There has been a revolution in the digital marketing space, thanks to marketing automation. Marketers have become way more productive, successful and efficient with the help of automation. However, on the downside, the automation process still relies on manual inputs to a large degree. For instance, a lot of companies have marketing teams that spend time drafting digital marketing updates, writing emails, managing the paid ads budget, and carrying out keyword research, etc. However, a lot of the above- mentioned tasks can be carried out with the help of automation.
Let us have a look at the difficulties that are faced currently in marketing automation without AI.
- Understanding the Audience: Without AI, it becomes really difficult to understand the customers and what would resonate with them. But with the help of AI, it is certainly possible to know your target audience and analyze their buying habits. Based on such decisions, businesses can plan their strategies carefully.
- Creating Strategies for Marketing Campaigns: The marketing firms have to currently think as to what works and what won’t. The entire process of creating strategies is based on guesswork which is certainly not reliable. On the contrary, when automation marketing is coupled with AI, the process of creating targeted ads become easier as information is derived from data.
- Redundancy of Tasks: There are a lot of mundane and redundant tasks in marketing activities. Resources have to spend hours trying to manage repetitive tasks. The AI algorithm makes it possible to automate all such tasks so that a lot of time is saved. Employees can then focus on other important aspects.
Slow Growth: In the current scenario, the growth of the company has become a really slow process considering the facts like a variety of tasks and very little time. With the help of AI, marketing automation becomes very feasible. This means that the revenue generation is also increased.
Competitors Data: It can get gruesome to find out what the competitors are up to without any intelligence. One has to spend a lot of effort and resources in finding the information manually. With the help of AI, this task becomes way easier as all the information can be gained through machine learning. One can then devise a counter-strategy to stay at par with the competitors.
Manual Chats: Customer interaction is one of the most important aspects of any sales funnel. Due to the lack of AI, it becomes extremely difficult to provide around the clock support to users. With chatbots, the entire process becomes seamless.
Struggling With Lead Generation: When it comes to lead generation, marketers can generate accurate leads with the help of AI. Although, currently there is no clarity on how exactly it can be improved.
Slow Data Processing: Processing a chunk of data manually can be a very tough task and one surely needs AI to make this easier. AI would not only process data faster but would derive useful information out of it.
Handling Social Media: It gets difficult to manage multiple social media channels manually. Especially, when they have different nuances. Posting relevant content within time can also become a task.
Creating Relevant Content: It becomes difficult to stay up to the mark and always have post ideas for social media platforms. With the help of AI-driven tools, marketers can now create a repository of content topics. They can also get content written through certain platforms and outsource the entire function. This gives teams a chance to focus on other aspects.
The Efficiency of Work: Marketing teams struggle with work delegation. It becomes difficult to gauge how efficiently a task is done.
Customer Needs: These days, marketing teams struggle to find exactly what the customer is looking for. Without this information, it becomes tricky to create relevant content. This issue is resolved with artificial intelligence.
Advertising Spend Leakages: When companies are manually managing the ad words, there is less scope of finding out what is working and what is not. Moreover, in many cases, marketers end up losing a lot of money because of the lack of AI.
Thus, the aforementioned problems can be easily solved if AI is integrated with marketing automation. There have been various innovations in the field of marketing automation and new updates are introduced every single day. That being said, people need to come up with AI tools that can be added to core marketing technology. Here are the top common marketing tasks which can be done with the help of marketing automation.
Finding Content Ideas
Content marketing is typically done after brainstorming on the work that has been done in the past, topics that are currently trending, and a comparison with what competitors are doing. However, when it comes to AI, it uses a different approach for the same. There are solutions like Curata that finds out what type of topics will be the most appropriate for a certain type of audience. You would also get a fair idea of keywords that you can use in the content.
Currently, a lot of time and effort is given by the in-house marketing teams for such activities. With the advent of AI and the integration of processes, the work can become faster than ever before. Another tool that is helpful in this regard is Buzzsumo as it will give keyword suggestions based on the social share volume. Thus, half of your work is done and you can focus on the other tasks.
Getting Content Written
Writing content takes incredible time for any digital marketing endeavor. With the help of the right tools, it is now possible to delegate the content writing to someone else. This way, you can focus on promoting the content and discussing further strategy. There are online platforms such as Scripted wherein the businesses are connected with the freelance content writers. The platform works with the help of AI. The samples of writers are analyzed and the requirement is mapped with the best writer accordingly. This certainly reduces all the time and efforts the marketing team has to put in for producing fresh content.
Moreover, some tools help in the automation of content. You can generate stories out of data with the help of natural language generation technology. Some firms already use these tools to augment their digital marketing operations.
Optimizing and Personalizing Content
Content optimization is crucial for the effectiveness of any digital marketing campaign. Once you know exactly what type of content you have to make, you can then optimize it. There are tools like MarketMuse which help you create graphs against your content inventory. With the help of prioritized content plans, you would know exactly how you should go about promoting it.
Apart from optimization, marketing automation also helps in personalizing the content. Your audiences would see content that is most relevant to them so that you can generate good ROI from every asset. For instance, CaliberMind is a tool that you can use to create buyer personas. It also recommends you what type of content would be suitable for these personas. With the help of such tools, you can generate more traffic and leads than ever before. Similarly, OneSpot is another such platform that personalizes the content depending on user behavior and context. All these aspects help your team in getting more work done within less time.
Managing Ad Campaigns
Ad creation is a task in itself and it surely needs a lot of planning and strategizing. Moreover, managing ads is a tough job for which a lot of dedicated attention is needed. Usually, ad campaign management is done by the in-house team members wherein they have to handle a myriad of tasks. Thanks to artificial intelligence, these tasks can now become easy. There are tools such as Adgorithms which help your marketing team by creating segments and carrying out cross-channel execution. The optimization is also done with the help of this tool.
