11 Powerful Uses of AI in Marketing

Written by
Ema Lukan
Published on
September 16, 2024
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Between data, content, customers, and adapting to the changing marketing landscape, marketing teams can easily feel like running uphill.

If you'd like to stop spending most of your day on minor marketing tasks, AI can help free yourself up to focus on the bigger picture.

It can also analyze mountains of data to uncover competitor and customer insights. So, it will enable you to develop laser-sharp marketing strategies and impress your higher-ups with measurable ROI.

Like the sound of it? Read on to discover the many other uses of AI in marketing.

We'll also recommend specific AI tools you can start using today to achieve your marketing goals faster.

How is AI useful in marketing?

AI and marketing make a powerful combo. With artificial intelligence, marketers analyze and interpret heaps of customer data. The golden insights they get serve to craft messages, ads, and even product suggestions that are just right for each person. Overall, AI-powered marketing increases customer satisfaction, showing it knows its audience.

Reports indicate that 72% of those who use AI marketing tools personalize the customer experience and save 2.5 hours/day or 3 hours/piece of content.

Indeed, AI expands marketing capabilities and improves business operations. It relies heavily on big data analysis and prediction and, by looking at specific data points, it also helps:

  1. Generate custom content at scale
  2. Automate email marketing and ad placements

In short, AI makes marketing more personal and efficient. It frees marketers to focus on strategy and creativity. That's why businesses are actively looking to leverage AI for successful campaigns — an estimated 40% of companies have already hired AI experts to train and help their marketing teams adopt this technology.

How will AI impact marketing?

AI will allow any marketing team to scale personalized customer experiences. So, consumers will benefit from more engaging and tailored interactions. At the same time, generative AI will help marketers produce an explosion of content without sacrificing quality. This means increased conversion rates and customer retention.

Thanks to AI marketing applications for data collection and predictions, marketers can become more proactive in their strategies. Algorithms will make content more search-friendly, and automation will help handle everyday and complex tasks more efficiently, improving ROI.

However, using AI tools in digital marketing will raise important questions about ethics, privacy, and proprietary data. Consequently, businesses will have to carefully manage how they gather and use customer data to address these concerns.

Marketing expert Neil Patel claims that, while AI will change some advertising methods and improve certain processes, it won't completely replace existing methods:

Revolutionizing Marketing with AI: The Future is Here

1. Create AI marketing videos for brand awareness

Marketing videos boost brand awareness. They help viewers remember 95% of a message and increase organic traffic from SERPs by 157%. With generative AI, you can create personalized and contextually relevant videos at scale. And you'll reduce your workload by 60-70%. 

Generative AI creates endless possibilities using technology like:

  • Natural language processing (NLP) for script generation
  • Machine learning (ML) algorithms for editing and optimizing video content
  • Computer vision for incorporating relevant imagery dynamically

One tool that uses genAI to create marketing videos is Synthesia. This text-to-video platform excels in generating AI videos using text input. It also includes customizable AI avatars and voiceovers in multiple languages.

Synthesia can help AI marketing teams create more with 80% budget savings, which is ideal for scaling video production for international brands and localizing content efficiently.

Case study 📚

SaaS company Doculife creates AI marketing videos 20x faster and at a fraction of the price of traditional video production.

2. Generate ads and other marketing content

AI can produce marketing content using natural language generation. Deep learning and ML algorithms can also research and analyze past campaign data, predicting what content will perform best and suggesting improvements. The results? AI-generated content can increase leads by up to 50%.

Using AI in ads and marketing materials helps create more effective messages that, in turn, increase engagement. But AI in digital marketing can also scale personalized content creation and adapt messaging across different demographics and consumer behaviors.

For reference, watch Coca-Cola's stable diffusion AI ad below. Notice how it blends various artistic styles and cultural elements to reflect the brand's global identity:

New Coca Cola Stable Diffusion AI Ad

Another cool, powerful AI-powered marketing example is the Messi Messages campaign, awarded a Cannes Lion in 2021. This interactive global campaign features soccer star Lionel Messi. In partnership with Synthesia, it sends personalized video messages to fans, with Messi calling them by name and speaking in eight different languages:

Watch Lionel Messi Speaking 7 languages (with AI)!

Recommended digital marketing AI tools:

  1. AdCreative.ai: #1 most used AI tool for advertising, generates content, monitors competitors, and writes reports that guide the creative processes.
  2. Copy.ai: Creates AI marketing copy (including ads, social media posts, and emails) that resonates with your target audience, boosting engagement and conversions. 
  3. Persado: Uses AI to optimize the emotional appeal of marketing messages, enhancing the effectiveness of content across channels. 
  4. Jasper: AI marketing tool for scaling content in multiple languages, from blog posts to ad scripts, with built-in SEO.

3. Make sense of large data sets

The more customer data you analyze, the greater your marketing strategy. Still, social media listening and voice-of-customer analysis take a lot of time. Luckily, AI technologies, particularly ML, can ease your marketing efforts. They sift through large, unstructured data sets, even messy stuff like social media posts and emails, to find patterns and predictions humans can't.

AI processes and interprets all that data, guiding your marketing solutions based on accurate audience segmentation and personalization. AI analytics predict customer behavior so that you target marketing campaigns more accurately and improve customer experiences.

In short, you'll save plenty of time using AI-powered tools for predictive analytics, customer sentiment analysis, and real-time data processing. These will enable you to understand market trends, consumer feedback, and campaign performance.

Recommended AI tools:

  1. Tableau: With powerful data visualization capabilities and intuitive dashboards, it transforms complex data into actionable insights.
  2. Google Analytics: It uses AI to track and report on web traffic and provides deep insights into user behavior and website performance.
  3. IBM Watson: Relies on NLP and ML to deliver detailed insights into customer preferences and market conditions.

4. Personalize content and customer experiences

Personalization strengthens customer relationships. It leads to higher engagement and improved conversions, making messages resonate more deeply with individuals. From custom email marketing and website experiences to targeted ad placements, there's a lot AI can do in this department.

Looking at the big picture, ML and AI in digital marketing have two significant contributions:

  • Help marketers analyze customer data to predict preferences and behaviors.
  • Dynamically tailor content, product recommendations, and communication based on real-time interactions and historical data.

Did you know? 🤔

80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from brands that offer personalized experiences in their marketing programs.

Marketing tools with AI features: 

  1. Dynamic Yield: Provides personalized website experiences and product recommendations and performs A/B testing and automatic content optimization.
  2. Optimizely: Uses AI to test and optimize user experiences across digital platforms. It helps marketers improve outcomes with more relevant content and experiences.

5. Automate important marketing processes 

Companies using AI in marketing automation see an average ROI increase of up to 30%. Their artificial intelligence marketing can reach more of the right people through the right channels at the right time. We're talking about programmatic advertising (automated ad buying and selling), social media scheduling, and email workflows that respond to user behaviors and triggers in real-time.

AI technologies applied here include machine learning for predictive analytics and decision-making and NLP for content creation (social media, emails, etc).

AI marketing platforms:

  1. AdRoll: As a tool for programmatic advertising, it uses AI to automate ad placements and optimize marketing campaigns across multiple channels.
  2. Hootsuite: Integrates AI capabilities for social media scheduling and management, allowing for automated posting and performance analysis.
  3. Mailchimp: Offers an AI growth assistant to optimize email delivery times and content personalization, turn data into insights, and produce content at scale.

6. Reduce the tedious admin work

With AI, marketers save an average of 2 hours and 24 minutes a day. It's because AI handles tedious admin tasks like note-taking, meeting summarization, and even the scheduling of different events. Without the administrative burden, digital marketers can focus on developing more effective marketing campaigns.

Recommended tools:

  1. Otter.ai: Specializes in real-time transcription and meeting notes, providing searchable, shareable notes and boosting meeting productivity. 
  2. Zapier: Creates custom workflows that can automate virtually any part of a marketer's day, from data entry to sending follow-up emails.

7. Generate leads and nurture prospects with chatbots

In AI marketing, chatbots can initiate conversations based on customer behavior. With personalized recommendations and offers, they increase the chances of conversion. And by answering inquiries, they also guide potential customers through the sales funnel, redirecting users to relevant marketing content or sales reps.

Conversational chatbots are AI-driven programs. They use NLP to understand and respond to customer inquiries and ML to learn from interactions and improve their responses over time. These programs are available 24/7 and facilitate customer engagement in real-time.

Implementing chatbots into your AI marketing strategy will provide personalized interactions that make the customer journey more exciting, drive sales, and enhance brand loyalty.

Recommended tools:

  1. Intercom: Offers chatbots that integrate into websites and apps, automatically engage with your target audience, provide tailored support, and capture leads.
  2. Drift: Specializes in conversational marketing and sales, allowing businesses to use chatbots to book meetings, provide instant answers, and guide customers. 
  3. ManyChat: Facilitates customer interaction primarily on social media platforms using chatbots. 

8. Improve SEO

AI's SEO applications include automatically suggesting improvements, identifying SEO gaps, and offering insights into competitor strategies. 65% of companies had better SEO results when using AI. That's because AI tools facilitate more precise keyword optimization, more relevant SEO content, and even technical SEO adjustment recommendations.

To improve your SEO, look for ML tools that run predictive analyses of SEO trends. These tools can also use NLP to analyze user intent and suggest content optimization and semantic search algorithms to enhance content discoverability.

Recommended AI SEO tools:

  1. Surfer: Analyses top-performing content across the web and provides insights to optimize your content for better search engine rankings.
  2. Clearscope: Runs detailed content analysis and makes optimization suggestions to improve readability and search engine rankings.
  3. MarketMuse: Compares content to existing top-performing web pages, offering suggestions for improvement and content expansion to increase SERP rankings.

9. Gain competitive intelligence

Some AI tools give business professionals real-time insights into competitors' pricing, product changes, marketing strategies, and customer feedback. 90% of Fortune 500 companies use competitive intelligence, proving that this data favors smart market positioning and strategy development.

Did you know? 🤔

25% of competitive intelligence leaders use AI to assist them at work, and 56% plan to start doing it.

Use AI to understand market dynamics, predict competitor moves, and refine digital campaigns. Try out tools that use ML (for pattern recognition and trend analysis), NLP (for sentiment analysis from customer reviews and social media), or data mining (to extract and analyze large sets of data from multiple sources).

Improve marketing intelligence with these tools:

  1. Crayon: Tracks and analyzes competitor websites, social media, pricing strategies, and more, alerting businesses about significant changes and trends.
  2. Kompyte: Automates competitor data analysis and tracks real-time data across multiple channels.
  3. SimilarWeb: Provides digital market intelligence and web analytics with detailed reports that help businesses compare their performance against competitors.

10. Manage brand reputation

Artificial intelligence proactively manages brand reputation, which accounts for up to 63% of a company's market value. It listens to online conversations and alerts companies on sentiment shifts or emerging trends. This way, businesses address issues before they escalate. 

Commonly used AI technologies are NLP (for sentiment analysis from social media, reviews, and news) and ML (for pattern recognition to identify trends or changes in public opinion). Often, these AI tools include automated alert systems to notify companies of potential reputation risks.

Recommended AI marketing tools:

  1. Brandwatch: Analyzes online conversations across social media, blogs, and news websites to gauge public sentiment about a brand. Its deep analytics capabilities and comprehensive data coverage make it ideal for large-scale monitoring.
  2. Mention: Offers real-time monitoring of mentions across the web and social media, providing insights into what is being said about a brand. It features an AI-powered Instagram caption generator, a Tweet generator, and a LinkedIn summary generator.
  3. Resolver (previously Crisp): AI marketing tool for risk intelligence and digital crisis management. It detects potential threats to a brand's reputation across various digital channels.

11. Tap into foreign markets 

Marketers use AI to analyze multilingual data and understand cross-cultural elements. This significantly enhances a brand's ability to enter and succeed in foreign markets because it helps align products and marketing messages with local tastes and preferences. 

Use AI to translate your marketing campaigns, run sentiment analysis across different languages, conduct cultural trend analysis, and predict customer behavior.

Recommended tools:

  1. Google Cloud Translation: Offers advanced translations in 100+ languages for quickly adapting websites and marketing materials for diverse global audiences.
  2. Talkwalker: Provides AI social media analytics and monitoring tools for global consumer trends and brand perception across languages. Analyzing visuals and text, it's a comprehensive tool for global market analysis.
  3. Synthesia: Text-to-video tool for training, marketing, and communications videos in 130+ languages and accents with 160+ diverse AI avatars (virtual presenters). It's a great option for creating localized videos at scale.

Discover Synthesia in 4 minutes | Product Tour

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faq

Frequently asked questions

How is AI used for marketing?

AI marketing applications are diverse. They involve machine learning to analyze data and natural language processing to generate content. Most often, AI in marketing is used to:

  1. Create AI marketing videos
  2. Generate ads and other content types
  3. Analyze consumer data and market trends
  4. Personalize content and customer experience
  5. Automate important processes
  6. Spare marketers of admin work
  7. Generate leads and nurture prospects with chatbots
  8. Improve SEO
  9. Gain competitive intelligence
  10. Manage brand reputation
  11. Tap into foreign markets

What is the best example of AI in marketing?

So many companies are doing amazing things in marketing with AI that it's hard to stick to just one example. Popular examples include Amazon's use of genAI to help advertisers, Netflix's use of machine learning for personalized recommendations, or Starbucks' use of "AI for humanity."  

What is the future of AI in marketing?

AI is painting a bright picture for the future of digital marketing. Providing marketers with the right measurement tools, AI digital marketing will make ads more tailored and effective and reach the right people. For consumers, artificial intelligence in marketing means finding what they like faster and having a more fun customer experience. Everyone wins!