For good and for bad, AI marketing is everywhere these days. AI Copywriting programs are spitting out content that’s being shared and boosted by bots, driving tons of traffic to websites paying for these tactics (at least, until Google catches up with them).
Gartner believes that by 2023 the AI market will experience 5X growth. The AI software market is predicted to reach $126 billion by 2025. Over 54% of organizations spend $250,000 on automation yearly. And the robot led you to this article.
Yet 96% of senior marketers waste nearly 5 hours and 36 minutes weekly trying in vain to improve their data processing, so most of them decided to adopt AI as well.
Today we’ll take a closer look at what artificial intelligence offers, particularly to marketing teams, and how well (or poorly) it might work for them.
Pros and cons of AI for marketing
Artificial intelligence attracts curious minds, but it also has those who doubt it. Some people believe AI is the future, while others wouldn’t bet on that - and both are right.
How come? Let’s sort things out.
Pros
Yes, 80% of businesses and tech leaders claim AI has already boosted their productivity. However, we need to know all the ways artificial intelligence betters our workflow and helps us gain results.
So, here they are.
Personalized user experience
Sure, without AI, a company can still provide its customers with a personalized user experience. However, there is a big difference between collecting and remembering every small detail about hundreds or thousands of clients yourself and leaving it to a robot.
Thus, marketers have one less headache while still achieving the same or even better results.
AI tools can track every prospect’s step, providing a comprehensive analysis of them and letting you know how, when, and where you can more likely build a brand-client connection.
Cost and time savings
If we continue talking about how many processes in your workflow can be automated with AI, the cost and time saving will be fairly regarded as one more huge benefit of using artificial intelligence.
Data processing, deep analysis, “grunt work” such as sending emails every Christmas or scheduling the same meeting again and again - all of these are no longer your responsibility.
AI can easily cover them.
Enhanced decision making
Since we sort of have all-inclusive handed on a silver platter, like data analysis, the marketer decision-making process is way faster.
Moreover, there are a lot of AI tools that not only provide us with automated reporting but with forecasting as well. Thus, you get ready-made solutions; the only thing left is to consider and use them.
Cons
To consider and only then use. That’s the point.
Fully relying on AI is not a good idea, and many businesses stop using artificial intelligence just because they overestimated it in the first place.
Though AI is a great tool, you must never forget that it’s a tool. So you better double-check everything it gives you and take it under your control.
“And again, do-it-yourself approach,” you think. But no, we aren’t talking about giving up on using AI. We talk about using it right.
A given technology can do what we humans can’t. For example, it can process heaps of data in seconds, while this task may take months for us. But it also can’t do some things that humans can, like understanding ambiguous data and emotions and producing a really unique product.
AI follows the patterns we give it and uses the data according to just those patterns.
So, if you use artificial intelligence to write content, for example, it does give you some, but it’s just the pieces of another people’s content assembled together, and of course, they need to be reviewed by a writer.
What AI marketing tools can help your business?
And we’re finally here. Now that you know all the pros and cons of AI and how it’s supposed to be used, we can get down to specifics.
So, there is a list of AI marketing tools for you to consider.
Email marketing AI tools
Email marketing is the basis of marketing itself. And a little help in this one will never be superfluous. Some AI email tools, such as HubSpot Email Marketing, automate emailing in general.
You can set the triggers it has to follow with sending an email to a client, like visiting your website or subscribing to your newsletter and rest assured that everything and everyone is covered.
Some others, like Sender, can provide you with ready-to-send emails, which you can customize and save some time on creating newsletters or replying to emails.
This tool shows you when your email was opened and the links the recipient clicked.
Content marketing AI tools
Content writing software can save you days and nights by providing ideas for your content or a draft of the content itself.
There are some narrowly targeted tools, like Smartwriter, which is more about email outreaches, and the ones with a broader range, like QuillBot or Copy.ai. Let’s discuss them a little.
Smartwriter is software that can analyze your customers’ or partners’ social media and generate a personalized outreach email.
With Copy.ai you can write any type of content, from emails to songs.
And QuillBot helps you with paraphrasing, grammar checking, plagiarism detection, and summarizing, and may also be your co-writer.
Messaging AI tools
When we say “messaging AI tools,” we mainly talk about chatbots. These creatures became the favourites of both marketers and clients.
For instance, Kindly claims that 80% of Elkjøp’s customers are fully satisfied using the Kindly chatbot, and more general statistics show that 68% of people like chatbots because of quick answers.
There are many different ways to implement chatbots into your corporate website or create one from scratch. For instance, the above-mentioned HubSpot has a special widget you can use to build your own chatbot with the patterns your company needs.
Another good example of an AI-powered chatbot is Amelia.
This one can take your service to the next level by learning customer behaviour and providing a human-like kind of conversation.
AI analytics
Some CRMs may already have AI analytics inside. For instance, Salesforce-based platforms can use Salesforce Einstein for companies to analyze their employee and customer data, get insights and make informed decisions after.
DealCode, as another example, can be integrated into a HubSpot or Pipedrive-based platform, and marketers can get a comprehensive analysis of their workflow, the actions they take to gain the results, and how effective each of them is.
AI forecasting
To be or not to be? To wait or not to wait?
AI forecasting is made to answer your questions about whether it’s the right time to take the next step in your sales pipeline, what to expect from your actions, and how hopeful your new campaign is.
Predictions are not verdicts, but they can direct you and help with some dilemmas.
One of the greatest AI forecasting features is churn predictions. Such giants as HubSpot and Salesforce offer some tools which you can use to predict your company churns.
The latter created a separate tool, Salesforce Churn Prediction, that analyses your customer activity and shows you which ones are more likely to fall off.
Conclusion
Artificial intelligence brings a lot into our lives and our business. And as you can notice, a lot of good.
However, we shouldn’t forget that any technology can do nothing but harm if we don’t use it wisely.
We hope this article helped you understand wise AI usage and made you fall in love with it a little while still understanding that no robot will ever be a perfect replacement for good, old-fashioned human hard work.
So marketers can rest easy and without fear that their jobs are going to be taken over by AI. It’s here to be a tool to make your lives easier, not take them over.
