AI's Transformative Impact on Future Marketing Strategies - CMSWire

The Gist

• Rapid development. AI in marketing has revolutionized customer understanding, communication and accuracy in targeting.
• Improved analytics. AI-powered tools enable predictive analysis, better trend identification and optimized campaign strategies.
• Future potential. The next decade promises further advances, automating tasks and refining customer engagement, while addressing ethical concerns.

Artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing has captivated experts, as they continue to leverage the combination of human creativity and intelligent tech to better learn, understand and engage with the customer at an individual level.

The creation of hyper-personalized online experiences still remains a distant goal, often considered a pipe dream by many marketing teams. However, the momentum at which AI marketing is continually expanding brings new innovative opportunities to the table, enabling marketers to better understand customer behavior and experiences, and provide real-time solutions.

Moreover, with AI marketing, teams can establish compelling communication channels that can automate on-demand tasks, collect customer data and provide advanced data analysis.

With the right tools and adequate implementation, marketing teams can unlock the potential to create relevant and timely communication efforts and help to increase customer engagement. Customer satisfaction is expected to grow by 25% in 2023 within organizations that use AI according to Gartner research.

While we can agree that AI marketing, and perhaps the broader AI ecosystem is still in its infancy, looking forward into the next decade could provide some promising developments, opportunities and challenges for marketing experts.

comicsans on Adobe Stock Photo

An Overview of AI Marketing

Since the release and commercial use of ChatGPT by OpenAI in late November 2022, artificial intelligence has exploded onto the global stage, seeing widespread adoption by individuals, businesses and marketing teams.

Although ChatGPT, Google's Bard, and Bing's Sydney (the unofficial, official name) have marked a turning point in the commercial development of AI systems, we can't dismiss existing AI software that's already molded the marketing industry for quite some time.

While each company and marketing team holds a different strategic approach in terms of their financial resources, customers, products and services, AI has already helped shape the way experts understand their clients, how they communicate with them, and how they can deliver accurate messaging to the right group of people at the right time.

Already we see the use of voice search through software such as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa playing a big part in the way marketing teams generate content and deliver messaging efforts based on voice search data.

This sort of technology has become increasingly prevalent in consumers' day-to-day use, which is frequently used on smartphones. Research tells us that nearly 97% of smartphone users make use of AI-powered voice assistants, with roughly 40% using these technologies to function at least once every day.

Furthermore, artificial intelligence has helped marketers understand their customers through the collection of data, accurately deciphering consumer behavior, predicting trends and analyzing engagement efforts — faster than humans could do.

There's already software that's helping marketing teams better understand what type of content customers frequently engage with. Using these metrics, teams are then able to create strategic efforts to generate content based on customer search histories, keyword research and focus on content that will generate more accurate leads.

The existing, and ongoing need for artificial intelligence within the marketing ecosystem has already seen the unlimited potential for organizations that can accurately apply practical techniques within their marketing strategies.

This could perhaps contribute to the argument that around 40% of businesses have said that customer experience is their biggest motivator for investing and using artificial intelligence in their operations, whether it's for marketing or service-related purposes.

Moreover, AI marketing ensures that experts can combine advanced tech and human creativity that can help organizations broaden their approach to direct customer messaging, increasing accuracy, developing improved performance metrics, and building better digital content.

For what seems unknown, AI is steadily narrowing the divide between the consumer and the marketer, establishing predictive analytics that in turn can help teams create more accurate trend analysis, market predictions and develop content based on emerging patterns.

Related Article: Predictive Analytics: Overcoming Data Swamps in Tech's Dynamic Landscape

The Next Decade of AI Marketing

Looking at what we've accomplished so far, it shows that these attributions to the marketing industry are nothing new and that the long-awaited need for increased personalization, cross-channel integration, and dynamic customer engagement still requires increasing development on the front of AI advancements. 

Even to this day, marketers are still looking for better ways in which they expect and prefer to engage with their consumer market. Industry development continues to remain lopsided, often only reserved for bigger, more advanced companies that have adequate knowledge and resources to successfully implement fundamental AI infrastructure into their marketing strategies.

Finding the right prospects requires the necessary development, within the marketing industry, and that of artificial intelligence. This creates both opportunities and new challenges as AI marketing develops in the coming years.

With one foot firmly planted on both sides of the development spectrum, the next decade could bring exciting innovations for marketers, and from what we already know and use today, the coming years could be a revolutionary experience for both industries.

Related Article: 5 AI Applications for Marketers to Streamline Work

Consumer Behavioral Analytics and Data Insights

Most digital marketing efforts continue to be interwoven, primarily functioning based on simultaneous development. Perhaps the biggest generator of strategic growth lies within the ability to leverage AI for the increased awareness of consumer behavior analysis, helping to generate more accurate data insights.

Using these efforts would ensure that marketers can analyze, predict and foresee valuable customer understanding. These data points provide a look into ways marketers can identify trends, track their ROI, and further optimize marketing campaigns toward their target consumer market.

The coming years could potentially see further investment in AI-powered analytic tools that will help marketers make more accurate real-time decisions. Using consumer data more effectively, for marketing campaigns, content generation and establishing quality leads ensures that organizations will achieve more accurate results, and integrate accurate predictions within their marketing strategies.

With AI-powered analytics, marketing teams can stay ahead of consumer demand, trends and needs. The next few years will see how digital marketing teams can more precisely leverage their available tools and resources, to further enhance not only their understanding of machine learning, but also their target audience.

