If you ever had any reservations about the use of AI in digital marketing, let's get that out of the way first. A digital marketing strategy focuses on an engaging user experience which may result in direct sales or brand loyalty. To create this environment where each consumer experience is more or less customized, a digital marketer needs to study the relevant data, analyse it and strategize accordingly. Enter AI, with an ability to collect, analyse, apply the data and furthermore, even learn from it. No wonder AI has become a close confidante of any digital marketing strategy. According to a survey by Salesforce, 51% of marketing leaders have already deployed AI in their strategies and 27% more are intending to start soon! Another report suggests that by 2020, customers will be able to manage 85% of their relationships without having to interact with a human at organizations. See the trend?

AI is only an umbrella name for many micro-technologies like Machine Learning, Predictive Analysis, Natural Language Processing, Robotics, Speech recognition/processing etc. What we need to understand is that different technologies prove to be productive for different layers of our digital marketing strategy. Let us look at how these enhance the 5 social media tools that are the most basic-

Social Media

What is social media if not targeting particular demographics basis their online behaviour? This is the single most important input for targeted campaigns. Nothing new here, right? Well, artificial neural networks can take this up a notch and intelligently analyse unstructured data too. They have an uncanny ability to extrapolate the vaguest of patterns and get you trends/results. This helps organizations immensely as customized feeds are created basis the customer's interactions online. Social Media, without a doubt, is the first and the most important channel of communication today and this fact has been supported by The Economist's survey too.

With predictive analytics and propensity modelling, AI can transform the face of social media when deployed intelligently. In fact, it is being done as we speak. This depth of analysis is practically not possible by a human.

Email Marketing

Or as we all call it, spam. And exactly for this reason, organizations are more inclined towards generating email content so customized that garnering clicks is no longer a roadblock. With Machine Learning, it is possible to understand which days of the week, what hours of a day and at what frequency is the user available for email checking. Also, what kind of a subject line will make it more interesting for a particular reader. In short, personalizing emails to the minutest thread possible. As per the various tools available for this application of AI, the content generated is almost 90-100% more cognitively relatable than that generated by a human being.

Chatbots

"Hi, I am Tara. How can I help you today?", is a probable pop-up you will encounter on mostly every website. Although, a lot of them stick to closed-ended questions; some of them also deploy NLP and ML to analyse and answer correctly some of the open-ended questions. The thing to note here is that many customers might still start the chat assuming that the discussion won't be fruitful. Nonetheless, this makes it easier for the bot to impress a customer as well. A bot, if engaged with, can provide the best Ux in terms of affability and handle all kinds of customers with equal grit. Bots can be your sales representatives too, if used correctly.

Searches

Gone are the days where stickiness was a direct function of SEO, and why should it be? While home assistants like Alexa are revolutionizing searches, Google recently in its report stated that today more than 70% of its searches do not involve keywords but are more conversational and natural. Here, voice searches are the next big trend basis NLP. For any brand to bridge the gap with the consumer, it will have to study voice search data and deploy AI to make trends out of the natural keywords used.

Content Generation/Curation

Yes, we know what you are thinking. This blog couldn't have been written by an AI application. Yes, true but 80% of this blog's content could have been curated by AI. And why just blogs? Content curation can be a part of recommendations on various apps too. How do you think Amazon knows which product would you be interested in next? For content generation, organizations use previously manufactured templates in order to get the best results and this comes in very handy for publications or even online new channels.

Let's talk business. What do you think happens to your productivity scale when AI is deployed to do data-menial jobs in your organization? It goes up, because employees are engaged in more strategic work. What do you think happens to the ROI? It goes up because your campaigns are now scientifically more on-point and will produce better conversions. AI is not the future anymore, it is fast becoming the present; so, the sooner we catch up with it, the better fruits we shall bear!