Marketing Automation: Streamline your Processes with AI

Intro

Digital marketing can be challenging, especially in a big organization, where managers manage multiple locations and campaigns. Marketing automation aims to streamline the marketing process, increase revenue, and enhance the productivity of marketing efforts.

AI automation represents an upgrade from past workflows, where tasks are designed to be completed according to basic workflows set by humans. In AI automation, humans set rules, but artificial intelligence technology can learn based on data and determine its own path, improving its performance over time.

This article will tackle the latest trends in marketing automation, the advantages of AI automation in marketing, and how this technology is implemented. So, let's dive in.

Fundamental AI Technologies in Marketing Automation

AI automation technologies can transform the nature of the workplace by streamlining various marketing processes. Artificial intelligence models can consume and make sense of more data than humans, complement an employee's work, and even complete marketing tasks that humans find too challenging.

According to the latest studies, 300 million jobs will be affected by AI automation. Employees will have to learn new skills to work with artificial intelligence to prevent being displaced, much like the personal computing revolution of the 90s and early 2000s.

Sales and marketing departments can significantly benefit from AI automation to tackle repeated tasks, allowing employees to address more complicated problems. Moreover, these technologies are becoming more cost and time-efficient, leading to increased lead generation at a lower cost.

While Large Language Models are all the rage, multiple other AI automation technologies, such as Machine Learning and other general Natural Language Processing applications, also increase marketing campaigns' ROI.

Machine Learning

Machine learning is an AI technology that uses computers to learn and improve by analyzing data. With machine learning techniques, computers can gain insights, identify marketing trends, and make predictions about the market to make better marketing decisions.

Machine learning lets you gain insights from browsing history, social media activity, and purchasing patterns. With these insights, the artificial intelligence model can create targeted ads and emails for marketing campaigns.

Marketers can use marketing automation and machine learning for customer segmentation, content optimization, chatbots, social media marketing, and within their CRM. For example, companies like Amazon and Netflix use machine learning to suggest products or movies that appeal to their customers based on their liking.

Some examples of Machine Learning techniques include regression and classification.

Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an AI technology that allows computers to decipher and understand written text like humans.

Before OpenAIs ChatGPT and GPT models, most marketing experts used basic NLP techniques to create AI chatbots to improve customer experience by analyzing customer personality and adjusting conversations to match.

In addition, NLP tools can be used to analyze customer behavior to improve customer attraction and retention levels. For example, AI chatbots can improve customers' experience by collecting data and recommending products and services to the customer based on their personalities.

Large Language Models

While the concept of Large Language Models has been around for a while, recent developments in the space - notably by OpenAI and Anthropic - have taken the popularity of Large Language Models to new heights.

Large Language Models analyze data and use deep learning to understand, predict, and produce new content. Large Language models are trained on massive amounts of textual data. For example, OpenAI required over 350GB of computer memory to train GPT-3.** **

LLMs can create content by studying the sequence of words and how frequently they're used. Marketing experts can use this technology for summarization, automating reports, and removing errors.

While some generated text might only sound human-like with editing, these models are constantly improving and producing better content.

Advantages of AI Automation in Marketing

The modern breed of Artificial Intelligence enables computers to learn and act without being explicitly programmed for a task. The technology's ability to make decisions independent from humans is incredibly promising - and AI marketing tools are becoming more prevalent than ever before.

The benefit of marketing automation and using Artificial Intelligence for content creation is obvious. However, we should see more of these applications soon, as AI can provide several other benefits for any marketing team.

Enhanced Targeting and Personalization

AI automation allows marketers to analyze data concerning customers' wants, helping them create more targeted marketing campaigns at any stage of the customer journey.

For example, AI tools can determine the next purchasing decision based on the customer's location, gender, past purchases, and browsing history.

The next generation of marketers will directly target their consumers and shoppers with personalized emails and social media campaigns, bypassing generalized communication.

Improved Data Analysis and Decision-Making

AI can quickly process large amounts of data, making information available for improved decision-making. For example, marketers can determine the efficiency of marketing tactics and make the necessary decisions based on relevant data.

With over 64.2 zettabytes of data on the internet as of 2020, expected to almost triple by 2025, human analysts can miss essential metrics about their audience. AI marketing automation can help close the gap, allowing marketers to change their tactics more accurately and quickly.

Time and Cost Savings with AI

AI takes a fraction of humans' time to analyze and process data. As a result, these tools can save employees time by doing repetitive tasks on their behalf.

Marketing leaders can determine the best decision based on data provided by AI tools without wasting time. As a result, marketing campaigns can be more efficient, reducing the overall cost.

In addition, in the next few years, Large Language Models will likely handle simple tasks like responding to customers' questions, allowing employees to tackle and solve more complicated problems.

AI Automation in Action: Transforming Marketing Processes

AI's full potential is becoming more evident by the month, but today several companies like Amazon, Adidas, and Apple are already using this technology to optimize marketing efforts.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization tools automate data analysis to recognize keywords and identify trends to provide the basis for more successful content.

For example, companies like Apple and Adidas use Ranktracker for comprehensive keyword analysis. While many tools exist to analyze how your website ranks on Google, Ranktracker takes it to another level by allowing you to analyze SERP results by location, language, and even based on different search engines.

In addition, SEO tools such as Ranktracker's Backlink Checker can analyze competitors, guiding you on valuable backlinks to acquire to help your site rank higher.

(Ranktracker.com’s Backlink Checker)

Even search engines leverage AI - Google's BERT is an AI language model that studies and refines search results. It analyzes snippets and better ranks websites according to relevant queries.

AI and Customer Segmentation

AI can assist in email marketing automation, creating marketing campaigns that target your specific audience to maximize leads and revenues. Machine learning and deep learning can analyze customers' information to separate them into groups, promoting proper lead nurturing.

Traditional segmentation techniques can divide customers based on age, gender, location, and experience with the company's products or services.

However, AI-powered segmentation will be able to analyze sentiments, time spent before purchasing, and various qualitative traits that humans might miss in real time.

Amazon is considered a pioneer in using this technology, and its algorithm is continually improving to provide users with the best user experience. For example, with ML algorithms, the platform can suggest individual outfit recommendations using Style Snap.

AI-Powered Chatbots for Customer Support

AI-powered Chatbots use Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and now Large Language Models to understand intent. As a result, they can understand what the customer means and provide fast, personalized responses to queries.

Not only is this an advantage for consumers, but chatbots can also drive efficiency for the company. Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa are all examples of conversational AI tools.

(Amazon Alexa)

MailerLite, for example, uses Intercom's GPT-4 chatbot, Fin, to assist its customers.

Social Media Management

Marketing professionals can also use AI automation for sentiment analysis. A great example of this would be brand monitoring - analyzing how your current and target audiences feel about your brand.

Several tools can analyze online mentions of your brand, allowing marketers to focus on the problematic areas and suggest solutions. Audiense is one of these tools, mainly used for social media analysis by monitoring your brand's mentions on platforms like Twitter.

Implementing AI Automation in Your Marketing Strategy

Designing a marketing strategy that realizes the potential of AI is a multi-step process. Here's what you need to do to implement AI automation in your marketing strategy.

Identifying Areas for Implementation

A complete analysis of your current marketing strategy and decisions will help you identify potential growth opportunities. You can see which areas and topics are ripe for automation before addressing your problems and driving efficiency.

Selecting the Right Tools for their Use Case

There are currently several tools to address SEO, content creation, email marketing, customer segmentation, and responding to customers' queries.

If you want to improve your search engine results, Ranktracker is the best tool to help you gain more traffic and rank higher on search engines.

Do thorough research to identify the potential of various tools and understand their pros and cons before using any of them in your marketing decisions. Consider their features, scalability, compatibility, functionality, and cost.

Training and Managing Your Team for AI Integration

Despite the advantages of AI automation, it comes with some challenges. Most employees still need to become more familiar with the concept and be made aware of the potential of the tools used.

Taking the time and effort to train your team to use these tools will lead to the desired results.

Assess your team's needs and skills, then choose the right tool or platform. If you need to become more experienced with AI technologies and automation, consider hiring an automation expert to help guide you through the training and transition.

Conclusion

AI and its potential to automate marketing processes today are incredibly promising.

Marketing automation software utilizes machine learning and other AI techniques to facilitate decision-making, increase the efficiency of marketing campaigns, and increase ROI.

With some work and guidance, you can implement AI automation in your organization - riding the wave of this incredible, up-and-coming industry, right into effective marketing tactics.

Any effective marketing automation plan starts with Search Engine Optimization.

If you're looking for SEO tools to help increase your traffic and rank higher on search engine result pages, you can't go wrong with Ranktracker, an all-in-one marketing automation platform for SEO.