Published 10 April 2020

AI in Buyer’s Journey – How Important It Is for Marketers to Know About It

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing marketing by providing powerful tools for personalization, campaign optimization, and customer loyalty. AI enables marketers to analyze vast amounts of data, understand customer behavior, and create highly targeted and personalized campaigns. With AI, marketers can optimize content, identify the most effective channels, and enhance customer experiences. The use of AI-powered chatbots and personalized recommendations further enhances customer engagement and loyalty. While AI continues to evolve, it has already become critical for marketing success, empowering marketers to build stronger relationships with customers.

Introduction

Artificial intelligence (AI) is currently one of the fastest evolving technologies in the world. In 2016, the AI market was valued at $4.06 billion. By 2025, this sector will have a market capitalization value of $164.41 billion, signaling a 55.6% rise in compound annual growth rates.

Today AI is everywhere you turn. You will find it in the auto, healthcare, finance, manufacturing, education, legal, retail, and marketing industries. The technology now runs self-driving vehicles, crucial medical equipment, and various programs and platforms online. Businesses such as Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and IBM are heavily invested in AI development.

These platforms are also continuously making this technology more accessible to users. You can, for instance, access Google’s AI via its RankBrain search engine algorithm. This AI interprets search queries to provide Google’s users with the most relevant results.

Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri have become the perfect virtual assistants making speech recognition a substantial possibility. Chatbots powered by AI have also become commonplace, and there are predictions that in the future, 90% of all inquiries from customers will be in the hands of conversational AIs.

What Is AI Marketing?

One sector that is poised to benefit the most from AI use is marketing. Marketing is one of the most misunderstood professions. Most people simply think that all the marketer does is sell. While a marketer’s end game is the sale, the process of getting people to buy products or services in an extremely informed world is not easy.

The professional marketer has to conduct in-depth research and analyze data from many different sources to understand his market and what matters most to it. The marketer then uses the insights gathered from this research and analysis to create, communicate, deliver, and exchange offers that are of value to the target audience.

The process, however, does not end with the sale. The savvy marketer will need to engage with his customers regularly to turn them into loyal customers. AI marketing can simplify these processes through tools that utilize machine learning and artificial intelligence.

The marketer of the day cannot survive the digital marketing world without the aid of AI tools. Traditional marketing has evolved into a discipline that places the customer at the forefront of decision-making. Every successful marketer must have a firm finger on the consumer’s pulse. They also have to determine the buyer stage. Such knowledge forms the basis of marketing interactions.

AI marketing makes customer data access and analysis easy for the marketer. Additionally, AI insights can predict client behavior better and enhance the customer’s journey. AI marketing tools will sift through tons of customer, product, and competition data to identify useful patterns about them.

The tools will avail data insights on the behavior, sentiment, likes, and dislikes of your potential customer. Such valuable information can drive your marketing strategy and improve your product or service offering.

AI Use In Marketing

Source : blueconic

Personalization

Content marketing has become very crucial to the digital marketing process and with good reason. Digital content marketing initiatives cost 62% less than other forms of traditional marketing. They also generate three times more leads than older forms of marketing. The perceptive marketer knows that certain features in digital initiatives can fuel the strategy’s lead generation ability.

Chief amongst these features is targeted and personalized content. The rules of this new era in marketing dictate that a marketer’s communication must resonate strongly with their prospect’s views, needs, and wants. The customer of the day has very high expectations from brands. This increased demand for perfection has been fueled by the information age and the heightened competition for their attention online.

As a result, 59% of all customers say that personalization plays a crucial role in their purchase decisions. 78% of online buyers will only engage with offers from brands that interact with them as per previous engagements with the brand.

Personality AI can help you to run highly personalized marketing campaigns tailored to an individual lead’s personality makeup. These AI tools can discover certain traits of your audience and structure email campaigns that enhance open and read rates as well as conversion rates.

The ability to send personalization campaigns is such a critical feature in email marketing that a simple feature such as a personalized subject line can increase open rates by 7.4%. Personalized messages will increase your email open rates to 18.8%. Data shows that personalized email marketing has an overall six times more transaction rates than regular mail.

This trend has caught up fast amongst marketers. Everyone is personalizing emails by including the lead’s name or company to emails. So how can you push this advantageous feature further? Let personality AI create an email that addresses the persona of your lead.

This AI form can analyze a potential lead’s social media profile and understand their behavioral journey and what it is that makes them tick. You, therefore, will not need to take chances when profiling your targets. The AI will analyze data faster and with more accuracy than you can.

This technology can also store the insights better and in a more organized format. You can use personality AI to go beyond demographic personalization and to attain intent data. Use its valuable insights instead to approach your customers. That includes their motivation, preferred communication mode, or passions.

Campaign Optimization

Understanding your target audience will help you to create optimized content and marketing strategies that strike a chord with the lead. If the data gleaned from the personality AI shows that your customer is a frequent visitor on Instagram, then you can focus your efforts on content that appeals to Instagramers.

Consequently, you will also direct your costs and efforts on channels that have a higher ROI. The AI can also help you to understand the most effective forms of content according to the personality of your leads. Its data can, for instance, point out leads that prefer engaging and vivid stories in their emails and highlight those that prefer content that cuts to the chase.

You can, therefore, optimize your content to suit their tastes and preferences and ensure that your strategy hits the bull’s eye. AI can also highlight the most share-worthy and likable social media content to direct the design of social media posts. The technology can also point out landing pages that convert the most. Such metrics can assist in the creation of optimized marketing campaigns.

Customer Loyalty

Businesses spend so much money to attract new leads. At the same time, data shows that retaining your old customer is a much easier and cheaper way to keep your revenue up. Professional marketers understand that nurturing old leads is vital to business success and acquiring new ones should never overshadow this fact.

Data shows that the cost of acquiring a new lead is five times more than that of retaining the older leads. In fact, by merely increasing your customer retention by 5%, your business can increase profits by 25% to29%. Older customers are so vital to business goals that you have a 60% to 70% higher sales success rate with them. The sales success rate with new leads can be as low as 5% to 20%.

There’s an easy way that a business can reduce customer churn. That is by ensuring that its converted leads have everything that they want in the customer journey when they need it.

AI can offer deep insights that can personalize the customer journey and enhance their experience with your brand. You can use the AI insights to design incentives, upsells or services, and products that accessorize their purchases.

Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify use AI features to recommend products or services as per the converted customer’s interactions with their brands. Such features keep customers loyal to these brands. Businesses are also increasingly using AI-powered bots to support customer service.

With a chatbot in place, your customers will not need to call or email your support agents when they need assistance. All they need to do is to access your website or app and get instant assistance from the chatbot.

What The Future Holds For AI Marketing

Artificial intelligence technology is undergoing such a speedy phase of development that forecasting what changes lie in the future can be a challenge. Marketers can nonetheless expect improvements such as;

Increased personalized data that will lead to highly optimized content
Laser-focused market segmentation and targeting
An increased takeover of specific customer journey steps by AI-powered bots
A value-driven marketing environment where insights from AI technology begin to build experiences and communities

Conclusion

Personality AI is a powerful marketing tool that enhances data use and customer interactions. It also helps to create fantastic personalized experiences, aid customer support, and to understand purchase intent. This is the reason why 61% of marketers now say that machine learning and artificial intelligence have now become critical to marketing strategies. Nevertheless, AI development is still in its early milestones, so human intelligence and support are still critical to marketing success. AI technology has, however, automated marketing systems to help the marketer focus more on how to enhance their brand’s relationships with the customer.