Automation & Intelligence: 5 AI Hacks to Supercharge Your Marketing in 2023 | PodMixers.com
By Donald Gray
Hollywood, pop culture, and sci-fi writers worldwide have explored the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for decades. Intelligent machines first appeared in popular culture in the mid-20th century, when sci-fi writers and futurists began imagining the possibilities of machines with human-like intelligence.
Today, AI is no longer limited to science fiction. It's real. It's here. And it's revolutionizing how people and businesses interact with each other as we speak. If you're running a small-to-medium-sized marketing operation and you haven't incorporated AI into these areas of your workflow yet, it's time to automate, optimize, and get your operations up to speed.
Here are 5 AI Hacks you can implement to supercharge your marketing operations today:
1. AI for Customer Segmentation and Targeting
Back in Marketing 101, you learned the importance of segmenting your customer base and crafting targeted messages for each group. Depending on your age, you might remember waiting anxiously for the week's Nielsen charts to track TV viewing patterns or hand-coding customer segmentations and buying preferences with SQL.
In 2023, AI is changing the game for customer segmentation. Instead of relying on manually coded data and regression models, AI algorithms quickly identify customer characteristics and collect the data to create dynamic segmentations in real-time. Marketers can now identify and target customer groups based on their individual preferences with little-to-no lag time.
Here are several of my favorite segmentation and targeting tools today:
Customer.io is an AI-powered customer data platform that allows marketers to create targeted campaigns, segment customers based on behavior, and personalize communications. Customer.io is the best comprehensive messaging platform for marketing teams seeking granular control over messaging and offers a tiered pricing structure with services tailored to SaaS, FinTech, EdTech, and Healthcare Organizations.
Tealium AudienceStream leverages large datasets to provide real-time customer segmentation based on behavior, context, and attributes. Geared towards enterprise-level users and sophisticated marketing teams, AudienceStream offers features such as automatic segmentation, campaign optimization, and data enrichment to deliver better-personalized customer experiences and communications at scale.
Segment by Twilio is an AI-driven customer data platform that integrates a wide range of marketing, sales, and customer success tools, enabling marketers to segment customers quickly based on behavior and attributes. Segment is especially useful for teams with disparate and siloed data sources. It offers an intuitive UI that makes it easy to sync data channels and set up campaigns quickly.
2. Leverage AI for Predictive Analytics
SaaS companies and other organizations in the digital space often collect and store a large amount of customer and industry data to stay competitive. Are you maximizing the value of your company's database?
If you're not investing in predictive analytics, you're missing a huge opportunity to maximize marketing ROI. AI-driven predictive analytics allow you to track customer behavior and anticipate future trends, enabling marketers to get ahead of the curve and make data-driven decisions that drastically improve marketing performance.
Before the advent of machine intelligence, we had to wait for weeks or even months to analyze customer data and generate insights.
Today's AI-powered Predictive Analytics tools allow us to generate insights from customer data, sometimes in real-time. This means that marketers can identify trends, detect anomalies, and create personalized customer experiences in just a matter of minutes.
My go-to solutions for predictive analytics are:
ChatGPT: I'll be diving deeper and exploring some of the revolutionary features that 2023's darling AI offers in another post, but ChatGPT by OpenAi is a fantastic (and free!) predictive analytics platform for small-to-medium-sized marketing teams. In addition to providing powerful Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities, ChatGPT helps marketers detect and predict customer patterns, behaviors, and trends.
ChatGPT's AI-driven insights are invaluable for driving personalized marketing campaigns that can convert prospects and boost customer retention. This platform is handy for startups and mid-sized companies looking to leverage AI without investing in a third-party solution. ChatGPT packs features like predictive customer segmentation, predictive lead scoring, and predictive churn analysis at the free tier for now.
Alteryx: Alteryx is a predictive analytics platform for data and business analysts. It provides a simple and intuitive interface for building predictive models using various algorithms and data sources. The platform delivers advanced visualization and collaboration features and makes sharing insights and predictions easy.
I like Alteryx for early and mid-stage marketing teams because it offers robust predictive modeling capabilities and excellent scalability with cloud-based services. As your team and needs grow, Alteryx can scale with your operation, assisting with everything from marketing automations to engineering optimizations and analytics.
