As we recently discussed, the artificial intelligence revolution is upon us – and it continues to ramp up almost daily.
The advancements made in AI tech over the recent years have been highly beneficial to marketing teams around the world.
On just a surface level, AI enables marketing teams to become more productive. By today’s standards, even the most rudimentary AI tools can allow marketing teams to create more output while minimizing production costs.
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That’s all well and good – but there’s much more to the big picture, here.
Today’s AI-powered technology doesn’t just help marketing teams do “more of the same”. Rather, modern AI has paved the way for the modern marketer to evolve their processes across the board.
This has ushered in a new era of marketing. This era is marked by four AI-powered emerging trends – which will be discussing throughout this article.
Hyper-Personalization and Hyper-Segmentation
The “segment of one” has long been the Holy Grail of marketing.
And with good reason: As a 2018 report from Evergage shows, providing a personalized experience to your customers is key to increasing acquisition, engagement, conversion, and retention rates.
Of course, it’s near-impossible to provide a truly personalized experience to each of your customers – at least not without the help of AI. As AI technology continues to improve, so, too, are brands’ hyper-personalization and hyper-segmentation efforts.
First of all, AI has revolutionized the data analytics game. With AI in the driver’s seat, here, marketers can collect, organize, and analyze more data than ever before – and do it all in a fraction of the time it used to take.
More than that, AI and machine learning technology enable modern analytics tools to uncover data and information that had previously gone unnoticed. This can lead to the creation of innovative experiences for your customers, as well as the creation of new and more accurate audience personas to target in the first place.
(This, to be sure, is a huge step toward being able to create the coveted “segment of one”.)
Artificial intelligence also allows for the delivery of a dynamic experience to individual customers, in a few different ways:
- Dynamic content
- Dynamic advertisements
- Dynamic pricing
Here, AI uses all available data to understand the context of a certain customer engagement – and use this context to automatically deliver laser-focused content, ads, or promotions to the individual as needed.
AI takes all this even further, allowing for omnichannel delivery of these offers and experiences, as well. This, in turn, will give your team better insight into which channels to focus on moving forward – and how to use them to effectively engage with your customers.
The Takeaway
AI has enabled marketing teams to provide a highly-personalized experience to their customers – both automatically and manually.
As AI tech continues to improve and attending to the “segment of one” becomes more of a reality, the modern consumer will begin to expect such individualized service from the brands they do business with.
Those that manage to do so are going to quickly find themselves way ahead of their competition in the years to come.
Realtime Marketing via Micro-Moments
As you surely know, the modern consumer can be pretty impatient.
In fact, Hubspot found that up to 90% of consumers expect an “immediate” response when they reach out to their favorite brands for assistance. On top of that, Salesforce reports that 45% of consumers will switch brands if said team is unable to proactively anticipate their immediate needs.
More than just being quick when engaging with their customers, marketers also need to pack as much value as possible into every one of these engagements. Unfortunately, falling short just once in this regard can cause a customer to think less of your brand moving forward.
As we touched on in the last section, AI enables marketing teams to provide for their customers more quickly and effectively than ever before.
For one, AI can supercharge your approach to creating behavioral triggers (and accompanying content/promotions). This goes back to using AI-powered analytics software to understand what to offer your customers at various points along their customer lifecycle.
AI can also simulate human-to-human engagements between your customers and your brand. As AI technology becomes more advanced, chatbots, conversational landing pages, and the like will continue offering more human-like interactions – leading to a more personal and personable experience in the eyes of your customers.
And, again, AI brings more data to the table than ever before. With all this data on-hand at all times, marketers and other customer-facing team members will always have the information they need to optimize the actual human-to-human interactions they have with your customers.
The Takeaway
When it comes to engaging with the modern consumer, every second counts, and every moment matters.
As AI enables marketers to better capitalize on the micro-moments that are so crucial to the overall customer experience, this, too, will become a major expectation of the modern consumer.
More than just catering to the micro-moments that already exist, we’ll likely see brands begin creating new reasons to engage with their audience (and vice-versa) throughout their journey. If your team is able to anticipate (and even proactively provide for) your customers’ needs at all times, you’ll quickly be seen as the go-to brand in your industry.
VSEO: Voice and Video Search Engine Optimization
Depending on who you ask, VSEO means either voice- or video-SEO.
In both cases, the concept stems from the evolution of AI’s evolving ability to understand more than just textual information:
- Video SEO acknowledges that search engines are learning to crawl through and discern meaning from audio, video, and visual content posted on the web
- Voice SEO acknowledges that search engines are learning to better understand spoken search queries
Here, it’s not so much about marketers using AI, but in being aware of how it’s affecting their content’s visibility.
When optimizing video content for search, marketers now need to go beyond the typical titles, descriptions, scripts, and meta tags that have been the focus for years. On top of all these things, we’ll now need to start thinking of our video content in the same way we think of our text-based content.
As for individual video content, optimizing for video SEO now means:
- Structuring the content in a clear and comprehensive manner
- Providing both visual and audible cues throughout the content
- Ensuring the equipment used creates high-quality content
In terms of the overall approach to video content marketing, we’ll now need to create video pillars and clusters that interlink with one another. With regard to AI, the more robust your video content catalog, the more attention it will get from tomorrow’s search engines.
For example, SEO guru Brian Dean owns the top three video results for the search term “video SEO 2020 examples.”
Content marketers are also adapting to AI-powered improvements to voice SEO in a number of ways:
- Delivering clear and concise information in-text to snag the snippet (or so-called “rank zero”)
- Using more conversational longtail keywords to match spoken search queries
- Creating both longform pillar content and more concise and targeted cluster content
Again, the goal is to cater to the individual as needed at any given moment – regardless of the format of your content or the channel it’s being delivered on.
The Takeaway
Again, as AI evolves, so, too, will best practices for search engine optimization.
And it’s not just that the best practices of yesterday and today will go out the window. Rather, we’re going to see brands build on these past practices to ensure their content remains highly visible for their target audience.
On that note, we’re certainly bound to see AI-powered SEO tools continue to emerge and evolve as time goes on, as well. So, in addition to amending your approach to SEO, overall, you’ll also need to stay up to date with the newest tools that will ensure your team’s efforts are leading your company in the right direction.
Internet of Things (IoT) Marketing
The Internet of Things has been around for years now – and continues to connect our world in ways that felt like science fiction mere decades ago.
A few quick stats:
- The number of in-home IoT devices is expected to explode to 86 billion worldwide by the end of this year
- 127 new IoT-ready devices are connected every second
- Consumer electronics will account for 63% of all IoT devices within the next year
IoT and AI technology go hand-in-hand in many ways – all for the purpose of supercharging the modern brand’s ability to engage with and provide value to their customers.
Firstly, many brands have begun adding IoT connectivity to their digital and non-digital products, alike. This can give marketing teams a glimpse of the “hidden” parts of the customer’s experience with said product. Brands selling consumables, for example, will gain a much clearer idea of how (and how often) their products are used within the home.
(As we said earlier, this is where AI-powered data analytics tools come into play.)
In addition to simply collecting this data, IoT and AI tech team up to enable brands to deliver proactive service and support in real-time. From automating replenishment orders to delivering right-place-right-time offers based on product usage, physical location, and other factors, IoT and AI are paving the way for brands to deliver a truly integrated, omnichannel experience to their customers.
The Takeaway
True omnipresence in your customers’ lives simply can’t happen without IoT and AI technology.
On just a surface level, the takeaway is clear:
If you aren’t hopping on the IoT/AI bandwagon, you’re going to be missing out on a ton of potential opportunities to engage with your audience.
But, there’s more to all this than just relying on technology to become more omnipresent in your customers’ lives. As we said earlier, the goal is to dig deep to discover the high-stakes moments throughout your customer’s journey that can make or break their experience with your brand.
The fact is, brands are becoming more in-tune and connected with their customers – both literally (in a digital sense) and figuratively (i.e., relationship-wise). As a marketing team, it’s your duty to ensure these connections remain active in some way at all times, and to continue finding new and exciting ways to provide value to your individual customers.
Again, this just will not be able to happen at scale without the help of IoT and AI technology.
Wrapping Up
Artificial intelligence has come a long way in the marketing world…and it’s going to continue evolving at a rapid pace as time goes on.
Instead of just sitting back and letting technology do everything, though, the modern marketer needs to understand how AI can enable them to evolve as marketers, overall.
(Perhaps one day AI truly will do everything for us…but that day is not today.)
This is essentially why the above trends have emerged in full force:
With AI taking some of the load off your human marketing team’s back, the team will be able to invest more heavily into the progressive marketing tactics that the modern consumer expects from your brand.