How to Use AI in Digital Marketing

AI is being used in both subtle and transformative ways to improve digital marketing. However, digital marketers are still figuring out the best way to gain a competitive advantage from the technology. Lean too heavily on AI and you could miss the human element of your campaign or lose control over your ad placements. Avoid AI altogether and you could get left behind.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the science of making machines that can solve problems and make decisions like humans. AI technology can process large amounts of data, recognise patterns, and use the input to make decisions.

Many people are asking how to use AI in digital marketing. It has an infinite number of applications for marketers and some of the biggest opportunities lie in audience targeting, task automation, and content creation. 

However, AI is advancing quickly and we’re also discovering some of the pitfalls of the technology that need to be avoided. So, let’s explore some examples of how AI is used in digital marketing and how to make the most of it.

AI in Digital Marketing Examples:

Audience Targeting

There are many new types of digital advertising formats which incorporate AI. For example, Meta Advantage+ and Google Performance Max campaigns use AI to deliver the creative that is most likely to deliver a goal to the right audience. 

To achieve this, many advertising platforms encourage marketers to set up broad audience targeting and many different types of ads within their campaigns. This gives the algorithm more inputs to work with and optimise to deliver the best result. 

While this can help brands boost their placements, visibility, and audience engagement quickly, it can come with a loss of control. 

For example, TikTok’s 3rd Party Placement Network will display ads programmatically in blog articles across the internet, not just within the platform. This can open up brand safety considerations that digital marketers need to be aware of. 

Audience targeting algorithms can also quickly skew towards audiences that are showing results in the early phases of a campaign. While this might generate a high return on ad spend, the audience might not be aligned with the strategic direction of the brand. 

Dynamic product ads can also create ads from products on a website. However, some products shouldn’t be taken out of context and displayed in a new environment. Without rules and controls in place, these campaigns might not generate positive engagement.

That’s why digital marketers need to ensure that AI doesn’t oversimplify their audience targeting strategy and implement manual controls that guide algorithms to work in favour of their overall brand goals. 

Task Automation

One of the most obvious use cases for AI in digital marketing is to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks, especially those that are prone to human error. 

By leveraging AI-powered tools, marketers can direct their focus towards more strategic aspects of their campaigns. 

For example, AI can automate many of the time-consuming elements of data analysis and interpretation. Marketers can use AI algorithms to analyse vast amounts of data quickly, extracting valuable insights that would take humans a long time to identify. 

Consider Google Analytics’ new data-driven attribution model, which uses AI to compare the paths of customers who convert with the paths of customers who don’t, then find the patterns among those ad interactions that lead to conversions. 

This type of AI-driven measurement tool helps digital marketers calculate the actual contribution of each ad interaction across the conversion path more easily. 

However, it’s important to remember that AI requires high-quality data in high volumes to perform best. Therefore, digital marketers need to be careful when relying on AI and predictive analytics to interpret results and make decisions about where to spend their budget. 

Digital marketers are also using AI to automate customer service conversations. Sometimes, customers ask the same questions frequently. In the case where the question is routine and the answer is simple to generate, the response can be automated. 

However, if the customer service question is more nuanced or sensitive, an AI chatbot might struggle to generate an empathetic response that fully considers the context. Therefore, rules need to be set around which questions the chatbot or humans will answer. 

Content Creation

Creativity is at the heart of every successful marketing campaign. 

While AI hasn’t been able to replace human creativity, it can provide a helpful spark in the creative process. 

AI tools are being used to help digital marketers generate ideas, write content quickly, and create personalised recommendations for different audiences. 

Chat-GPT drew attention to the creative capabilities of AI and many digital and email marketing platforms now have content generation tools built within them. Images, video, and text can all be generated with AI using tools such as Jasper AI and Muse AI.

These tools are great for anyone who is struggling to bring a content marketing idea to life or deliver personalised content at scale. They are guided by human prompts, which means you can instruct the tools to create ideas that are stuck in your imagination.

However, these tools typically learn from data sets that are available on the internet, meaning they can struggle to create something that feels real. They might also mimic or repeat information that is already available online. As a result, the final product, such as a blog post, might not be original or engaging. Therefore, digital marketers have to carefully consider where they use AI-fueled content generation tools in their creative process. 

In some instances, they may be best used to mock up an initial idea and then brief a creative team who can bring it to life and add a unique touch. Social media marketing also calls for novelty and authenticity, meaning that the human touch is necessary for an effective campaign.

How AI is used in digital marketing:

AI is making its way into digital marketing in both subtle and disruptive ways. In some instances, it can replace tasks that humans used to perform. In other instances, it can be used to augment our capabilities and amplify our impact. Regardless of how you choose to use this emerging technology, it’s important to explore the opportunities it presents while also keeping an eye out for its pitfalls.