Move aside, Don Draper. Artificial intelligence (AI) is moving in. Compelling creative and hard-hitting headlines aimed at the general masses are only a fraction of the modern marketer’s job description. With reams of data about millions of online consumers at their disposal, marketing professionals today more closely resemble a nerdy math geek, a spreadsheet in hand, than the smooth-talking Mad Men of old. In 2019, they’re more effective, too.
AI makes marketing smarter and more effective. That’s thanks to the advent of Artificial Intelligence in digital marketing. Although AI has been around the industry for some years, the power of AI to deliver personalized, relevant, and timely ads to an individual online is only growing stronger, and marketers are growing savvier with their new tools. By employing multivariate testing methods in advertising, marketers can test all of the traditional elements of an ad campaign – imagery, headlines, Call-to-Actions (CTAs), and color – and add the mountain of consumer data into an AI engine that will deliver the right ad to the right person at the right time in the right place. Rudimentary tests will optimize around single ads that perform the best to a broad audience. The best Mad Men of 2019 will use multivariate testing to serve unique combinations of each variable in a single ad for a single category of user. AI is here.
Artificial intelligence is offering a powerful new tool to digital marketers, who can use the capabilities of AI to both test and modify how marketing campaigns are delivered to target audiences in a far more personalized way. Before the advent of AI, the testing of banner ads or email campaigns would have been limited to A/B variables, such as subject lines for email or headlines for digital banners. Fancy experiments could also test different graphics, but it typically would be limited to two or three versions at most.
No more ‘spray and pray’. Appeal to individual consumers in 2019. With AI, marketers can now test a wide variety of media attributes, including colors, font, calls-to-action, and background image specific to an individual consumer. AI can assess that person’s past preferences to predict what will have the most impact. That opens up much greater opportunities with retargeting. Not only can the ad display the same product that the consumer was considering from the day before, but it can also suggest, as just one example, the angle of the image that would be the most appealing to that consumer.
The brains of AI, of course, are its algorithms. While AI software may vary in their algorithm, all deliver modern marketers with the unprecedented ability to make real-time calculations about advertisement opportunities. Known as Moment Scoring, AI can determine the likelihood that a digital consumer will engage with an ad and make the desired action based on the goals of the marketing campaign. More than just delivering ads in the moment, AI in 2019 is more cost-efficient by predicting what marketing actions to take in which moments, thereby optimizing your campaign’s spend toward those users that are most likely to convert from prospect to customer.
If you’re not using AI, you’re already losing. According to a report by eMarketer, advertisers around the world have caught on to the power of AI for their marketing campaigns. Nearly 40% of advertisers surveyed indicated that they already use AI’s media spend optimization tactics to make their campaigns more cost effective, with another 31% indicating that they plan to use that tactic. Dynamic creative – ads that change automatically based on the AI’s information about an individual user’s behavior, location, and interests – is already employed by 42% of respondents and is planned to be used by an additional 27% of those surveyed. All of this is to say, if you’re not yet incorporating the power of artificial intelligence into your digital marketing efforts, you’re already losing to the competition.
For a digital marketing campaign that optimizes your budget and delivers results thanks in part to the powerful tools of Artificial Intelligence, partner with Bluetext.
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Dynamic content may be the next big thing for digital marketers. In the marketing world, as personalization becomes more in demand, the power of artificial intelligence and data analytics to deliver personalization through dynamic content generation is taking on a larger role. That artificial intelligence is taking the guesswork out of marketing. No longer do digital marketers need to “hope” that, for example, a blue-themed campaign landing page with lots of large images or a certain type of blog post will appeal to all audiences. Artificial intelligence can provide real insights on messaging, graphics, color schemes, and even the types of content that marketers push out to target audiences.
This evolution may be closer than you think. In fact, according to eMarketer, forty percent of marketers in a recent survey responded that they were currently using AI to fuel their dynamic creative. That number was consistent with audience targeting and segmentation, creating a clear path to real personalization. This tactic has given advertisers the unparalleled ability to know their audience through identification, segmentation, and targeting.
Because various types of testing can be done now thanks to AI, marketers are able to find the optimal way to target a particular consumer. This includes elements such as colors, fonts, call to actions and images. Targeted advertisements not only serve a consumer the product they were looking at in the days or weeks before but in a way that would be most appealing to him or her, increasing the likelihood of engagement.
Beyond customizing the content that users are served, consumers are increasingly interested in curating their online experiences as well. That helps explain the endless number of social media platforms available to us.
We recently worked with the cognac company, Courvoisier, to launch their Honor Your Code campaign microsite which truly defines what we mean by “user-generated content.” The site encourages users to create a meme by uploading a photo, adding their hometown, and choosing a “code” that they respect and honor. Memes are then shared to social media, and ingested into the CMS by an Instagram API to display in a scrolling mosaic grid. Users are also able to explore the “Heatmap” by clicking on cities across the country to view other codes being shared and possibly even their own.
The Honor Your Code site on mobile provides for a unique user journey with more of a “native social” experience. Videos and Instagram posts display in a scrolling, digestible way users have become accustomed to. The site also features age authentication and a product locator.
It’s no question that people love personalized content. According to Janrain, 74 percent of online consumers get frustrated when content on the websites they visit has nothing to do with their interests. It’s clear that generating dynamic content for your audience is vital to a brand nowadays, so why not take a deeper dive into each individual’s profile to better understand what will work with that specific target audience? It is much more effective to serve content types and styles that the individual responds to instead of a blanket assumption of one-size-fits-all.