10 Ways AI Can Supercharge Your Marketing Effectiveness
20 March 2024, Jeremy Rosenberg
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a game-changing technology for marketers and content creators seeking innovative approaches to craft marketing campaigns that genuinely resonate with target audiences. From analysing vast datasets to generating content at scale, AI now offers unprecedented opportunities to save time, reduce costs and dramatically boost marketing effectiveness.
This in-depth article explores ten innovative ways AI can transform and enhance your marketing strategy and execution across all phases – some may surprise you:
Marketing Strategy and Testing with AI
1. Market Segmentation
Traditional market segmentation often misses nuanced customer segments or emerging trends by relying on broad categories or simplistic data analysis. AI solves this by analysing billions of data points to identify subtle patterns and preferences invisible to the human eye.
At Wickes, a UK home improvement retail chain, Chief Marketing Officer Gary Kibble pioneered using AI to enhance segmentation. Their “Mission Motivation Engine” AI model analysed three years of customer data, identifying unique segments based on consumer behaviours categorised into “missions” (what customers aim to achieve) and “motivations” (the reasons behind it). This granular behavioural analysis enabled tailoring messaging and recommendations to each segment’s precise needs, fuelling a highly personalised marketing approach that drove over £7 million in incremental revenue within just six months.
2. Audience Personas
Audience personas help marketers better understand their target audience’s behaviours, motivations, challenges and goals for crafting resonant marketing. While traditionally based on data, research and gut instinct, AI is elevating audience persona development with far greater accuracy and depth.
Netflix is a prime example, using sophisticated algorithms to analyse vast data sets of user viewing patterns, searches, content consumption habits and more. This machine learning-based approach uncovers multidimensional psychographic and behavioural insights, translating audience personas from abstract concepts into vivid, actionable profiles. Netflix reported this granular customer understanding reduces churn and increases customer lifetime value by an estimated $1 billion annually.
3. Hyper-personalisation
By using machine learning to analyse troves of customer data like browsing patterns and purchase histories, AI enables businesses to deliver hyper-personalised content, product recommendations and experiences at an unprecedented scale.
Beauty retailer Sephora’s “Color IQ” system uses AI to analyse individual skin tones and provide perfectly matched, personalised product recommendations. For apparel, Marks & Spencer’s acquisition of Thread brings AI-powered styling algorithms that create outfit suggestions tailored to each customer’s preferences, measurements and purchase data.
Taking it further, online styling service Stitch Fix employs AI “stylists” that understand individual tastes through natural language feedback on previous selections. These virtual stylists use nuanced insights to curate clothing options exquisitely personalised to each person’s unique style and fit preferences.
4. Cookieless Marketing
As third-party cookies are being phased out by tech giants like Apple and Google, AI offers a solution for targeted advertising without invasive user data tracking. Major brands are leading this shift:
Procter & Gamble has invested in developing proprietary AI-powered marketing platforms that analyse first-party data like customer purchasing patterns and engagement metrics to create hyper-targeted ad campaigns without third-party cookies.
Similarly, Unilever partners with Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiatives that use machine learning algorithms to cluster consumers into cohorts based on shared interests and online behaviours. This allows targeted advertising for each cohort without tracking individual user data.
Google’s FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) technology exemplifies this privacy-forward approach. It groups users with similar browsing habits into audience cohorts that advertisers can target without accessing any individual’s browsing data.
5. Enhanced Search Engine Optimisation
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is crucial for any effective marketing strategy. AI has emerged as a powerful ally, offering a more intelligent, data-driven approach to enhancing website visibility and search performance.
At HubSpot, an AI content optimisation system analyses existing website and blog content to identify gaps and provide prescriptive recommendations for optimising headlines, meta descriptions, body copy and more to improve search rankings.
AI-powered tools like Clearscope and MarketMuse work similarly – they analyse top-ranking content for specific keywords, then guide creation of new highly optimised pages and content aligned with user search intent and topic clusters.
Generative AI, models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude can directly generate high-quality, SEO-friendly content tailored to specific audiences, search terms and context. This AI-powered content streamlines production of compelling, traffic-driving pages and posts.
6. A/B Testing
A/B testing is critical for optimising marketing performance, but manually creating and analysing test variations is incredibly laborious and time-consuming – until now. Google has pioneered an AI-powered solution through its AI Marketing Optimisation platform.
This machine learning system automatically generates and tests thousands of dynamic ad variations tailored to specific audience segments in real-time. It can adapt ad copy, imagery, videos and landing pages on the fly to continually deliver optimised creative and experiences.
According to a Google case study, fitness company Precor used this to generate over 15,000 ad variations, increasing click-through rates by 25%.
Similarly, Optimizely’s AI Personalisation Engine enables automated A/B testing of countless website experience variations driven by evolving customer data. This allows continuous multivariate optimisation for maximum engagement, conversions and returns.
By automating the testing process and leveraging predictive AI models, businesses can run far more sophisticated optimisation experiments, systematically enhancing campaign performance over time based on evolving customer behaviours and preferences.