Likewise, when the content is created for any social media campaign, it is important to test the content which is present in it. Cortex is a tool that can be used to predict how the content will be received by the consumers. The tool also has tips about when the content should be posted and suggests about the aesthetics that should be kept in mind.
Managing Social Media Updates
It goes unsaid that digital marketing involves a lot of post sharing on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It is quite important to always keep the posts ready for updating and scheduling and that helps immensely. Using platforms such as Hubspot enables users to carry out mass scheduling. Moreover, it also helps in understanding the user reaction to certain posts and knowing what time is the best for posting on a certain platform. With this insight, the impact of every post increases automatically.
Reviewing Analytics
Marketers spend a lot of time interpreting reports from Google Analytics for their clients as well as executives. With the help of AI, this task can get simpler. Data tools such as PaveAI go through 16 million combinations of your analytics to come up with recommendations as well as insights. Apart from this, a Google Analytics report is also generated to give an in-depth idea.
Benefits of Combining AI and Marketing Automation
- In the present scenario, several organizations struggle to manage all their variety of marketing efforts. Not only is this time consuming, but also affects productivity as a lot of resources are needed for the same. With the help of automation marketing, you can ensure that the errors are reduced and the work is done within the least possible time.
- Most of the in-house marketing teams have employees with a dedicated role. For instance, in a team of ten members, if there are four content writers, then, they would only be writing content and thus the work distribution is not even. In the same case, if the same writing task is allocated to a freelancer who works from a distance, then the resources can be utilized in a much better way. AI plays an important role in mapping out the requirement and finding suitable candidates. Thus, overall productivity also increases.
- With the advent of digital marketing, there is a lot of advertising that takes place. Every company tries to make their best impression and goes aggressive with the marketing approach. However, in doing so, a lot of companies often end up losing perspective. They fail to understand how relevant the content is for the audiences. As a result, marketing efforts go in vain. AI can come in handy in such a case as it helps in finding the right programs for the right type of audience.
- Customer delight is the goal of any digital marketing campaign. Using AI along with marketing automation can turn out to be helpful. By creating the right strategies, one can make the audiences relate to what is being posted on all the social platforms. This results in business growth and you are more likely to derive better outcomes. One also gets to measure the results of all their endeavors when it comes to marketing automation. With such useful tools, you are sure to get the desired results faster.
- Data is the backbone of any social media marketing activity. It has become really easy these days to derive useful insights from all the data that is available. When you add AI to marketing automation, you can optimize a lot of user experiences with the utmost ease. The data can be used to derive strategies that would help generate more traffic and promote the brand on a larger scale.
Things to Know While Implementing Marketing Automation and AI together
From the above-mentioned argument, it is clear how well AI and marketing automation can help you once they are coupled together. However, even before you go ahead and experiment with the variety of tools out there, you must know the best practices which will come in handy.
- Test First Before Going All-in: You might be fascinated with what a tool can do for your marketing firm and would want to get started right away. However, it is always a good idea to start small and test it out before you take up the premium version. Most of the tools have a free trial which you can test to check if it works as per your business requirements. Also, check if it integrates with the existing technology.
- Invest in People as Well: Even though AI is automatic, it also needs humans to run certain functionalities. Moreover, humans can also make the program better which is why you should focus on training your staff for the online tools. While you focus on getting cutting edge technology on board, do not forget about the people who would be using or implementing it.
- Know Your Exact Requirement: As mentioned earlier, you should only invest in the tools and technology which would benefit your business. It is advisable to first ask the internal team members about the areas in which they are struggling to know what type of tools you would need. Once the team reaches a consensus, you can introduce a new tool and check if it works well for your specific requirement. If you do not think that it works well, you can always switch to a better and more relevant tool. Make sure that you train your team members as to how you can use the same.
Thus, with the help of AI, you can easily make the marketing automation practice more effective and productive. Several companies have already implemented data solutions to assist marketing efforts. Below are the top trends that might be big in this year that you should watch out for.
- Visual and Voice Search: The trend of carrying out searches with the help of visual and voice search is promising this year. Users prefer technology that gives faster results and voice searches are going to be popular. Marketers who are aware of such trends are making the content suitable to be discovered through voice search. Similarly, voice search is also becoming the next big thing. With the advent of all these technologies, marketers need to up their game.
- Improving Leads With Predictive Analysis: With the help of this technology, the leads are scored using factors like online posts, social information and the like to know whether the lead is qualified or not. This helps in improving the lead generation as the content is delivered to the exact people who would benefit from it. This saves a lot of time which would have been spent in finding out the useful leads and then targeting them.
- A Common Marketing Strategy: Users these days use a variety of devices and it is the responsibility of any marketer to make the content visible for them. To make the most of any opportunity, marketing has to be done such that it is relevant for every channel. This way, all sorts of customers are catered to. According to researchers, it is very crucial to have an omnichannel strategy for the success of any marketing campaign.
Thus, there are a variety of ways in which AI can be integrated with marketing automation. With time, there will only be more ways using which marketers will find it easy to apply the tools. This would make the entire work simpler and faster. Combining marketing automation with AI will prepare businesses to face future opportunities and make more profit than ever before.
DvSum is one such firm that uses AI to augment marketing automation. It provides an array of products and services which would help you improve the quality of your data, save the customer data accurately, and reduce the operational costs on databases significantly. With the help of their strategically crafted products and services, you can generate more ROI and take your business to greater heights.
