Artificial Intelligence (“AI”), the intelligence exhibited by machines, is nothing new; most people heard of the term though most may have a problem describing what exactly AI is. In marketing, some companies already start enjoying the sweet taste of AI-powered marketing solutions while some may not be aware of the power of AI for marketers.
AI powered technologies and platforms are already available to help marketers run autonomous digital campaigns (paid, or non-paid), create and extract targeted content intelligently, and promote to or communicate with customers on an individual level (personalization). Let’s take a look at seven areas AI can be useful to marketers.
Wordsmith: Intelligent Content Creation
Wordsmith is a natural language generation platform that lets you produce insightful, personalized content from your data that communicates with every individual in the way everyone understands.
It can be deployed for copywriting and content marketing as it can automate the content creation process. In addition, it benefits organic search engine optimizations (SEO) as search engines love unique and quality content.
Wordsmith can also be used in:
- generating product descriptions for e-commerce websites
- explaining Tableau visualizations in clear language, bringing expert analysis to every one of your visualizations
- creating reports from data for internal or external purposes
- communicating with customers on a highly personalized level
The Orlando Magic customized their email copy with Wordsmith. Using Wordsmith’s precisely customized copy, the Magic seeks to increase season ticket holders’ satisfaction by explaining a way to get more value from their investment.
The Associated Press uses Wordsmith to transform raw earnings data into 4,400 corporate earnings stories every quarter, up from 300 published manually.
Another AI software Quill from Narrative Science uses “Advanced NLG” (Natural Language Generation) to use your intent as its guide to deliver the information you care most about.
Persado arms organizations and individuals with “smart content” that maximizes the efficacy of communication with any audience at scale, while delivering unique insight into the specific triggers that drive action.
Boomtrain: Marketing Personalization
San Francisco-based Boomtrain is a marketing platform helps businesses understand and communicate with their customers on an individual level; it enables companies to act on that understanding, automatically in real-time. The Boomtrain platform provides marketing automation, onsite recommendation, email marketing, and etc. powered by AI.
With a combination of Boomtrain’s next-generation machine learning algorithms and Marketo’s automated campaign delivery, brands can create unique relationships with each of their customers.
Game Rant, a game lover’s go-to resource for reviews, was able to achieve 3-4 times the number of subscribers than before using Boomtrain’s highly targeted lighbox popups. CBS Interactive’s Chowhound used Boomtrain to send personalized email to their audience and boost engagement by 150%.
LiftIgniter is another company offering the machine learning personalization and recommendation. Also check out Amazon DSSTNE.
Albert: Autonomous Digital Marketing Campaigns
Albert, claimed as the world’s first and only artificial intelligence marketing platform, requires little human manipulation across all channels. It incorporates predictive analytics, machine-learning, control systems and feedback, natural language processing, and etc.
It can be deployed to run your paid and nonpaid digital marketing campaigns, including email, mobile, social, search and display. It learns and maintains constant optimization and analysis of your campaigns, answering questions you may never have thought to ask and freeing you up to focus on higher value problem solving.
Adgorithms, creators of Albert, was named the “Best Marketing Automation Company” and won “Best Retail Campaign of the Year” for its work with Harley-Davidson NYC, at this year’s DMN Awards.
Albert is currently working with retail and consumer brands, including Harley-Davidson, EVISU, Cosabella, Made.com and others to help them reach their customers directly.
Frustrated by “the inability of traditional agencies to expand its audience and continuously deliver better results”, Italian lingerie brand Cosabella needed a new approach to digital marketing and chose Albert. It described the initial results from using Albert as “incredible.” – 336% ROAS and 155% increase in revenues.
Using AI for marketing should focus on driving better results and easier management instead of reducing the cost. Yes, Albert is neither free nor cheap. An ad agency will charge 15-20% of your media spend. Albert charges 18% and had no monthly cost or implementation fee (via Campaign).
Also check out Conversica, an AI powered email marketing platform that automates email conversations with all your leads to qualify them for sales.
Other intelligent digital marketing solutions: Adobe Media Optimizer, Rocket Fuel, Kenshoo
Clarifai: Visual Recognition to Improve UX
A online photography marketplace Foap uses Clarifai’s visual recognition solution to consistently tag all user uploaded photos to make them easily searchable by brands. In addition, using Clarifai to suggest tags to users not only helps categorize and curate user-generated content, it also creates a great user experience.
Another AI company Dextro builds advanced machine learning systems that understand video.
Google Cloud Vision API classifies images into thousands of categories (e.g., “sailboat”, “lion”, “Eiffel Tower”), detects individual objects and faces within images, and finds and reads printed words contained within images.
Adobe Experience Manager provides its users the smart tagging feature on images for easier digital asset management and better user experience.
Indico: Construct Your Buyer Personas
Persona Alignment API from Indico predicts the alignment of a sample of text with each of the 16 Myers Briggs personas. can be used to construct buyer personas for targeting user groups with custom content.
Indico also provides other APIs useful for marketers including sentiment analysis, keywords extraction, person recognition, emotion detections, and etc.
Chatbots: Improve Customer Relationships
Chatbots has received a lot of attentions during the recent years. It’s getting deployed by more and more marketers and communications executives.
For those who aren’t familiar with chatbots, a chatbot or chatterbot is like a virtual assistant powered by rules and artificial intelligence, such as Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, Amazon’s Echo, Microsoft’s Cortana, and those found in messaging apps.
Further references: Facebook Messenger, Alexa Skills API, Converse.AI, IBM Watson
The Grid: AI Web Designer
Priced from $96 a year, The Grid has already designed hundreds of thousands of web pages. 24/7 she’s experimenting, figuring out what works & what doesn’t. Check out this video:
The Grid can apply a simple 5 color palette to your site in more than 200,000 unique ways. In less time than it takes to read this sentence, she analyzes your media, sifting through millions of unique color combinations searching for the perfect application of your palette.
One of the cool things you can do with The Grid is to set up a constraint that will generate the color of a text box to go with each new photo that you upload. Read more details on Forbes.
Lucy: Market Research & Media Planning AI
The AI, Lucy, based on IBM Watson, can help marketers with sophisticated market research, complicated audience establishment, and media planning. It helps with business development as well while this cognitive assistant assembles all the complicated data needed for business development and RFPs.
More AI Tools for Marketers
I’ll keep an eye on the latest AI tools that can be adopted by marketers and leave the updates below.
- AI to develop insights from data: Lexalytics, Sysomos, Crimson Hexagon
- DPM: Oracle Bluekai, Adobe Audience Manager
[…] Relying less on human. As AI technology is maturing, companies should start experimenting with AI marketing platforms. […]