Article Summary: The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Marketing

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The marketing landscape is rapidly changing, explains Sprout’s content specialist Annette Chacko, as emerging artificial intelligence technologies create new opportunities for marketers to connect with consumers. She reports how tools such as natural language processing and neural networks can help you achieve your marketing goals, while navigating uncertainty and increased public exposure. Chacko urges future marketers to take a more proactive approach to their social media marketing strategy, leveraging AI tools to better engage customers with individualized content.

Take-Aways

• Intelligent marketing tools create new opportunities to connect with audiences.
• Emerging AI technologies are rapidly disrupting marketing and generating new insights.
• AI marketers will have tools to better connect with global audiences and manage uncertainty.

Summary

Intelligent marketing tools create new opportunities to connect with audiences.

Using AI-generated content and ideas, marketers can better target consumers, gleaning valuable insights into customer sentiment and journeys. Using AI prompts to target and engage with each customer individually, marketers will be able to automatically match content to a consumer’s intent and buyer persona. Marketers can leverage intelligent social media management tools, connecting users to the posts and content that interest them most through voice of customer (VoC) analysis. Powerful AI algorithms can help you better understand your customers’ perspectives, rapidly sifting through millions of data points via social listening.

“AI and machine learning give critical customer insights on a range of aspects to help you make strategic marketing decisions.”

AI will assist marketers in managing brand reputation – an essential task, given that today’s brands are particularly susceptible to public scrutiny on social media. By monitoring negative sentiments toward your brand in real time, marketers can respond with proactive customer engagement, while choosing the best ambassadors and influencers to share their message. AI tools also provide marketers with competitive intelligence, enabling you to compare your brand’s social performance to others using competitive benchmarking, while discerning your rivals’ share of voice.

Emerging AI technologies are rapidly disrupting marketing and generating new insights.

The following technologies can help marketers leverage the capabilities of AI, when interfaced with social marketing platforms:

• Machine learning (ML) – Analyzing social data using statistical methods, trained ML models can help marketers automate text mining (transforming unstructured text into a more structured format) and complete other essential tasks, such as grouping similar search queries into meaning-based clusters, within seconds.
• Natural language processing (NLP) – When applied to social listening activities, NLP algorithms can interpret a wide range of data, even when it contains emojis, errors and colloquialisms.
• Semantic search – By extracting keywords and categorizing them into semantic groups, semantic search algorithms better interpret the intent of search phrases than approaches that depend only on keywords.
• Neural networks (NN) and named entity recognition (NER) – NER enables AI platforms to identify named entities (for example, celebrities and locations), while NN algorithms remember the connections between entities and other interconnected data points, handling the flow of information much like a human brain. Such technologies help marketers better glean insights into an influencer’s position and navigate market trends.
• Sentiment analysis – Using feedback data, marketers can measure consumer sentiment, which entails assigning “polarity scores,” or measuring the degree to which customers’ descriptions of their overall experiences tend toward positivity or negativity.

AI marketers will have tools to better connect with global audiences and manage uncertainty.

A study from PwC predicts that AI-driven marketing is poised to drive nearly half – 45% – of the world’s economy by 2030. Future marketers will harness AI’s potential, working in areas such as predictive and responsible AI, to reshape business. Emerging AI technologies will play a pivotal role in guiding your future business strategies and helping you develop a more proactive approach to social media marketing.

“AI marketing insights are empowering businesses to build a foundation for growth and future success by exploring new marketing, product and customer engagement opportunities.”

AI marketing tools can help you expand your brand globally. You can gain data insights from users communicating in different languages, while providing effective multilingual customer care. Using technologies ranging from virtual agents to NLP, AI will help you better respond to complex, unpredictable market forces. Given the rapid pace of technological change, generative AI and intelligent marketing are essential tools for marketers hoping to remain relevant as they reposition their brand within rapidly changing contexts.

About the Author

Annette Chacko works as a content specialist at Sprout, a company that provides a suite of social media tools to help brands better connect with consumers.