How Companies Are Leveraging AI in Digital Marketing

Like many revolutionary technologies, artificial intelligence (AI) has had its fits and starts. Particularly in marketing, only recently has its adoption taken off: In January 2020, 50% of respondents to an Advertiser Perceptions survey had “no plans to use AI in marketing.” Somehow that number had grown from 36% in 2019.

Today, the stance of AI avoidance in marketing feels as rooted in a pre-pandemic landscape as blowing out your candles over a communal birthday cake. Nowadays, AI influences the marketplace across every industry sector — and marketing is far from an exception. Still, like any tech boom, it takes time to know which tools are best for your organization and how to leverage them.

Read on for a sampling of AI tools every marketer should know, and four ways they’ll change how your company works forever.

Improve Your Content Strategy

Developing a successful content marketing strategy can be time and resource intensive. From researching competitors to auditing your content, even the most concentrated efforts often rely on opinions or insufficient data after dedicating considerable resources and hours to the task.

Not so with AI. Take MarketMuse, which “analyzes your entire website to give you personalized, objective insights so you can confidently plan better and faster.” After conducting deep research to identify valuable long-form content topics for your brand, MarketMuse gives you KPIs and a detailed content brief including a structure, user questions, and relevant links. Better still, as you edit its provided draft, it’ll give you pointers to ensure the final product is fully optimized before you publish it.

Similarly, Frase.io is here for you when it comes to SEO. Self-proclaimed as “your entire SEO content workflow on steroids,” Frase will take a keyword you provide and scrub the top sites where it appears. Then, using that data, it produces an SEO-friendly outline, and scores your work as you create it to ensure the finished piece ranks higher in search results.

Surfer SEO also optimizes your written content strategy for maximum SEO potential. Some of its unique features include comparing your copy to the competition as part of its real-time evaluation tool and its integration with writing platforms like Google Docs, WordPress and Jasper (more on Jasper later).

Develop Better Content

Thanks to the tools above, you know what to write — but what about some help writing it? AI has you covered there, too.

ChatGPT is the best-known player in this space, dominating headlines and water cooler talk since its debut last year. (We detailed this in our article exploring the history and future of chatbots with chat AI.) Whether you use it to break through writer’s block or create a tweakable draft, ChatGPT has an incredible range of copywriting applications. Keep in mind, though, this technology is relatively new, and the tool is not infallible. Think of it as just that: a tool, not your team’s newest (or, heaven forbid, only) copywriter. It can supercharge your output, but you still need people.

Listed first in Influencer Marketing Hub’s Best AI Marketing Tools You Should Be Using Today, Jasper AI goes beyond just elevating your copywriting capabilities. It has built-in templates, a plagiarism checker, and tone of voice settings, so you’re always speaking on brand, and it can even generate art and images. As we mentioned earlier, Jasper AI can integrate with other AI tools to maximize its power. For example, plug Jasper AI into Surfer SEO to create optimized content that hits all your essential keywords. From ideation to content generation, Jasper’s marketing applications are practically endless.

Whereas Jasper can (seemingly) do it all, Smartwriter.ai takes a more niche approach by focusing on email outreach. Smartwriter is a whiz at personalized emails (including subject lines and cold email outreach), backlink generation, LinkedIn personalization, and lead enrichment. If your company could benefit from personalized emails at scale, then run — don’t walk — to Smartwriter.

But what if you do business worldwide in multiple languages? AI’s got you covered there, too. Check out DeepL, described as the “world’s most accurate translator.” If Google’s word-for-word translations make you cringe, you’ll love how DeepL translates the nuance and meaning of the words you provide. Yes, even industry jargon. If you can say it, DeepL can translate it.

Manage Your Social Media Presence

For all its marketing opportunities, social media is one of the largest company time sucks introduced in generations — and no, we don’t mean time spent scrolling on TikTok. We mean the massive effort that goes into creating social media content and maintaining a brand’s channels. This has never been truer than today, with the rise of entertainment-based apps and social media’s evolution toward entertainment rather than interpersonal connection. There’s a reason community management is a full-time job. Well, surprise surprise — AI can also help out here.

Brand24 is a powerful AI social media monitoring tool companies can use to keep up with their brand sentiment. As HubSpot summarizes, Brand24 “sifts through massive amounts of information generated on public platforms, whether social media or forums,” and wraps it all up in a handy dashboard “that analyzes everything from mentions, the volume of discussion, and overall brand sentiment.” Even better? Brand24 can audit your social media marketing campaigns and warn you of possible issues so you can address them before they spiral.

The influencer industry is already a complex beast by itself; if you want to complicate your social media marketing strategy tenfold, just add influencers. While there are big benefits to incorporating influencers, it takes a lot of work (there are entire agencies dedicated to influencer marketing). Still, AI can help control the chaos through emplifi.io’s influencer tool. This handy tool can identify, vet, and retain influencers while analyzing your content’s performance.

Automate Key Tasks

In addition to helping you tackle your biggest challenges, AI can take easier but more time-consuming tasks off your plate entirely. The benefit? More time and energy to spend on the things AI can’t do (yet).

Interacting with customers can be time-consuming, but the data it produces is priceless. Enter AI. Conversational commerce — or e-commerce facilitated by AI — drives the sales process by making personalized product recommendations, streamlining transactions, and offering enhanced customer support while giving companies a wealth of customer data.

While almost every industry uses this tech, Botco.ai focuses on healthcare and senior living, among other sectors. Botco integrates within an organization’s systems to simplify customer interactions and collect data produced through these chats. That data is then analyzed to inform and support all business decisions, including marketing and customer experience management.

Competitive analysis is another place where companies often dedicate considerable time with potentially limited rewards. Today, AI tools like Crayon can streamline the process. Crayon lets you “tap into more than one hundred different data types across millions of competitive intelligence sources to stay on top of product updates, messaging pivots, executive team changes, and more.” Plus, its tool cuts through the noise so you don’t drown in oceans of data, meaning you can “identify trends and flag the intel that’s most impactful” with ease.

Finally, Zapier can automate nearly any workflow imaginable and integrate with a list of apps so long it’s mind-boggling. One of our favorite functionalities is how it turns text-based input into data. For example, if you want to mine insights from your customers’ feedback, but sifting through everywhere it’s scattered across the web seems too overwhelming, give Zapier a try. It can use automated text analysis to parse through gobs of comments and reviews to provide valuable takeaways.

We AI(m) to Please

By helping you maximize your output and continually grow alongside tech, AI can truly change your organization. At Ideas Collide, we recognize AI’s potential and have invested in its future with our partner, Botco.ai. Whether you want to explore tools that’ll help you meet your objectives or partner with an agency that can implement this powerful technology on your behalf, we’ve got you covered. Drop us a line and get started today.