Real-Time Target Audience Predictive Analysis

The next decade will see advanced AI-powered software process massive amounts of customer data and information. Through these systems, organizations can further decipher consumer patterns as they emerge, and further determine how these patterns will evolve.

This is where market optimization through the use of artificial intelligence and big data takes a front-row seat during the development of marketing campaigns. Having the ability to leverage real-time target audience patterns through the study of consumer behavior will give marketing experts a better analysis of how successful a campaign might have been.

We can argue that similar systems are already present within the marketing ecosystem; however, experts are still unaware of the power of big data, cloud migration and real-time changes made by their competitors.

Collecting on-demand consumer data could see organizations track and monitor campaign success, adjust their strategies in real time, and further improve their personalization efforts as new data sets are collected and accurately analyzed.

Again, we see how important the development of AI-powered tools becomes as we start to investigate how data management and consumer predictive analysis are within digital marketing.

Personalized Digital Content Curation

While there has been steady progress in the development of AI-based tools and software that can enhance the creation of digital content with generative AI platforms, a bigger need remains for personalized content curation.

Bringing this into arm's reach would ensure that organizations are not only able to create digital content based on consumer or target market behavior but that AI-driven features can curate digital content according to specific platforms for different products and services.

Instead of marketing teams spending endless hours having to curate information and content to fit desired platform needs, distribute it and then monitor engagement, AI-powered software will help content marketers more accurately decide on their channel of execution.

Leveraging these possibilities would help create a feedback loop for content marketers, thus enabling them to create more measurable results, and adjust their content strategies against their competitors.

These efforts create the ability for content marketers and organizations to accurately establish their customer point of entry or access. Using these channels more adequately will help put marketers' messages in front of the right people, at the right time, with more precise execution.

Enhanced Automated Customer Support and Service

The ongoing transition to the digital landscape has only further increased the need for more reliable, and on-demand customer service. At the height of the pandemic, organizations rapidly implemented digital chatbots and instant messaging platforms that helped automate customer service on the back of increased online demand.

While automated customer service, for the most part, has been seen to improve the relationship between the client and the business, as research tells us that 68% of online users enjoy the speed at which chatbots respond to their queries, there remains a disconnection between these two points.

A large portion of customers, roughly 60%, are still concerned about the fact that chatbots cannot accurately relieve their issues. This creates a barrier between the customer and the business, however, this could create more opportunities for digital marketers to see where the pain points in the communication channel may lie.

With automated responses, organizations can now better understand what their customers are looking for, and how they can resolve these issues more precisely. Better yet, it could enable marketers to have the ability to read their customers more accurately, based on their interactions with chatbots.

Ultimately, this boils down to the further improvement of natural language processing (NLP) models. Using the language customers are speaking within marketing campaigns, and applying NLP methods within AI-powered platforms.

Natural Voice and Language Processing

As we've already mentioned, voice recognition technology is in abundance, and we're already seeing big-tech companies using voice recognition software to improve the user experience.

However, in the coming years, AI-driven applications, such as Alexa and Siri, among others, could help improve the natural use of language in marketing campaigns more adequately. Organizations will have the ability to understand the language their audiences are speaking, and how they react to these messages.

Voice search optimization has become a necessity, rather than a luxury, and with real-time applications, marketers can calculate how this technology can assist them to increase their organic and natural presence online.

Using AI applications to learn natural language models could further increase marketers' consumer vocabulary, and shift their attention toward marketing efforts that can deliver improved results, and also improve their personalization efforts.

Advanced Digital Marketing Workflow Automation

This could perhaps be the most revolutionary change the digital marketing ecosystem experiences in the coming decade.

The further development of digital AI applications for the automation of workflow will become increasingly important for organizations, not only to improve their customer engagement, communication, or user experience; but more so, for their productivity and bottom line.

Both stand-alone and integrated AI programs will help marketers automate projects more efficiently, with a combination of both digital technology and human creativity.

Digital content will be developed faster, helping improve the overall output of teams, while at the same time overseeing the delivery of accurate messaging. Aside from market research, organizations will now have better market insights, conduct better keyword research and have improved SEO analysis.

Generative content will be more user-orientated, as marketers can now combine several elements of their target audience at once, ultimately leading to more personalized messaging efforts, communication delivery and real-time monitoring.

In the coming decade, bigger portions of marketers' work will become automated through AI-driven applications, however, this is not without the need for human ingenuity and insight to oversee the accurate implementation of these efforts.

The Change AI Will Bring to Digital Marketing

We can't think of artificial intelligence as a singular application or automated solution, instead, it's a multi-facet system that's interwoven among the different levels of digital marketing.

Given how fast artificial intelligence has developed over the last several years, the coming decade could pose even further advancements in the digital marketing ecosystem, but this is not without the many ethical challenges the AI industry could and has already been facing.

While there is a need for improvements, it comes at the cost of bringing our human creativity to the forefront and establishing more innovative applications that can help marketers better understand their target audience.

With this, the coming decade will not only help automate the workflow of digital marketing teams or replace mundane tasks. Instead, it could provide a deeper look into how customers interact with marketing campaigns and deliver accurate data insights that can reflect a predictive analysis of market trends and consumer behavior.

On the back of this, it's important to consider how working alongside the development of artificial intelligence software and technology will not fully replace human innovation, but rather help us embrace a more connected market, helping deliver more personalized online experiences, but ultimately, giving marketers a look at their efforts from a pure customer point of view.

Learn how you can join our contributor community.