How AI is changing producer to buyer bond: AI Marketing

By Aditya Abeysinghe

Marketing was used to reach out buyers from early days of distribution, manufacturing and selling of goods and services. With electronic marketing, new ways of establishing marketing links with consumers are used. Today, from social media marketing to automated marketing, tech is used for many activities. With use of tech, a new issue is the massive data volume that is generated due to multi-channel marketing strategies used by sellers. Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in marketing has been a new solution to solve this concern.

Where is AI used

Big data and social media are two terms that were introduced in the past few years. Analyzing big data to efficiently make decisions has been an issue with the use of multiple social media methods and mass marketing. Often software which can bring insights to marketers to identify which channels to market and which targeted customers to market is used as marketers are not machine learning or AI experts. These software use AI and machine learning to transform and process data used for visual analysis.

AI is also used for inner processes in marketing. Social media advertising is based on user behavior in a social media system. Social media businesses collect data on how users use their websites and mobile apps. Then these media recommend pages and display advertisements using AI and other algorithms. Similarly, websites of popular manufacturers use algorithms to recommend other products either based on user navigation or the content displayed to market products.

Benefits of AI

One of the main uses of AI in marketing is the speed at which decisions are made using AI. AI algorithms can handle large amounts of data and process them at lesser time and cost compared to manual processing. The benefit is the ability to increase sales at less cost and time using customer data.

Often vendors are unable to reply to all issues raised due to increasing number of customers interacting with systems today. Chatbots are a new feature used in many large businesses to answer these questions posted by customers. AI is used in these bots where customers could progress through options to get answers or post a question. This improves customer retention with the provider of a service or a product while also ensuring sales or after sales.

A drawback of manual analysis of data is biasness in information gained using data analysed. Biasness may be due to errors in processes used, due to personal reasons of analysts or due to factors external to analysts. Since knowledge gained is inconsistent when the analyses are biased, incorrect decisions made through such data could lead to reduce customer retention, loss of sales etc. However, information generated using AI algorithms are often less biased compared to that generated using manual analysis because machine-based analysis is used.

Several social media websites and apps display a personalized feed of videos, images, and other content based on similar posts viewed by users. These social media systems use AI algorithms to suggest content based on content already hosted and display them as a series of posts. Apart from the regular content suggested, these media also display online advertisements between posts or while playing videos selected by users. Businesses could display advertisements to market their products using these social media while reaching a large audience at fraction of the time and cost compared to other regular marketing methods.

Challenges with AI

The main challenge of marketing using AI is the time taken to train AI models. Often large datasets need to be used to train data and test models based on metrics such as accuracy and precision to ensure they provide accurate output. This process of cleaning, transforming, and testing the accuracy of trained AI algorithms requires time. AI marketing is also costly since large server farms are used by top businesses to store and process data in contrast to other methods of marketing. 

Many social media have been criticized for using customer data for marketing purposes without their knowing. Breaching user privacy for marketing is common with online selling websites. Social media and other online marketing systems need to often use such data since AI models require regularly updated data to accurately provide output based on user behavior.

Image Courtesy: https://emarsys.com