AI in Digital Marketing.

Hey there friend! Have you ever heard of AI? AI stands for Artificial Intelligence, and it’s a technology that’s changing the world in amazing ways. One area where AI is having a big impact is in digital marketing.

Digital marketing is all about promoting products or services using digital channels like email, social media, and search engines. AI can help digital marketers in many ways, but it also has some drawbacks.

Let’s start with the benefits. One of the biggest advantages of AI in digital marketing is that it can help you analyze huge amounts of data. For example, if you run an online store, you can use AI to analyze your customers’ purchase history and browsing behavior to recommend products they might be interested in. This can help you increase sales and build customer loyalty.

AI can also help you personalize your marketing messages. By analyzing data about your customers, AI can help you create messages that are more relevant and targeted. This can help you increase engagement and conversions.

Another benefit of AI in digital marketing is that it can help you automate routine tasks. For example, you can use AI to automatically send personalized emails to your customers or to schedule social media posts. This can save you time and make your marketing more efficient.

However, there are also some disadvantages to using AI in digital marketing. One of the biggest drawbacks is that it can be expensive. AI technology is still relatively new, and it can be costly to implement and maintain.

Another disadvantage is that AI can be impersonal. While AI can help you personalize your marketing messages to some extent, it’s still not the same as having a human touch. Some customers may feel like they’re being marketed to by a machine, which can be off-putting.

There’s also the risk of relying too heavily on AI. While AI can be a powerful tool, it’s important to remember that it’s not perfect. If you rely too heavily on AI, you may miss out on opportunities or make mistakes that could hurt your marketing efforts.

Overall, AI has the potential to revolutionize digital marketing. By helping marketers analyze data, personalize messages, and automate routine tasks, AI can help businesses improve their marketing efficiency and effectiveness. However, it’s important to be aware of the potential drawbacks and to use AI as a tool, rather than relying on it completely.

The above was created verbatim by ChatGPT with the following query: “Write an article that introduces AI and explains the benefits and disadvantages of using AI for digital marketing as if you were talking to a friend”.

Note that ChatGPT has only been trained on data up to 2021, which means it has no “knowledge” after 2021.

Please forgive me! I thought that this would be a great way to demonstrate the progress made in the field in recent years. AI does indeed offer many opportunities for advertisers. We’ve been using various solutions from the field of AI for years, including audience targeting and bidding techniques. AI can certainly be impressive. But whilst there are opportunities that can boost your marketing, there are also limitations.

In this article, what I’ve been referring to as AI is technically called “weak AI” (or “narrow AI”). This type of AI relies on being trained with data. On the other hand, “strong AI” or “general AI” is the super-intelligence that Hollywood delivers to us via the big screen; fear-inducing computers that can think for themselves and be creative (often to the detriment of humans).

Today, AI cannot be original in the creative sense. This is because weak AI relies on learning from pre-existing data. Everything generated earlier in this article was learnt and perhaps twisted in one way or another. This can be a problem for digital marketing because of the requirement for original content. At this stage in the growth of AI, it’s reasonably acceptable to use AI to generate messaging (and even images!), but give it 20 years on this trajectory and we’ll end up with some very generic ads. These ads of the future won’t break the mould, they’ll just be reusing the same mould, over and over, based on the fact it’s worked well before. We need human input to be creative and build campaign strategies that connect users to products and services.

But AI also has huge benefits. Providing accurate data is available, we can utilise AI to learn and identify patterns in huge quantities of data, and then use it to effortlessly apply those learnings to drive performance in digital marketing campaigns. This is achieved by AI models making predictions and helping digital ad campaigns to be more targeted.

One extremely important consideration is the quality of the data that AI models learn from. The field of AI has been accused of things like racial bias; but this is only possible because of the data the AI model has learnt from. Marketing data is the foundation of all the learnings, so we must ensure that the data being delivered to an AI solution is accurate. It means ensuring that website measurement services are operating correctly, and ensuring what should be tracked properly is indeed tracked properly.

We see all-too-often sub-standard website measurement configurations. If the data isn’t right, then your AI isn’t right. If your AI isn’t right, your insights aren’t right. However, with the right data, AI is a tool that can fuel performance and business growth.

To close, I’ll refer back to a slightly modified version of ChatGPT’s conclusion from earlier:
Overall, AI is revolutionising digital marketing. By helping marketers analyse data, personalise messages, and automate routine tasks, AI can help businesses improve their marketing efficiency and effectiveness. However, it’s important to be aware of the potential drawbacks and to use AI as a tool, rather than relying on it completely.