AI has turned out to be a blessing for widening the scope of marketing in businesses!

In recent decades, the popularity of social media platforms and search engines have transformed marketing from a psychology-based endeavor to one that measures and tracks everything. Using the right approach, it's now possible for a company to scientifically plot its way to the top.

As technology improves, artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly prevalent in a widening array of disciplines, and marketing is no exception. Thanks to a diverse suite of tools that gather data on the preferences of audience members, sales prospects, and existing customers, today's marketing platforms offer fertile grounds for AI use cases.

Here are some key ways in which AI is powering audience insights and enabling marketers to laser-target their audience.

Better Paid Marketing Campaigns

Today's marketing runs on data, and digital assets are data mines. Everything from user interaction to customer intent is measured by an audience insight tool, and marketers crunch data on advanced platforms to derive audience insights. Factors such as demographics, income levels, content interactions, bounce rates, and previous visit data offer clues about the funnel stage that a prospect belongs to.

AI helps marketers in layering customer targeting filters. Layering is a process where marketers place one target user variable on top of another to narrow their audience's size. For instance, a marketer could run Facebook ads targeting women between the ages of 20 and 25 who have exhibited an interest in beauty products in the past. In this case, the prospect's sex, age, and interest are layers that narrow the size of the audience.

Layering is essential to reducing cost-per-click (CPC) costs, which then leads to more productive ad budget spending. AI offers deep insights into layers by analyzing a prospect's interaction with a product and with the competition as well. Some platforms offer marketers the ability to compare their audience with their competition's and derive audience insights from this.

AI can boost these comparisons by diving deep into data and looking for patterns. For instance, a competitor's audience might be displaying interest in interacting on new social media platforms. Marketers can then judge whether a presence on those platforms is worthwhile, given the ROI those customers give their competitors.

Discovering new audience segments also becomes simple with AI thanks to its ability to crunch vast amounts of data. The result is an efficient ad campaign that delivers the highest ROI possible.

Deeper Audience Insights

Every marketer lives and dies by their user personas. Personas are data-driven profiles that marketers create for their "ideal customer" types. They condense audience behavior into a few common tropes that help marketers understand every user's needs.

For instance, a product might be used one way by people aged between 40 and 60, while people aged 25 to 35 might use it differently. The ads and content that marketers target these sets of users with will be different. Appealing to the younger demographic requires marketers to understand their needs, which will be different from the ones of the older cohort.

AI simplifies this process since it can quickly identify patterns and create highly accurate customer personas. It can even take highly granular data patterns into account to segment audiences intelligently. The result is a better framework that marketers can use to understand who they're marketing to.

One of the challenges of the persona creation process is that consumer attitudes change over time. These days, they seemingly change faster than ever because of the way technology has shaped our lives. AI-driven personas can take fast-changing trends into account and create intelligent customer segments in real-time.

The result is marketers are assured of staying up to date with their consumers' needs and can always target them efficiently.

Chatbots and Data Acquisition

Chatbots were once heralded as a new paradigm in customer interaction. These days, the average chatbot AI isn't smart enough to replace manual intervention due to the technology lacking sophistication.

However, chatbots are great at collecting user intent data, even if they can't hold a conversation together. Customer service bots help companies understand user issues better and convey them to the relevant departments. Marketing teams benefit since they achieve insights into the pain points customers routinely face.

These issues help inform product development and the message a company wants to craft around it. For instance, AI-powered chatbots help companies direct user concerns to the necessary departments. The AI engines behind these bots can also be configured to run analytics on these data and identify the most common pain points.

By sharing these data with marketing and product teams, companies can ensure greater customer satisfaction and accurate targeting.

Advanced Analytics

Massive data crunching is where AI shines. These days companies collect vast quantities of data, and human operators might not make full use of them.

Putting AI to work in identifying trends and highlighting customer behavior changes helps companies stay on top of their industry. While AI isn't smart enough to act on recommendations derived from analytics, it can help human operators understand budding issues better.

For instance, marketers can view a customer's interaction history with the company to figure out what their issues are and whether they've changed. The customer might have downloaded new content that is different from what they typically consume. A human operator might not notice this change, given the vast quantity of data they have to analyze. However, AI can spot this pattern and alert users immediately.

A Maturing Technology

As AI matures, there's no doubt that marketers will benefit from it even more. The technology is nascent right now, but the rate of improvement is massive. As companies continue to gather more data than ever before, it remains to be seen how marketers use AI to get to know their customers better.