and answering them in the right way. It may never fully replace human customer service, but it provides 24/7 assistance for the most common types of interactions.

Top AI Chatbots for Customer Success Teams: ProProfs ChatBot, Pandorabot, Botstify 

Automated Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing campaigns have dramatically improved now that AI makes personalized emails possible. AI tools enable marketers to automatically send personalized emails to each customer at the frequency that will generate the most conversions.

Top AI Email Marketing Tools for Marketing Teams: BoomTrain, Phrasee, Siftrock 

Automated Social Media Management

Social media management can be incredibly time-consuming for marketing teams. AI MarTech tools come in and cut the team’s work in half by automatically posting the scheduled content on all social media platforms. Along the way, these tools can adapt the dimensions of visuals to fit each platform, tweak the messaging, provide outreach analytics, and even suggest better social media strategies. 

Top Social Media Management Tools for Content Marketing: AI-Writer, RAD AI, Pattern89 

Search Intent Data Machine Learning

AI tools provide an invaluable way to analyze trends. They do this by using existing customer search data. Understanding what people are searching for helps companies optimize their marketing strategies. Ultimately, it translates to better ads, better product positioning, and stronger click-through rates. 

Top AI/ML Search Intent Tools for Advertisers: MorphL, KeyWI, Keyword Insights

AI-Powered UGC Displays

Tools like Feelter’s social proof widget display user-generated content like reviews and pictures right next to the relevant product. This simple website add-on builds trust and encourages customers to stay on the store’s page longer.

Top AI-Powered UGC Displays for Marketing Teams: Feelter, Yotpo, Tint 

Dynamic Pricing 

Dynamic pricing tools allow online stores to adjust the prices of products to match changes in the market. Sometimes it’s about adapting the price to the budget of a particular customer segment, sometimes it’s about setting the price lower than the current competitor. It’s a strategy that can yield big results in terms of conversion and help companies compete with other sites, but it remains controversial because of its use of customer data. 

Top Dynamic Pricing Tools for Sales Teams: Pace Revenue, Intelligence Node, Wise Athena 

Automated Ad Buying

Showing ads at the right time, in the right place is critical to customer targeting. Buying it isn’t always so easy, and something machines can do way better than humans. Ad buying software allows companies to get more out of their marketing money by making data-driven decisions about advertising. 

Top Automated Advertising Tools for Marketing Teams: WordStream, GumGum, Albert AI 

Customer Analytics

Artificial Intelligence offers new tools to gather better analytics about customers. For example, geolocalization determines which part of the world a customer lives in. These tools also go much further, examining how much time a certain user category spends on a webpage or where they click. The ultimate goal is to reach conclusions about a consumer’s mood, desires, and mindset. 

Top Customer Analytics Tools for Product Teams: MonkeyLearn, HotJar, Feelter

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are advanced, multifaceted software that aim to automate large parts of the marketing process. They usually involve:

• Analytics on customer profiles and engagement
• Analytics on the performance of your marketing channels
• Well-organized, easily accessible records of customers’ past purchases and interactions
• Customer segmentation

Top CRM Tools for Marketing Teams: Feelter, Yotpo, Tint 

Why AI Is The Future of Marketing

When someone starts doing something much better than others can, we inevitably recruit them. In the case of AI MarTech, why would it be any different? AI-derived metrics and analytics tend to be much more precise than the ones people produce, and they arrive in real-time. 

It’s clear more than ever, AI has become an invaluable tool for growing online businesses. AI MarTech tools help us save time, energy, and money — and ultimately help us achieve our business goals faster than any human can.

MarTech tools also offer creative ways to improve customer experience and your brand’s reputation — a massive driver of sales. These tools make your ads land better, help your social media posts reach the right audiences, and help marketers stay within budget. 

This is not to say that machines are about to replace CMOs. Don’t worry about your job just yet. But in a digital age, working together with the new marketing technologies that AI affords is the best way to stay on top of your game and ahead of the competition.  

Final Words

Companies of any size can leverage the power of AI to improve the return on investment of their marketing. From using simple, cost-effective software to implementing complex, analytics-driven strategies, any business can use AI to its advantage. 

This article should have given you a few ideas of what MarTech can look like, but the list of tools we’ve put together will only keep on growing over the next few years! You can learn more about Feelter’s powerful AI MarTech tools and how they can help your business meet its marketing goals organically.