The avoidance of AI in our everyday lives is becoming less and less possible as we realise the importance of embracing this technology to stay ahead and utilise this tool for a greater impact than traditional data analytics at a human level to marketers’ advantage.
In digital marketing, we’ve been lucky enough to be at the cutting edge of these technologies for over a decade. It all started when Urchin launched its first website tracking capabilities, which have now evolved into Google Analytics, and when the largest tech companies in the world moved from a chronological feed to a curated experience for every individual. These significant advancements in analytics and AI allowed marketers to understand their customers and meet them where they are from their fingertips without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on research.
At its core, marketing is the process of communicating with people to increase the likelihood that they buy a company’s products or services. To do this well, businesses need to excel at two things:
- Finding people who are most likely to buy their products and services.
- Creating messages (in different advertising mediums) that resonate with these people.
For the past decade, 90% of AI and analytics efforts have been focused on finding the right people for a target audience, but the delivery of messaging and creative testing relied upon the minds of the marketing team. This all changed in the last two years when OpenAI opened up its generative AI model, ChatGPT, which was accessible to all. Following on from this language model-based chat boy, a new team of AI products and services flourished and very quickly became tailored into tools for speeding up content production and developing and curating marketing messages.
Previously, the required resources were one of the largest barriers to creating large-scale personalised marketing messages. This limited most companies to small variations of messages based on CRM data (names, companies, industries, etc.). Now, with a single prompt entered into an AI Chatbot, a business can create 40 different variants of a graphic or video that would have previously taken weeks of a designer’s time and brain space.
To give it a go, you can take an existing creative you have right now and drop it into an app like photoroom and instantly create these different variants using generative AI. Render them out, and you’re good to go.
Want to test a few variants of the copy? Ask Meta’s AI or Claude for 10 different copy variants (short and long in length) for your Facebook Ad and let the algorithm test their performance. To help the algorithm, you can always give examples in your prompts from previous ads that have performed well.
Looking ahead to 2024 and beyond, there are two key ways businesses can integrate AI and analytics to stay ahead:
1. Dynamic Content Personalisation: AI can analyse vast amounts of customer data in real time, allowing businesses to create hyper-personalised content that adapts to users’ behaviour and preferences.
Imagine an email campaign where the content dynamically changes based on the recipient’s latest interactions with your brand. This level of personalisation can significantly boost engagement and conversion rates.
2. Creative Testing: With AI, businesses can generate 100 variants of a creative idea quickly and cost-effectively. This allows for extensive A/B testing of different designs, messages, and formats before committing significant resources to a full-scale campaign.
By identifying the most effective creative elements early, businesses can ensure their marketing efforts are both impactful and efficient. This reduces the risk of spending thousands on a concept that hasn’t been proven to resonate with customers.
Now, it’s all good to sit and think about AI as a “good in theory” idea, however, I challenge each of you to start being a practitioner today. Here’s a challenge:
- Pick an upcoming marketing campaign, take your target audience, and try to generate 10 different creative variants using only AI tools. See what you come up with.
- If you’re feeling even more adventurous, test 5 of them in the market and see how they respond.
By starting to integrate these AI-driven strategies now, you’ll enhance your marketing efforts and create more meaningful and effective connections with your customers, driving growth and success in an increasingly competitive market. If you don’t, your competitors will.
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