IBM Watson: IBM Watson is a comprehensive AI platform with advanced predictive analytics capabilities. It uses machine learning algorithms and natural language processing to provide predictions and insights on customer behavior, sentiment, and trends across various industries and applications. Suited for larger enterprises and more sophisticated marketing teams, Watson offers features such as automated customer segmentation and campaign optimization while retaining the flexibility you'll need once you're operating at scale.
3. Intelligent Ad Optimization
Are you still manually tweaking ad campaigns? A/B testing is still the hallmark of digital marketing, but it can be tedious and time-consuming. If you're looking to maximize your time and drive better ROI for your campaigns, AI-driven ad optimization is the way to go.
Platforms like Google and Facebook already incorporate AI algorithms to prioritize high-performing ads. Still, you can further optimize your campaigns with machine learning-powered ad optimization tools that provide predictive insights and actionable recommendations.
Platforms like Adzooma, Revealbot, and The Trade Desk can help you tame the chaos of paid ad campaigns by providing insights and recommendations for optimizing your ads. These platforms offer time and budget-saving features like:
Automated bid optimization
Intelligent ad targeting
Multi-channel segmentation
Predictive budget forecasts
Automated ad placement and traffic allocation
Ad optimization platforms offer growing companies a competitive edge to maximize ROI and efficiency across all aspects of digital ad campaigns, allowing even bare-bones marketing operations to compete with the big boys.
4. Let the AI Generate Leads that Convert
Gone are the days of manual lead generation. AI-powered lead management and conversion optimization tools can help you acquire leads that are more likely to convert using predictive insights. Today's top lead-generation platforms leverage machine learning to offer advanced lead-scoring capabilities that assist with automated lead segmentation and personalization. With AI-driven lead generation, you'll be able to generate more qualified leads and create segmented campaigns that can drive a higher conversion rate.
Here are three of the top lead-generation platforms to consider:
1. Leadfeeder – This AI-driven software uses machine learning algorithms to generate and score leads from website visitors. It can detect website visitors from multiple channels and provide personalized messages to convert them into customers. This is an excellent tool for organizations looking to reach a broader range of prospects and boost lead conversion rates because it allows for automated segmentation and personalization tailored to B2B service providers.
2. Leadformly – Like Leadfeeder, Leadformly uses AI and machine learning to optimize lead forms for maximum conversion. This platform also helps marketers create personalized landing pages and email campaigns tailored to their target audience. If you're managing large-scale campaigns, Leadformly's user-friendly UI makes it easy to track and analyze conversions in real-time.
3. LeadCandy – This AI-driven platform helps B2B companies identify high-value leads and prioritize them for outreach. With LeadCandy's powerful lead-scoring capabilities, you can quickly determine which prospects are most likely to convert and create segmented campaigns to target high-value leads with personalized messages.
5. AI-Powered Content Generation
As a writer first and a marketer second, the rise of AI-powered content generators hit close to home. I still love the endless possibilities of a blank page-- whether it's a short story, a blog post, or even a marketing email. I'm confident in my ability to churn out high-performing content in a timely fashion, and until recently, I've been reluctant to accept that the reality for content marketers has also changed.
But if used correctly, AI-driven content generation tools provide an undeniable opportunity for writers and marketers to create high-quality, SEO-optimized content without sacrificing creativity or that 'human touch' that remains ever-important in our increasingly digital world.
Platforms like Automated Insights can help growing marketing teams quickly and efficiently generate engaging ad campaigns, landing pages, and email copy. Writing assistant tools like Jasper.ai and Writesonic can help content marketers (like yours truly) generate compelling short and long-form content even faster.
If you're a writer, it's not time to pack it up and change jobs just yet. This generation of AI content generators won't replace the need for writing talent; they'll help us work more efficiently to produce high-quality content in less time.
In fact, I used Jasper.ai to generate the basic outline of this blog and ChatGPT to conduct research for it. While AI writing assistants have a ways to go before they replace us-- there's a lot left to ask for in terms of tone, voice, and accuracy-- I can report that these tools absolutely saved me time in the ideation, research, and structuring phases of this article. I'll be going in-depth into AI content generators in a separate post, but for now, my parting advice is: