A Simple, Easy Way to Understand AI Marketing

You’ve heard the term AI marketing (or Marketing AI) sufficiently I’m sure this last year. And you’ve experienced AI using Alexa or Siri, and you like how responsive and smart AI responses seem to be.

But what does Artificial Intelligence do in marketing and what are the software platforms used? You’ll find insight into all of that here on my blog beginning with this post. You can move on to SEO, content, sales funnel solutions.

Right now, as we move past the devastation of the Covid 19 recession, you might be rethinking where your business is headed and how you can get more done with less. Where it’s headed is with better specialist talents combined with AI marketing. So why don’t delve into it now?

No Boring Technical Descriptions

Some definitions of AI marketing are extremely technical. They seem bent on drawing you into the realm of programming, data science and machine learning and so on. Not only is that boring, it’s irrelevant for us. We’re not interested in designing AI tools, apps, and platforms ourselves.

We want the sales and marketing benefits — leads and revenue.

When we ask, what is artificial intelligence marketing, we want to know to know what it’ll do for us.

AI Marketing Defined:   Artificial Intelligence Marketing describe the data guided process that AI software uses to match your marketing content to the customer’s journey — to anticipate and personalize their future experience on your website.

 

Mapping your Content to Your Customer’s Journey

AI marketing software helps serve your content and messages to your prospects like they were dining at a 5 star restaurant.

Your Content is Your Conversion Funnel

The artificial intelligence system optimizes the customer journey with its ability to respond to each visitor, almost as though in a human way. We couldn’t do that before, which is why most of the content, promotions, and calls to action worked poorly, and conversion rates stayed at only 1% to 2%. That’s horrible and frustrating. Why would anyone be happy with that?

You can’t yell out to a big audience with a canned speech and make an impact on each person. AI’s promise is to help you speak to each individual visitor and give them exactly what they want. Our new definition then becomes “a process of serving a personalized customer experience and know what to serve next.”

AI marketing helps you become more relevant, trusted, and impactful for each visitor while helping you anticipate their next step to becoming your customer.

AI marketing platform publishers however do advise that you or your AI marketing specialist must guide the software to achieve this. It may be artificial intelligence but the really ingenious stuff is still done by your creative marketing specialists.  However, the software is delivering some great benefits.

Is This Really Artificial Intelligence?

Is there really autonomous artificial intelligence baked into the software apps or is it a bunch of bunk?

It’s mostly just machine learning, which the software companies brand as “AI driven solutions.” Real AI is where the software is autonomous and discovers, tests and learns on its own. Claiming this is overstating it.

Just accept that these platforms can elevate your marketing and help a specialist achieve great marketing outcomes. Even your AI marketing consultant will look like a genius!

The AI marketing software companies are claiming some successes and we can have faith that improvement and success is inevitable.

Now that you’re aware of what AI marketing is, you can begin exploring how you might apply it to your content marketing, copywriting strategy, SEO strategy, and sales conversion strategy.

Top AI Marketing Solutions

We’re all excited about the advanced AI marketing tools available including AI SEO software.  New software dedicated to SEOContentSales, and even stock market investing are worth investigating.

The State of Artificial Intelligence marketing is big and advancing.  Yet, what makes one small business AI marketing software the best? And are they ready for prime time? When should you consider adoption? Likely, very soon!

Since hitting your marketing and sales goals is job #1, a solution that helps you do the things you can’t might be tops. These AI driven solutions can autonomously deliver the exact content, response, or call to action at the right time. Those who put off learning and adoption might regret it soon.

Your Goal: Autonomous AI Software

Autonomous AI software is the ultimate marketing tool for an AI marketing agency.  It gives you insights (predictive analytics) to help you deliver customers what they need in real time (predictive analytics).  How, let’s not forget you must still create that impressive content.

The best AI marketing solution makes visualizing, creating and delivering that ultimate customer experience easier.

Full Service Or Specialized Niches?

There are full service AI marketing solutions, which are typically what we all want.  That’s because the goal is to leverage AI and automation in the software to optimize our complete marketing campaigns.

There are also specialized niche solutions that can help with your email, content, lead scoring, personalization, analytics, and more. Various developers have focused on service/feature niches which they’re strong in, and for those tasks that marketers need the most help with. They offer solutions based on their own strengths, customer base, niche markets, and cost to develop.

The value of niche AI app specializations is debatable though.  The push has to be to full autonomous AI for all channels — letting the software integrate and optimize all channels and media is what’s ultimately wanted. The point is to wean off of manual marketing, fragmented solutions, and get the full spectrum of powerful benefits of artificial intelligence controlled testing, learning and optimization.

Let’s Look At The 4 Best AI Solutions

This collection of the best AI marketing solutions is about as much as you’ll want to explore at this point. Take it one solution at a time and avoid getting overwhelmed.

These are your top contenders, each with their strengths and weaknesses, limitations and potential.

Those solutions who focus on being an autonomous AI marketing service agent are the ones to dig into. The goal is to leverage the full power of AI to improve your customer experience through any channel, and to guide the optimization of your content — which is how value is delivered online.

