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Suddenly, it seems that artificial intelligence (AI) is present everywhere, powering everything from the virtual assistants we use at home to the contact centres we reach out to for customer service or support. Whether we realise it or not, AI is also rapidly transforming how marketers and advertisers target and engage with us as consumers.
A recent study from Influencer Marketing Hub found that 61% of marketers have used AI in marketing activities — and 44% report they’ve leveraged the technology for content production. And media investment company GroupM projects that AI will “inform” or otherwise impact at least half of all advertising revenue by the end of 2023.
So, if your business isn’t experimenting yet with AI advertising or marketing campaigns, current trends suggest you could soon be in the minority.
There are many reasons companies should at least consider exploring AI advertising as a way to connect with consumers on Google, Facebook, and other digital platforms more effectively. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at what AI advertising is and how businesses and brands are integrating AI marketing software into sales and marketing efforts.
AI advertising is driven by a powerful combination of human intelligence, machine learning capabilities, and big data and analytics. And, as IBM Watson Advertising explains in this article on the topic, advertisers can use AI in advertising “to create more personalised experiences, target the right audience, and make decisions faster.”
There are six key components of AI advertising that allow advertisers to deliver more effective ads to consumers:
AI’s machine learning capabilities enable marketers to target precise audiences by identifying specific segments based on demographics, interests, and behaviors. So, an advertising professional with AI experience can develop more relevant ads to fully engage customers and drive more conversions for the brand.
Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence used to dynamically create new content, including text, audio, and video, based on user preferences and behavior. The aim of using generative AI for advertising and marketing efforts is to develop more engaging and relevant ad experiences for customers. This is a rapidly emerging area of AI, and millions of people have quickly embraced early entrants into this market like ChatGPT and DALL-E.
AI’s machine learning is ideal for routine marketing tasks such as programmatic advertising because it automates the process of ad buying and placement via real-time bidding across multiple channels and platforms. This means marketing teams can make more efficient bids and confidently and efficiently advertise at scale.
AI algorithms use historic data to predict likely behavior and preferences, allowing advertisers to optimise ad placements, bidding strategies, and campaign budgets.
Advertisers can leverage AI to analyse phone conversations at scale and use conversation intelligence to identify trends. Marketers can then improve predictive analytics, bidding strategy, ad creative, the customer experience, and more.
Sentiment analysis is an important aspect of AI advertising that focuses on understanding and interpreting the emotions and sentiments expressed by customers. Sentiment analysis can be conducted on phone calls using AI marketing software such as Invoca to determine this at scale.
Now that we’ve covered the key components of AI advertising, let’s look at how you could use AI to develop marketing and ad campaigns:
As you would do for any ad campaign, start your AI advertising journey by defining what you want to achieve. A clear objective will help to guide your efforts, including where you want to use AI capabilities strategically in your campaign.
For example, do you want AI to generate all the imagery for your campaign, like Heinz did to promote its ketchup? Or do you want it working in the background to help you identify consumers’ specific preferences and behaviors, so you can create highly targeted and personalised advertising that resonates with potential buyers? (See this post to learn more about how automotive marketers are doing this, and using AI in other ways, to boost their results.)
AI can help you develop detailed customer profiles so that you can target your advertising efforts not only to reach the right audience — but to connect with them at just the right time. And when you can deliver the right ad to a customer at the right stage of their journey, you can inspire them to take action. For example, if you are handling marketing for an insurance firm, you might retarget existing customers with a bundle discount ad shortly before their renewal date to help create an upsell opportunity.
Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok — these are just a few examples of platforms you can use to run your digital ad campaigns. And they all embrace AI to provide advertisers with tools to personalise ad campaigns and develop strong customer segmentation. To choose the best platform for your AI advertising efforts, be sure to conduct thorough research and keep your campaign objectives and audiences top of mind.
AI can help deliver personalised ad content based on preferences, behaviors, and other customer data. Coca-Cola, for example, uses AI algorithms to promote drinks in its Freestyle vending machines. The company also uses AI to help inform its ad content by analysing thousands of social media mentions, giving marketing teams insight into when, where, and how customers consume Coca-Cola’s products.
AI-based advertising platforms like Google Ads and Taboola automatically adjust bidding strategies to help you maximise your return on investment (ROI) for digital ad campaigns. To optimise bidding, you need a complete picture of ad performance and full marketing attribution. This means tracking every channel, even phone calls.
Mix up your ad creative for AI advertising to make the most of your ad budget. A/B testing compares different ad variations, targeting options, or messaging approaches. Traditionally, this process has been a cumbersome, heavy lift for resource-stretched marketing teams. But AI marketing software from Adobe Target, Optimizely, and other sources can automate the A/B testing process, enabling marketing and conversion rate optimisation (CRO) teams to test more ads faster using fewer resources.
To confirm that your AI advertising efforts are meeting your objectives, you’ll need to monitor the performance of individual ads and ad campaigns regularly. By using AI analytics tools to gain insights into which ads are working best or falling short of expectations, you can make copy and budget adjustments quickly and take advantage of real-time trends, including evolving customer behavior.
One of the biggest hurdles to experimenting with AI advertising is knowing how to get started. Here are four ideas to consider that are already widely used and easier to adopt than you might think:
Why not use AI to automate your buying and selling of ad inventory on platforms like Google? Automating enables real-time bidding and optimisation for better ad placements and performance at a fraction of the cost for advertisers. Invoca’s conversation intelligence platform can help with this by adding call conversion data to your programmatic bidding strategy, so you can make bids that give you more call conversions at a lower cost.
AI-powered chatbots interact with potential customers in all sorts of ways on messaging platforms or websites, 24/7, 365. Chatbots can be loaded with pertinent information designed to generate sales leads, offer customers personalised recommendations, upsell or cross-sell, answer inquiries, and drive conversions. Among the many companies finding success with using chatbots for marketing and advertising are Domino’s, Hello Fresh, and Sephora.
Stats suggest that nearly three-quarters of consumers prefer to use their vocal cords to question search engines rather than their digits. Voice search is here to stay, and advertisers can optimise strategies for voice search now by using AI-based natural language processing (NLP) tools to understand and respond to voice queries effectively.
Ad creative boosted by AI can be generated dynamically based on user data, such as location, interests, or previous interactions, to create highly relevant and engaging ads on Google, Snapchat, Facebook, and many other platforms. (To get an idea of what dynamic ads look like in action, see this post with five examples of dynamic ads for Facebook.)
AI is helping advertising and marketing teams to automate routine tasks, quickly collect and analyse huge amounts of customer data, predict future buying behavior, and much more. And one tool many marketers are using to transform how they work and get the most from their campaigns is Invoca.
Invoca’s AI-driven platform analyses 100% of phone conversations and generates detailed reports so that marketing teams can optimise their strategies to drive more phone leads at a lower cost. Conversation intelligence also provides them with valuable and actionable first-party marketing data that is challenging to gather from other sources. Invoca’s AI insights are a powerful tool for building better customer profiles and developing strong customer segmentation.
Want to learn more about how Invoca uses AI to deliver valuable insights to marketers? Check out these resources:
