As AI continues to advance, it will integrate artificial intelligence, enabling deeper customer connections and redefining the marketing landscape forever.

Jordan Bitterman, CMO of The Weather Company at IBM says:

“There are twelve threats to civilization; AI is one of these twelve threats. However, AI is the only threat which can also be the antidote for the other eleven.”

Gone are the days when brands had to organize everything in person. To attend major events such as the Super Bowl, marketers had to wait for the right time to publish a tweet or send out a post for maximum engagement. Now, times have changed. We have better tools like the IFTTT, Hootsuite, Socialbakers, etc. They allow us to automate our tweets and social media posts; even better, they become their own judge and publish the post on our behalf to create the perfect buzz for social events such as the Super Bowl.

Don’t we often wonder how some of these tools are capable of making critical decisions for us?

Like every industry, marketing is also embracing change. Every new sunrise introduces a technological advancement that’s better than the one crafted yesterday. And when the power of technology is intertwined with marketing, the outcome is something beyond our imaginations. But, as much as AI promises a remarkable future for the generations of tomorrow. Some research analysts have realized the fact that AI can turn completely rogue on you.

A project named “Sophia” (A humanoid robot) was launched by a Hong Kong-based firm, Hanson Robotics in April 2015. It is a robot built in collaboration with AI developers. The robot is capable of carrying out detailed discussions with different individuals and responding to them in a sophisticated manner.

Although many believe that her responses are scripted, she is still an AI-powered robot capable of making judgments on her own. When someone asked her whether she would choose to destroy humans! Surprisingly, her response was positive.

Maybe, we do deserve to be wiped out from the face of the Earth and machines have already realized that (joke).

However, amidst the confusion, there are major technology giants who are bold enough to take that leap of faith. Some major technological giants such as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook have announced a partnered approach to implement AI initiatives which can be beneficial for people and society.

Today, AI has stepped out of fiction and entered into spheres of reality. Statistics show that more than 57% of the marketing agencies in the US are willing to adopt artificial intelligence to enable them to gain a competitive edge over their rivals. It’s just a matter of time until the whole world will go full throttle with AI.

But, how exactly the implementations are going to change the face of marketing? Let’s find out.

How Artificial Intelligence Will Change the Future of Marketing

Here’s how Artificial Intelligence will change the future of marketing

1) The Shift from the Programmatic Era into the Cognitive Era

The future of marketing is going to shift from the programming era to the cognitive era.

Cognitive Era

Previously, when we used to visit a website and search for a product, let’s say a smartphone… that smartphone might run around us for at least 2 weeks and would show up on in-website ads as we surf through the Internet. It would target market us on our social media profiles. And it will show up on random websites we are visiting on a daily basis.

However, now times have changed. We are living our lives in an era where the cognitive abilities of a machine are more entertaining just than the ones which are programmed into the machine.

Systems are being developed that capable of identifying why you left a website, how you left that site (exit pages), and whether you bought a product or totally skipped it. Based on your actions will enable marketers to make informed decisions about crafting an ad that would be highly relevant to you.

It ultimately saves us from getting bombarded with unwanted advertising altogether.

2) AI Holds the Power to Automate our Content Production

One of the many individuals who will cash the true power of AI in the marketing sphere is none other than future content developers. Wait, just hold up! I know you are getting those ideas… No, Artificial Intelligence hasn’t yet reached a stage where it will generate content on our behalf.

Tough luck! It’s going to take some time to get there and until then, you will have to write on your own.

But, here’s how AI holds the true power to automate our content production. “WordSmith” is an AI assistant that greatly benefits writers. It is a collection of modules which allow writers to search for patterns in languages. An estimated 1.5 billion content pieces were created with the help of WordSmith last year.

Software applications like WordSmith are based on NLG (Natural Language Selection) which is an intelligent AI algorithm. On the other hand, the AI sub-field NLG (Natural Language Generation) is an algorithm which translates data into natural language based on the kind of data you feed into the system.

