When we were younger we used to watch sci-fi movies showing us Artificial Intelligence. It felt like a distant future, one we would never see in our lifetime. But the age of information accelerated science fiction into reality. Nowhere in our daily lives is it more present than in the world of digital marketing.
Artificial Intelligence has morphed digital marketing into reacting faster to trends, being more resource-efficient, and has become more personalized than we thought possible. The dusk of pen and paper surveys, for marketing information, has started.
We know that artificial intelligence has caused a paradigm shift in digital marketing, but how has it done that? To properly appreciate the massive leaps one needs to understand digital marketing.
What is Digital Marketing?
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A common misconception is that digital marketing is only limited to targeted ads. But just dip below the surface and you will discover a vast ocean of a thriving ecosystem. Digital marketing simply is concerned with marketing through tools that are connected to the internet.
Anything and everything that has an internet connection is served by its very own digital marketing environment. Your phone, laptop, and even your smart toaster is a tool that has been leveraged by it.
There are several major digital marketing methods. We will go through a few of them so we can better understand how Artificial intelligence has affected them.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is marketing that focuses on creating content about products or services. For example, I want to spread the word about my clothing line. I can create content such as a video on a video-sharing platform or a podcast, using this medium I can talk about my clothing line in whatever way I desire.
Search Engine Marketing
Whenever you enter a query into a search engine, the first few results that show up have a little symbol on them that says “AD”. These are results that an organization pays the search engines to appear in the results for specific terms and keywords. Users are more likely to click on the first few results.
Search Engine Optimization
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The algorithm within a Search Engine answers your query by looking at specific keywords. If you type “Purple Curtains” then the pages that have the highest quality answer to this phrase will show higher in a search result. Potentially increasing traffic to your web-page.
If you are wondering, what if a page only had the words, “Purple Curtain” on it, would it not top the search results. No, it would not because this would be pinged as spam and sent to page 10. Google is always searching for the highest quality and best solution to a user’s keyword or problem.
Social Media Marketing
This category of marketing purely focuses on social media platforms. Since every social media platform has its niche and associated features, marketing efforts are bespoke to it. For example, a platform that uses pictures as its core socializer will have marketing content that uses pictures to convey its message.
Affiliate Marketing
This is when the product or service provider will ask an independent content creator to talk about their product. Whatever type of content a creator makes, the affiliate tends to pitch products related to their audience. For example, a website focused on teaching wood-working will have affiliates that manufacture and sell wood-working tools.
The affiliations usually materialize in the form of a link that will direct you to their product page. The more popular a creator is, the greater the traffic volume on the affiliates platform. More traffic generally creates more sales, all things considered.
Streaming Service Marketing
Whenever you watch a video on a streaming service you would have experienced an Advertisement during the video. This form of marketing has to capture the users’ attention in a short period, because a few seconds after, the viewer has the option to skip. This type of marketing campaign tends to be very direct and punchy, as well as expensive.
Each of these platforms of digital marketing has evolved to take advantage of Artificial intelligence. It is important to understand this evolution to grasp the scale of change.
Evolve to Adopt
Any industry, at any moment in history, has had to evolve to adopt the next big thing. Digital Marketing is no different.
When computers started being connected to the internet, digital marketing evolved from non-interactive television advertisements to interactable banner ads on popular web pages. When the first iPhone appeared on stage it ushered in the age of App stores. Now marketing had to cater to a small screen and the unique ways it could be interacted with.
To adopt artificial intelligence, digital marketing has had to employ more ways to collect data, and by extension, organize and process more data. To the point, an entire industry has popped up to cater to this data management, because it is a very resource-intensive task. For example, to store the incoming stream of data, storage has had to be outsourced. Having a storage solution in-house used to be good enough for most of the digital marketing industry.
Real-time data collection and processing is now an important aspect. To cater to it, the digital marketing industry has had to invest in hardware, which has helped push the networking industry.
Human resources in the industry have changed as well, a digital marketing firms now needs to have a software team or at the least out-source all their software requirements. Your average digital marketer can’t code an algorithm or run procedural statements on a SQL database.
Enhancements in Digital Marketing with the incorporation of Artificial Intelligence
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A misconception needs to be cleared. A lot of organizations that are thinking about revamping their workflows around Artificial Intelligence need to know that it has to be trained. It will not come out of the box ready to go and launch your productivity to the moon.
To deploy Artificial intelligence you must have a training set that is bespoke to your needs. For example, it would be useless for the manufacturing industry to use a model that was trained and designed for language. So your model needs to be trained on the data set that is most relevant to you.
Spinning off of the previous section where the types of digital marketing were explained, we will explore how some of these sections have been improved when Artificial intelligence has been incorporated into them.
Content Marketing
Since this sector focuses on creating content for their marketing. They are focused on what has made their content more popular. If a group of people tried to look through each video, search for patterns, and develop a data set then it would consume too much time and resources.
Using artificial intelligence, patterns that people would be oblivious to can be found. These patterns form a template. The next time a video is made it can be tested through the Artificial intelligence model, this can predict if it will do well or not. The more predictions it does the better it will get. These patterns can be extremely tiny things that we do not register consciously, therefore it would be extremely difficult for even a large group of humans to do.
Search Engine Optimization
Using keywords is still a reliable method to have your article on top of search results. But with more optimization within the search engine algorithms, this method’s effectiveness will vain away. Short of buying the Intellectual property from the search engine developer, they will never sell that anyway, the only way is to reverse engineer a simulation of one.
Databases on the top featuring articles can be created and again searching for patterns, it forms a template. It is the same process as said before. This is because they are both within the subset of content.
Voice Search Optimization
Due to smart home devices, voice search is becoming a growing section within a search engine’s traffic distribution. Optimizing for voice is extremely difficult because everyone has a different way of speaking, those little nuances in our speech make a huge difference in what we expect from a search result. Unless we can read audio data in binary at a rate of 1000 bytes per second or more, only artificial intelligence models can and are doing this.
If artificial intelligence models were not publicly available this segment of digital marketing would have been left untapped. Because this is one segment an average human being cannot optimize the same way we can in an article.
Ethical Issues
With the adoption of artificial intelligence systems, more data has to be extracted. This has led to an outcry about privacy concerns. With some sections of the population calling it akin to spying, some legal systems also label excessive data collection as spying on private citizens. Furthermore, the tech industry giants selling the data of their users for more advertisement revenue, plus collaborating with intelligence agencies to give whatever data on a user wherever they are in the world, things could be turbulent for the digital marketing industry during the next few years.
At this moment in time, the digital marketing industry is slowly adopting Artificial intelligence into its workflows. But for all its positive effects to be visible to us, it will take some time.
Resources
Dumitriu, Dan & Popescu, Mirona. (2020). Artificial Intelligence Solutions for Digital Marketing. Procedia Manufacturing. 46. 630-636. 10.1016/j.promfg.2020.03.090.
Theodoridis, Prokopis & Gkikas, Dimitris. (2019). How Artificial Intelligence Affects Digital Marketing. 1319-1327. 10.1007/978-3-030-12453-3_151.
Zeeshan, Mohd & Saxena, Komal. (2020). Explorative Study of Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing. 10.1007/978-3-030-43192-1_107.
Cizreliogullari, Mehmet & Akdeniz, Tülin. (2020). THE ROLE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN DIGITAL MARKETING.
Hubspot. (2019). Artificial Intelligence: The Future of AI in Digital Marketing. YouTube.
