AI has been a trending topic for quite a while now. And it’s getting used in various fields including digital marketing.
This can be mainly because the utilization of AI digital marketing methods can help you deliver improved client experiences. Over that, they can help you save both time and money.
It’s 2022, and the world has come a long way in terms of technology. Today, AI (artificial intelligence) impacts numerous aspects of life in the form of smart devices, chatbots, and even self-driving cars. All of those are designed to know client needs and preferences and deliver customized client experiences.
If you’re curious whether AI can fulfill everything digital marketers do in the future, it’s hard to say. Whereas it’s likely that AI is here to stay, that doesn’t mean that employees are going to find themselves without employment just because automation is in the picture.
The Future of AI Automation in Digital marketing
The future of digital marketing is going to be fully automated, it’s not like no human at all. AI tools can help marketers for generating content, enhance user experiences, and more.
From predicting consumer behavior to discovering patterns in large data sets, AI has made a significant impact on the marketing industry.
While it may be difficult to predict the future, it’s easy to see that AI will continue to progress and play an increasingly central role in digital marketing.
One of the advantages of AI in digital marketing is its ability to deliver businesses valuable insights into their customer base.
This will allows marketers to tailor the complete digital experience – as well as campaigns, content and messaging – to the requirements and needs of their unique audience.
How does AI automation work
AI can collect and analyze massive amounts of data quickly and efficiently. Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing digital marketing at a remarkable rate.
A few years ago, companies hired a team of digital marketers to promote their business. But now, they hire a person to have digital marketing experience to perform all marketing tasks using automation tools.
The main tasks digital marketers have performed include website analysis, customer analysis, keyword ranking, off-page submissions, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, cold calling, handling customer feedback, etc.
The Marketing Cloud offers a wide range of AI tools to perform all digital marketing tasks in less time and in less time with greater precision. The AI engine increases the efficiency of marketing work by reducing human effort.
AI Automation Tools vs Digital Marketing Jobs
As the world becomes more and more automated, the future of digital marketing jobs is looking increasingly secure. Already, a big range of marketing jobs is in danger of being automated, due to advances in AI.
However, while some marketing jobs are also at risk of automation, others are likely to see a surge in demand as businesses adopt AI to automate their operations.
This is because AI can help businesses automate tasks that are presently carried out by human employees, corresponding to client service and sales to provide you.
As a result, businesses can need far more marketers than ever before to take care of and grow their client base and sales team.
To perform all marketing tasks, companies don’t hire a team, they hire a person with digital marketing experience to perform all these tasks using automation tools.
Marketing jobs that may be automated
According to a McKinsey Global Institute study, robot automation will displace 800 million jobs in 2030, affecting up to one-fifth of the global workforce. Meanwhile, one-third of the working class in wealthier nations like Germany and the US may need to retain them for other roles.
While experts believe that positions in service, warehouse, and retail are the most at risk of getting replaced by machines and algorithms, the marketing field is bound to get a taste of this shift as well.
With the rampant advancement and availability of technologies specifically designed for the industry, many brands have incorporated these add-ons into their operations for a streamlined workflow. As such, here are some tasks that marketing automation can work on:
Content generation
While an algorithm to completely clear the need for writers and strategists is yet to be written, several marketing solutions available in the market can replace many content creation and curation duties traditionally performed by people.
Articoolo, Word AI, and Wordsmith are some of the on-demand automation programs today. As for generating more optimized content for search engines, SEMRush and its list of marketing tools are a go-to for most practitioners.
Email marketing
In today’s day and age, it’s almost impossible to find a digital marketer that hasn’t tried an automated email program yet. Now, more than ever, AI is used to manage large-scale email campaigns.
Tools specific for this marketing job have access to the data collected from contacts, enabling each message to be personalized depending on the recipient’s progress in the buyer’s journey.
This customized effort helps put potential customers or recurring ones in the right direction to doing business with your brand. Among the widely used software for this task include HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, and Mailchimp.
Automated advertisement
Go ahead and do a quick scroll through your Facebook or LinkedIn feed. Chances are, you’ll spot an ad or two that will make you want to click. Such a curated browsing experience is the work of marketing automation.
While more companies rely on AI power for data collection, analytics, and targeting, it still takes a group of marketers to formulate and execute the perfect campaign for a business.
However, utilizing audience management software such as Adext can help identify the best channel and optimize Facebook and LinkedIn ads based on the user easily.
SEM and PPC
In the last few years, (SEM) and pay-per-click (PPC) automation tools have continued to emerge in the market.
Although these systems are yet to become fully automated, marketers can tap into their wide range of features to track the performance of their online marketing efforts, allowing for real-time adjustments to optimize their campaigns better.
Automation destroys jobs but also creates them
While it’s true that AI can take over redundant jobs, it still has a long way to go before it can replace all marketing tasks. In fact, the rise of marketing automation comes with new roles meant to fill the ever-evolving digital landscape.
