The use of AI and Machine Learning is expanding in every area of our lives, and it surely will stand out as one of the most important technology trends of 2019. The adoption of AI in marketing is nothing new, but this area is still in development, so most probably we will witness an emergence of some exciting AI-powered tendencies and solutions.
So what AI and Machine Learning trends will affect the marketers’ job in 2019 the most?
1. AI recommendations
One of the advantages of Machine Learning algorithms when it comes to marketing is the possibility of processing and analyzing the data regarding customers’ behavior and choices in order to get to know what are their preferences and deliver them exactly what they want. This kind of information can be used in product recommendations – on the website, in emails, in web pushes, or in whatever channel you want. If you don’t want to lose out on the martech race in 2019, you can find the AI recommendations feature in a Marketing Automation platform powered by AI&Machine Learning that will permit you to replace the traditional static recommendations with a completely personalized offer.
By 2020, 75% of business buyers expect companies to anticipate their needs and make relevant suggestions (Salesforce)
2. Personalization
2019 will be the year of hyper-personalized 1-to-1 content. With AI, personalization can mean a total shift in the way we think of delivering any content to users – now we prepare static websites that in most cases look the same for everyone (or at best with some dynamic banners here and there). But the introduction of AI-based advanced personalization will bring a new era of content that will be fully adapted to the preferences and the behavioral and transactional profile of every user. And the customers will love it. Imagine entering a website that is tailored exactly to your needs – you see the categories and products that are relevant to you, and even a special discount only for you. No more browsing through products for dogs on an online pet store main page when looking for a little something for your cat! 1-to-1 personalization obviously can be applied not only to websites – personalized emails will also become more common.
On-site personalization is the second most commonly cited use case for AI (Adobe)
3. Targeting
AI enables even smarter audience targeting and segmentation, that will cause an improvement in the efficiency of advertising and marketing campaigns. The AI ability to analyze big sets of customer behavioral information allows to segment audience much better than marketers were able to do it before, even with the help of segmentation features of a Marketing Automation platform. AI can process much more data than a human being, so employing algorithms to find correlations among the audiences and group customers with similar characteristics significantly improves the relevance of such practices. Moreover, the use of Machine Learning ensure a constant improvement of the results and growing effectiveness.
47% of advertisers use AI for audience targeting and 46% for audience segmentation, making them the most popular AI digital ad tactics (Econsultancy)
4. Voice Assistants
Amazon has its Alexa, Apple has Siri, Windows has Cortana and Google has Google Assistant (yeah, no fancy name here). Customers worldwide are getting used to interacting with their virtual helpers in every situation: when making a purchase from an online store, when choosing a movie for the evening and when searching for information. The last aspect seems to be the one that will have a huge impact on digital marketing: it will thoroughly transform the way we search on Google or other search engines, and those changes will have to be taken into account in SEO. Voice search is different than searching by typing the query into the search bar, as we simply tend to build our sentences differently. Apart from that, voice assistants can be another part of the brand image used in order to engage the customers, and, of course, greatly improve the customer experience.
50% of all searches will be performed via voice assistants by 2020 (comScore)
5. Chatbots
It’s no news that chatbots are taking over the digital marketing landscape. Recently this solution is booming and appeared already on a huge number of websites and integrated within apps such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. The simple bots based on programmed scripts right now are being redefined thanks to the adoption of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Such solutions as Natural Language Processing help the bot to chat with the users just like a real person: understand their queries and construct correct and logical answers. This brings a revolution in customer service, sales, and marketing – the areas where the use of AI chatbots is growing at a fast pace.
80% of companies surveyed already use or plan to implement chatbots by 2020 (Oracle)
If you are interested in the topic of the change that the adoption of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Science brings to the good old marketing, download our free ebook.
Surely these are not the only AI-related trends in the area of marketing that we will have the chance to observe in the next months. Do you think these tendencies will be the most relevant, or you have antoher bets?
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