In the end, it’s all about gaining insight into content effectiveness in search rankingscontent strategy, social reach, customer engagement, personalization, action, sales and customer loyalty, and improving it continuously for maximum customer lifetime value.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Einstein

G2 rating: 4.0 out of 5.

Salesforce, headquartered in San Francisco, California is the world’s leader in corporate CRM. The company’s focus has always been sales and CRM is the path. Given the ultra-affordable monthly subscription rates, it might seem a no-brainer to try them out.

Customers typically don’t Salesforce because they’re confused about the company and the product (focused on sales people). However Salesforce is big into AI and should be able to offer big benefits to small companies on a limited budget.

Salesforce offers Marketing Cloud Einstein which integrates with other Salesforce products. The value proposition is to deliver the right content, to the right audience, on the right channel, at the exact right time with AI right where you work.

The feature that helps you monitor social media activity and deliver the right message to the right time to your connections shouldn’t be ignored. Their system can detect opportunities for you to nurture your connections at key moments.

Marketing Cloud Einstein offers a predictive content recommendation, engagement scoring, customer experience analytics and optimization features. All very useful for your purpose.

Marketo Marketing Automation Software

G2 rating: 4.1 out of 5.

Marketo has been around for sometime now is recognized as one of the top marketing automation solutions. Their software’s capabilities include automation of email, social media, digital advertising, and account based marketing.

You can set up a lead scoring and nurturing campaign to improve your sales funnel results. And you can have Marketo scan your content, which allows you to choose which content will get recommended to specific types of customers.

As we know, each customer is individual, which is why we need our AI marketing software to recommend content to satisfy each visitors quest.

Marketo is still a useful marketing automation solution which may want to try first before you invest in an AI marketing solution.

Albert Artificial Intelligence Marketing

G2 rating: not rated.

Albert is an autonomous AI marketing assistant, exactly what you’re looking for. The company is working to create a solution that takes all the tough, mechanical work of marketing away from you, and let the AI solution optimize the customer journey and sales growth.

“Albert manages campaigns in your existing search, social and programmatic accounts, giving you full visibility. Always aware of the entire landscape, he analyzes the unanalyzable, taking purposeful action and flexibly optimizing against your business goal.

Albert tests and learns using complex, multivariate calculations at machine pace and scale.
Albert reports discoveries he has acted on and also offers recommendations for items outside of his “AI guardrails,” that require action from his human colleagues ” — from Albert Overview paper.

The fact that Albert AI can act autonomously on key analytics insights and predict customer needs is one of the most important facts:

Albert is one of the more interesting AI marketing solutions, but in my conversations with them, a number of weaknesses showed up such as that it works only on the Google marketing stack. That might actually work well for most marketers. With every powerful benefit, we have to give something up.

Despite that, and the fact Albert was focusing on big businesses, this is a software to pay attention to. Albert is trying to be exactly what we want — an autonomous, learning, testing, optimizing personal AI agent.

They advised me that they were working on an SMB version of their AI marketing solution which is very smart, given the bigger potential of small business.

Blueshift AI Marketing Solution

G2 rating: 4.2/5

Blueshift AI offers 5 AI powered services including 360 customer view, cross channel journeys, AI powered recommendations, predictive segmentation, and trigger based automation.

Blueshift provides a customer data activation platform that helps marketers deliver more relevant and timely one-to-one personalized messages at scale. Blueshift enables organizations to gain a full view of their customers, including historic and real-time behaviors, and provides marketers with accessible predictive intelligence and campaign tools to orchestrate individualized customer journeys across channels and introduce intelligent automation throughout the customer life cycle — from Forrester report — The Total Economic Impact™ Of Blueshift

Their solution helps you create customized automated campaigns and personalize content delivery on the website, apps, ads, or via email. Predictive recommendation on content delivery is a big benefit. For Facebook, Blueshifts’  custom audience feature allows you to do cross channel integration for a more complete view of how your customers enter your site and engage with content.

Blueshift’s value proposition is summarized as: Marketer-accessible AI lets you continuously optimize WHO you target, WHAT you tell them, WHEN you reach them, and WHERE you connect.

One of Blueshift’s biggest customers is Zumper rental software, and they’ve reported impressive results using their personalization and recommendation engine which more than doubled CTR rates and 3x the growth of lead submissions.

Personalizing For The Absolute Best Customer Experience

What the success of these solutions indicates is the importance of content personalization. The software helps guide and recommend content delivery for any channel.

What the software does not do, is create content. The creative elements of copywriting, video, graphics and search engine optimization are not even on the product radar. Instead, what each service does is to help designers, content strategists, copywriters, and SEO pros understand better what is working. Predictive analytics is a huge benefit.

Each has its own dashboards, learning processes, features, pricing strategy, and more to contend with, but there’s no doubt they can take your marketing and sales to the next level.

Bookmark this page as I’ll review other premium entrants in the AI marketing software arena. It’s an exciting time in online marketing — the AI marketing revolution. If you’re a stock market investor, take a close look at AI stock forecasting software and services. They’re showing promise too.

How do you choose the right AI marketing software solution for your business? The best approach is to use spreadsheet with a weighted ranking of all the features/benefits you need.

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