Sean Chou, CEO of Chicago-based AI startup Catalytic, said it best: “The more technology encompasses and the more we demand of technology, the more people are involved in doing that.” As more companies adopt these advancements, the call to develop digital marketing strategies, track metrics, and create content will also increase like never before.
“When you look at AI, there’s this nonstop need for training, for data, for maintenance, for taking care of all the exceptions that are happening,” Chou further explained. With such promise, more positions are actually opening because of AI, contrary to popular belief.
What automation can’t do
Having machines in the marketing industry doesn’t necessarily equate to marketers losing jobs. As Larry Kotch of Brainbroker called it, “these things don’t destroy jobs, they just change what jobs are needed.”
To date, AI is more likely to supplement how people work in the field than replace them.
After all, a marketing automation software, for instance, doesn’t “automate” marketing, as marketers are still the brains behind the sequences of email messages AIs automatically send to specific audiences.
Plus, there are several distinct marketing essentials that code can’t replicate just yet. These include:
Creativity
The marketing profession exercises both sides of the brain. For all the required analytical work, AI can definitely step in to help.
However, when a project needs to tap into the creative side of things, such as emotions, expect that even the most advanced programs will find it hard to develop an engaging piece to impact consumers and businesses in their buying decisions.
Interpretation
While an AI-powered tool like PaveAI can look into 16 million possible correlations and then make a report highlighting its most valuable data, it still needs a human to interpret the results.
There’s , too. Although words like bomb, mad, and sick are considered negative by definition, they can also have a positive connotation in slang. People get it; machines may not.
Originality
Sure, automation can optimize multiple marketing channels, but it can’t pitch and hone ideas for a brand. Take email campaigns as an example.
While AIs personalize and deliver a message seamlessly, they’re yet to develop a well-written marketing piece on their own. The same goes for social media work, where online profiles and postings usually require a creative mind to appeal to the masses.
Perspective
In marketing, no matter how data-backed a campaign is, its impact on the audiences can still vary depending on their assumptions, beliefs, and experiences.
All this is the work of perspectives. Even with an AI’s clear-cut solution to your marketing needs, it’s the human thought leader that takes it up a notch with a narrative coming from a unique point of view.
How AI Automation is changing the marketing world
From Google’s RankBrain and Voice Search to customized Amazon recommendations, AI is changing the face of today’s digital landscape.
With effective information analysis and the ability to adapt to input, artificial intelligence is absorbing the human role of identifying marketing trends.
Brands and marketers use AI digital marketing to avoid wasting time and resources through machine-controlled digital marketing services. How AI digital marketing will give you a competitive edge:
- Helps You Understand Your Audience Better: AI can analyze data to simply predict the buying behaviors and decisions of your target customers.
- Improves User Experience: you can use AI data to provide your audience with what they really need.
- More effective Marketing: AI helps you finish the guesswork. You’ll create a more effective digital marketing strategy for your business with artificial intelligence’s data-driven analysis.
- Will increase Productivity: using AI algorithms, you can automatize a number of repetitive tasks. This will help you increase productivity and save you both time and money.
- Will increase ROI: AI empowers decision-making and also helps you create better-performing content. Using AI digital marketing strategies helps you reach out to the proper audience with deals they can’t refuse.
How to keep growing as a digital marketer
Few AI tools are currently available to marketers to improve themselves in this way. But once self-learning systems are developed for various marketing and sales functions, expect them to quickly surpass their human counterparts in skill.
This rate makes it very difficult to predict that marketing skills are going to be most valuable within the coming machine age. However, there are a couple of ways in which any marketer in any role will future-proof their career.
Proactively experiment with artificial intelligence: Many AI tools today are easy to learn, and many vendors offer free trials or demos. Try the tools that interest you. The more you do, the more you learn about the opportunities that are currently available in the digital market.
Consume the right resources on AI: You need to understand some of the basic technology concepts. This isn’t just for fun; Understanding some of the theories behind AI technologies will put you in a better position to see how AI impacts your work.
Become your organization’s AI champion: The best way to future-proof your career is to lead the charge for AI transformation inside your organization.
The proper AI implementations will improve marketing performance and productivity. Spearhead the change and you’ll be in the lead once AI begins to remodel marketing as we all know it.
The most effective way to start championing AI is by finding real use cases for AI marketing technologies.
Automation and Marketers: Onto the Future of Marketing
In his 2018 book titled AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, Kai-Fu Lee, CEO of Sinovation Ventures, mentions “There’s no doubt that the AI revolution will require readjustments and a great deal of sacrifice, but despairing rather than preparing for what’s to come is unproductive and, perhaps, even reckless.”
With all the AI fear mongering in the marketing field today, it’s important to remember that no evidence shows that automation kills more jobs than it creates. And if anything, the industry remains special, as it still requires human touch for its set of complex operations.
In case you’re on the lookout to up your marketing game, partner with a digital marketing agency like Spiralytics that can cater to both your unique marketing requests and automation service needs.
Get the best people with the best tool for the job, and prepare for future-ready marketing work today!