ROI (return on investment) is one of the biggest challenges small business owners face, especially when it comes to their marketing. For any business, the marketing efforts are expected to generate a ton of profit by maximizing revenue.
Artificial intelligence has already revolutionized several sectors, and marketing is just one of them. It has proven that it can breathe new life into marketing strategies by providing deeper insights into consumer behavior, allowing marketing executives to build loyalty through refined user experiences and customized communications.
AI can make real-time, data-driven decisions and its one-of-a-kind predictive capabilities can help businesses be more humane by leveraging the power of deep learning. AI holds immense potential to increase brand engagement, improve viability of suggestions and streamline purchasing processes.
The use of AI in marketing has grown substantially in recent years. Here are three insights that can help marketers explore all that AI can do for them:
- By combining the powers of deep learning and big data, AI can identify and target customers more accurately.
- Innovative technologies like voice recognition and object recognition allow companies to engage with their customers more meaningfully than ever before.
- AI in marketing provides corporations with the opportunity to engage directly with consumers, use their data to create valuable assets and create a blueprint for how to serve them better in the future.
How you can use AI to drive your ROI
Analytical insights and advanced analytics can significantly improve your marketing ROI in these five areas:
1. Segmenting audiences
– If you can manage to precisely divide an audience into specific groups with similar expectations, needs and behaviors, the better you will be able to develop, and cater to, targeted customer segments. Even though you can deploy manual segmentation, what AI-augmented strategies do is that they allow you to not only study a seemingly infinite number of variables (way beyond trade zone statistics and basic demographics), they also do so with much more fairness and accuracy, identifying patterns that humans may not be able to spot or simply overlook.
This information can help you identify segments where the likelihood of upselling, conversion, cross-selling or other retention strategies looks more favorable.
2. Predicting consumer intent
– AI allows you to work on more than hunches. Using predictive analytics, AI can incorporate advanced tools such as sentiment analysis to interpret clever cues like tone of voice, volume and cadence, among thousands of other data points, in every interaction with a user. As you learn more about past consumer behaviors, it becomes easier to predict future actions and build your marketing initiatives accordingly.
3. Personalizing offers and other messages
– According to a 2019 Harris Poll/RedPoint Global study, “63% of consumers agree that personalization is now part of the standard service they expect” and “37% of consumers indicated that they will no longer do business with a company that fails to offer a personalized experience.” Despite that, for 44% of marketing executives, personalization is an ongoing challenge.
Separately, 90% of consumers are willing to spend more with companies offering personalized experiences, according to 123FormBuilder’s 2022 statistics.
By employing AI in their marketing efforts, marketers can personalize content based on accurately segmented data for a seamless experience that makes customers feel they are valued, heard and understood.
4. Multichannel attribution
– In multichannel attribution, every consumer device, channel and touchpoint, as well as their journey is analyzed and rated comparatively to other touchpoints in terms of the likelihood of conversion. One problem with this technique is the sheer amount of data that is needed in as near real-time as possible to enhance the outcomes and subsequent spending.
This is where AI and analytics come in. Multichannel attribution powered by AI provides the kind of big-picture clarity beyond human abilities, clarifying the marketing effort’s direction and making the resulting data more reliable.
5. Predicting customer churn rate
– According to research by ThinkJar, an advisory and research think-tank focused on Customer Strategies, only 1 in 26 unhappy customers (less than 4%) will complain, the rest simply churn. AI can prevent customer churn (or customer attrition) by using algorithms that can analyze thousands of pieces of data make it possible to identify high-risk segments and adapt marketing strategies accordingly. And increasing customer retention rates by a mere 5% could increase profits by 25% to 95%, research shows.