Content Creation and Campaign Delivery with AI
7. Brand Consistency
Maintaining a unified, consistent brand identity and tone of voice across all marketing channels and customer touchpoints is critical yet incredibly challenging for most organisations – until generative AI.
Global brands like Coca-Cola use AI tools integrated into Adobe’s Creative Cloud to automatically analyse and replicate their iconic brand colours, fonts, logos and other visual elements with pixel-perfect consistency worldwide.
For tone of voice and messaging consistency, companies adopt AI platforms like Persado, Phrasee and customised language models, agents and assistants, such as OpenAI’s GPTs. These technologies analyse existing marketing materials to deeply understand the brand’s unique personality, voice and communication patterns. They can then generate new, on-brand content that maintains a cohesive voice across all channels and media.
8. Content Generation at Scale
Generative AI is genuinely revolutionising content creation by enabling production of high-quality, multilingual marketing materials at unprecedented scale, vastly greater efficiency and lower costs.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been widely embraced by marketing teams for quickly drafting blog posts, articles, social media updates, email campaigns, product descriptions and more, with minimal human effort. Major brands like Walmart have used ChatGPT to generate tens of thousands of localised ads and content variations.
Microsoft has integrated generative AI into its ubiquitous Office suite through Copilot. This AI assistant provides content creation capabilities directly within Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, as well directly via the Copilot app and website. Early adopters like JPMorgan Chase report productivity gains of 2-3x using Copilot to generate content rapidly.
Similarly, Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude has also seen enterprise adoption for content generation use cases, especially in sectors looking for a slightly more natural style of writing straight out of the box, such as marketing. A major electronics brand successfully used Claude to produce over 10,000 unique product descriptions in just weeks – a task that would have taken human writers months.
9. Visual Content Creation
Generative AI is also transforming visual marketing content production. Tools like OpenAI’s DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion allow marketers to generate stunning, photorealistic images, graphics and illustrations simply by describing the desired output in natural language.
Early adopters like cosmetics brand Glossier used Stable Diffusion to create compelling product visuals and lifestyle imagery. Food giant Heinz used DALL-E to produce eye-catching illustrations for digital marketing campaigns.
For video, new AI tools from Adobe, Runway, and of course OpenAI’s widely-anticipated-but-yet-to-be-launched-to-the-public Sora, are empowering marketers to produce dynamic, broadcast-quality videos at a vastly reduced cost and effort. McKinsey estimates AI will reduce visual content production costs by 60% while increasing output capacity 20%
10. Dynamic Customer Support
By integrating conversational AI like chatbots and virtual assistants, companies are transforming customer service through highly responsive self-service that operates 24/7 at scale.
The buy-now-pay-later fintech giant Klarna recently launched an OpenAI-powered chatbot for its website. Klarna reported it was able to handle ticket volumes equivalent to over 700 full-time agents within its first month, while maintaining customer satisfaction scores on par with human agents and reducing repeat inquiries by 25%. Klarna forecasts it will drive a $40 million profit improvement in 2024.
In aviation, KLM uses Google’s Dialogflow conversational AI system to provide passengers with real-time flight updates, travel info and booking assistance. Similarly, Domino’s Pizza used Dialogflow to build an AI order and tracking bot.
For retail, iconic brand Levi’s rolled out a virtual styling assistant created with Made.ai. This AI chatbot provides personalised outfit recommendations and fit advice tailored to customer preferences and data.
This AI-powered support model resolves most inquiries instantly through self-service while reserving human agents for complex cases – reducing costs while elevating satisfaction standards.
Bonus Innovation: AI Influencers
The rise of AI influencers like Lil Miquela and Lu do Magalu represents an evolution in digital marketing, blurring reality and virtuality. These hyper-realistic virtual personas can personify brand values, engage audiences organically on social media and drive major activations through celebrity/brand partnerships – with full creative control.
As generative AI capabilities advance, AI influencers offer a glimpse into a future where virtual and physical brand experiences converge seamlessly for innovative storytelling and audience engagement. That future may be nearer than you think: an Influencer Marketing Hub Benchmark Report in 2022 asked whether the respondents intended to use artificial intelligence during the year as part of their influencer campaigns. 62.9% said they would use AI tools, and a further 25.4% thought they may.
In Summary
AI is far more than an automation tool – it’s a strategic partner unlocking new approaches to creativity, personalisation, efficiency and ROI impact that are fundamentally reshaping the marketing landscape. While the possibilities seem boundless, the core limitation is whether you have the vision and skills to make effective use of these powerful new technologies.
This blog post was written by AI consultant, Jeremy Rosenberg. To help you navigate the fast-moving world of AI in marketing and content creation, Emarketeers offers AI courses and resources tailored specifically for, yes, you’ve guessed, marketers and content creators. The “AI for Marketers” and “AI for Content Creators” courses provide practical insights, real-world examples and hands-on training to help you integrate AI into your marketing strategies and content creation processes.
