AI in marketing is already happening. Are you prepared?

Artificial intelligence promises to disrupt every industry within time. Digital marketing will be among the first fields to undergo significant changes. Even if most marketers are unprepared for this change, there's an army of front-runners waiting to get their hands dirty using AI in marketing.

The big reason online marketing is bound for an early AI makeover is that automation has come a long way in the field, at least compared to other industries. Automation is a good stepping stone for AI, since an automatable process shares many of the exact needs as AI, such as well-structured data and clear goals, as long as the automated system has large enough data sets from which AI can make conclusions.

Additionally, many Martech startups are enthusiastically adding AI to both new and existing marketing tools. The promise to optimise and personalise marketing campaigns across channels, creating higher ROI and better user experiences, is lucrative for a myriad of startups.

AI-driven digital marketing will soon be the norm. The effect will be so significant that the current paradigm will seem tedious and blunt in retrospect.

AI will reinvent marketing in these three ways first:

1. Optimising campaigns

The possibility of using AI for ad optimisation is already in place. Tools like Smartly, Codewise, and Albert can significantly reduce manual effort in your ad-buying process, enabling marketers to place thousands of ads across multiple ad networks smoothly.

These tools effectively run themselves, learning over time what works and what does not. Three parts of ad optimisation are low-hanging fruit for an AI: 1. automated bidding, 2. pausing poorly performing ads, and 3. dynamic ad creation (using templates to create personalised ads from a catalogue of pre-defined assets).

AI has already created new tactics for campaign optimisation, but it also lowers the cost of running campaigns. I've been on projects where we get 200% better results from the same budget than when buying ads manually through a media agency. And on top of that, we don't have to pay the media agency.

Most human marketers don't wanna spend their time optimising ads at night, when most of the optimisation is needed. But with predefined parameters, such as budgets, placements and frequency caps, AI can already run campaigns with almost no human interaction.

Google claims that by automatically optimising the placement of local search ads, its "Smart campaigns" deliver three times the performance of the old AdWords platform it replaces.

2. Personalisation

Who? When? Where? What? The million-dollar question every marketer wants to answer is perfect for AI. Personalised marketing messages are about identifying who you are talking to and making sure you feed that person the right message, at the right time, in the right channel. Orchestrating all of this demands a lot of input, but when that data is in place, you can move on to do better things.

AI will automate marketing personalisation. Partly by speeding up the decision-making to (perceived) real-time, calculating and feeding messages to your audience. Continually testing and iterating to optimise towards your goals. But also by helping you to act faster on the insights currently hidden in reports you get at most once a week.

Your role as a marketer will be to define the data points for your AI to base its calculations on, describe your customer and the end goal. Your AI will determine what kind of personalisation works best for a specific user and automate customer interaction completely.

3. Analysing data

Within marketing analytics, we already have millions of data points to analyse. The amount of information is so comprehensive that it's hard for a human to process it all. With an AI analyst at your service, you can get pre-processed insights, enabling smart decisions.

AI will take over the process of capturing, cleaning, and parsing data –enabling much faster analysis and more accurate predictions. The recommendations you can get from an AI will be detailed; for example, it could suggest adding a specific touch point when leads are generated from landing pages, while removing one when they are generated through organic search.

Because AI never sleeps - and works at scale - it will deliver recommendations almost in real-time. E-commerce is one field that will benefit significantly from this type of AI-driven decision-making. The A/B-testing process will become much less tedious when the suggestions for what to change on your e-commerce site are more detailed. And soon, the AI won't just suggest changes; it will implement them on your website in real time.

There are many insights hidden in today's marketing analytics. It's hard to comprehend it all, just because of the volume. With AI, marketers will be able to have an extremely data-driven approach, without spending all day in a business intelligence tool.

The challenges for AI in marketing

As with most new technology, setup will be the weak spot in getting the AI tools in place. Companies need well-structured data for their AI systems to learn from, and they need feedback to learn and develop over time.

It's no coincidence that the companies with the most data are at the forefront of using AI for marketing. But we can already see that new, more accessible AI tools make it possible for small companies to benefit as well. And sometimes they have even more to gain when costs are reduced, and results improve.

And one last thing: This is happening today – not in 5 or 10 years. So you probably should get moving.