Artificial intelligence is something we all use in the modern day, yet we never really stop to think about how this amazing technology has evolved over just the last decade. The field of study was officially founded in 1956 but, according to Livescience, mentions of robots and artificial intelligence date back to ancient Greek, Egyptian and Chinese times. The first breakthrough in artificial intelligence was made in 1997 when the Deep Blue artificial bot developed by IBM defeated the current grandmaster in chess, Garry Kasparov. Many more breakthroughs were made later on and, today, this type of technology has become part of our daily lives.
There are many examples of how we have adopted artificial intelligence as part of our daily routines. Think about the last time you opened up the app store on your smartphone. The front page of the app store provides you with personalized recommendations. This is an excellent example of artificial intelligence.
Most smartphones today also come equipped with a virtual artificial assistant, such as Siri on Apple’s devices. These artificial assistants can perform certain tasks for you and can provide you with personalized answers based on your input. Games are probably one of the best examples. The characters in games that are not controlled by the player usually utilize some form of artificial intelligence to interact on their own and make their own decisions.
How Artificial Intelligence Fits Into the Business World
Artificial intelligence is not only useful to the average person but can also have benefits for almost any type of business out there. There are different ways in which artificial intelligence can be used by a business — sometimes to increase the productivity of employees, or to increase their exposure on the internet. Many businesses have also adopted artificial intelligence to help them cope with thousands of customer queries without having to hire new employees; thus leading to massive savings. From boosting the results of a standard display advertising campaign to ensuring the business uses the right influencers in a social media outreach campaign — artificial intelligence is now an essential part of digital marketing.
The way businesses are planning and executing digital marketing campaigns has also been affected significantly by artificial intelligence. No longer do businesses need to rely on “estimates,” as they now gain access to more accurate data than they ever had access to before. Businesses are utilizing artificial intelligence during every part of the digital marketing process, from the planning stage, through the production stage and even after the campaign has ended, to help them track the results and identify potential shortcomings. All of this will enable them to improve their future campaigns.
AI in Digital Marketing
To better understand just how much of an impact artificial intelligence can have on a business’s digital marketing strategies, let’s discuss some of the ways this technology can be utilized for a more successful marketing campaign bringing in more customers and making it easier to convert those customers into sales.
1. Search Engine Optimization
Let’s start with one of the most important subjects businesses tackle when it comes to digital marketing — this being search engine optimization. In the beginning, search engine optimization does not have as significant an impact as perhaps paid-per-click advertising would have, but when a business spends some time on optimizing its website, targeting keywords and building good backlinks, it can reach top rankings in Google and get thousands of targeted visitors to its website.
The most significant way in which artificial intelligence is changing the way businesses are planning and executing their search engine optimization strategies comes into play with the latest tools that are readily available to be used, such as SEMRush and WordStream. These tools utilize artificial intelligence to analyze a website’s structure and content, then provide the marketer with personalized solutions to help them rank better in search engines, such as changes they can make to their website, new keywords they can target or backlink, opportunities they can use to get better rankings. According to an article published on Forbes, the particular area where artificial intelligence may be the most useful is the way this technology specifies exactly how a marketer can utilize keywords and other elements in existing content for better performance in Google and, of course, the other major search engines.
2. Ad Delivery
Since paid-per-click advertising is a particular type of marketing technique that businesses tend to utilize excessively, especially when the company’s website is not yet ranking high in search engines, we should also discuss how artificial intelligence is affecting this particular type of digital marketing strategy. There are two primary ways in which artificial intelligence is used in online advertising.
Businesses are now able to provide certain advertising networks, with Google AdWords and Facebook Ads being the most popular examples, with a few keywords, and the artificial intelligence behind these advertising technologies will then automatically suggest the best keywords to target, based on the ones added by the marketer. In some cases, a simple URL of a website would include popular hundreds to thousands of potential keywords to target as the technology can analyze the content of the URL entered and suggested the best keywords to target for attracting visitors to the website.
This isn’t all there is too artificial intelligence and paid online advertising. Once keywords have been decided on, a marketer can input a daily or campaign budget, and the technology will then automatically decide how much the marketer should pay for every click that is sent to their website. This cost can fluctuate during the day — when there is more competition, the technology may allocate more money to each click for the particular marketer to ensure their ads are more visible. Search Engine Land explains that artificial intelligence has evolved to the level where no human interaction is even needed, and the advertising campaign is completely automated by the artificial technology behind the platform.
In addition to the above-mentioned advantages that artificial intelligence brings businesses who are advertising online, we should also note that artificial intelligent technology has been implemented into ad delivery services of many networks — including Google AdWords and Facebook. The technology that was implemented in these networks can analyze data of the visitors — the people to whom ads are displayed — and then draw up and display adverts that will spark an interest to particular visitors; thus offering a more personalized ad experience to the visitors and better value to the advertiser. There are numerous ways in which this particular feature can be beneficial, including with other types of marketing, such as blogger outreach campaigns.
3. Split Testing
Artificial intelligence is also an excellent strategy for split testing different types of campaigns to find what works and what does not work. Many ad networks have already implemented split testing abilities into their artificial technology to help business owners reach more customers without wasting money on advertisements that do not work for them.
A marketer can link multiple ad sets together and then the artificial technology, embedded into the ad network’s platform, will monitor the performance of the ad sets that were linked together. In some cases, with the marketer’s permission, the artificial technology will automatically make some minor adjustments in the campaigns that are running to make them more effective.
In addition to this, the technology will also slow down the campaigns or even stop them in some case if they are not doing well. The ones that are doing well can then be automatically be boosted by the technology so that those ads can be served more frequently to visitors. By doing this, the marketer and the business owner can benefit from the fact that campaigns that are not doing well will not waste them any extra money, and they would not have to continuously check in on the performance of their campaign — which would waste quite a significant amount of time — since the artificial technology will do this for them.
With split testing, marketers can test out different types of ad sets — such as different banners that they had designed to see which banners attract the most visitors, or a variety of headlines and call-to-actions, which helps them identify what type of text they should use when they are compiling new adverts. The results they obtain here can also be used in future advertising campaigns as the marketer can mirror the text and graphics that were present on the most successful past campaigns in new campaigns to ensure they do well from the very first time they are executed.
Conclusion
Technology is rapidly evolving, and artificial intelligence is one particular sector that has seen a lot of attention and development lately. Businesses have also noticed that artificial intelligence can help them increase their reach and revenue, by employing this technology in different sectors of the company.
Digital marketing is one of the best sectors to employ artificial intelligent technology in, offering a business the opportunity to reach the best and widest range of consumers, offer them expertly crafted messages and converting the audience into long-standing customers — without having to hire hundreds of employees to handle the intrigued tasks that artificial intelligence can bring the company.
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