However, the solution is more sentence-based and may fail to create the perfect writing flow that a writer may end up creating but it still turns out to be of great assistance. To produce as such, you ultimately require a senior writer who is skilled at writing.

3) Artificial Intelligence Will Improve Sales Performance

Some professionals who are going to benefit from artificial intelligence are none other than the sales teams. Most of the sales guys spend countless hours producing confirmed leads. While sieving through a roundhouse of customers can often become a hefty task. It also shaves off a good amount of time from your clock.

Artificial Intelligence in Marketing

In fact, some sales representatives claim that more than 80% of their working hours are spent identifying which of the leads have the potential to become customers and which of them are just “mystery shoppers” and not serious buyers. Making phone calls, sending out emails, awaiting responses, and then replying to them back, all at the same time can often lead to burnt-out and frustrated sales reps.

As a result, they might not be able to put their best foot forward when pitching to a highly lucrative prospective client.

However, with AI things can dramatically change for sales representatives all around. By using smart intelligent systems, first, sales representatives can avoid focusing on repetitive tasks. They will not have to go through the entire long process of monitoring, categorizing, and creating effective communication with leads. It will greatly help the sales representative as they can readily spend more of their time and energy on closing sales leads.

4) Micro-Segmented Email Marketing

Adding to the previous point, an organization communicates with its internal and external customers via email. Now, doesn’t it sound beneficial if marketers can apply all of their creativity to creating remarkable content instead of exerting their mental force in monitoring how emails are sorted and sent out?

Email Marketing

Email marketing has come a long way. From physical mail segmentation to scheduled send-outs. Today AI can help you automate everything using state-of-the-art marketing automation tools. Besides, there are several other automated emailing tools on the market such as Constant Contact, MailChimp, SendGrid, HubSpot’s CRM, and others which can help anyone easily comb through jargon of email data to reach useful conclusions.

Future AI applications will enable marketers to easily segment email information based on different areas of interest, demographics, regions, and other criteria. So, if a marketing specialist wants to target a specific individual, they are not going to spend hours analyzing information based on personal details, zip codes, or telephone numbers to target different users belonging to different market niches.

Instead, they will leverage the power of generative AI tools that will automatically reach out to users belonging to their target niche by analyzing previously stored data and all marketer has to do is steer the tool in the right direction.

5) Website Personalization and Offering What Customer Wants

The world of the internet is vast. It is ever-changing and growing at an immense pace. However, audiences visiting websites day in and day out are navigating through hundreds of websites each day. What will make your website stand above the competition is how personalized your approach is toward attracting customers and how good are you at creating compelling experiences for them.

What people want is a personalized experience and if your website is failing to give them one. They will eventually switch to another alternative. Many AI-powered tools have emerged which you can integrate into your website in order to provide customers with a more personalized experience.

CNET Intelligent Cross-Sell is a platform that usually associates itself with consumer-electronic goods products. CNET Intelligent Cross-Sell is a software platform that handles all cross-sells and upsells based on behavioral data and other attributes such as product profitability and score reviews to make the sales process and experience better for users.

According to eMarketers, 48% of marketers resulted in observing a sales uplift in websites that are more personalized than those which aren’t. With AI-powered personalization, you can train bots at the back end of your website, so they readily adapt to what you are searching for. They can collect information from the source the audience has reached to their platform and based on that, they can readily point the customer towards the right direction.

With tools like Evergage, you can personalize your offers and even personalize search results with modules like Evergage SmartSearch to meet customer preferences. In short, it is a tool that fits best in the category of content marketing when it comes to website personalization.

The Wrap Up

AI is making dramatic changes for marketers in almost every aspect of marketing. With all the hype rising up on the Internet and a bit of confusion, the future of AI in the world of marketing looks promising. Some marketing departments which haven’t implemented AI technology as a part of their business practices have an ambitious plan to do the same in the future.

With technology growing at a rapid pace, there is an immense concern that AI-powered solutions come with uncertainties. However, future market leaders believe that gaining better insights, doing better forecasting, and working on creative strategies can help give birth to more reliable AI solutions.