AI & Audience: How AI Can Help You Target Your Marketing Efforts More Than Ever?

By: Chandni Shah, Co-Founder & COO, Social Kinnect

With advertising always as her first calling, Chandni cofounded Social Kinnect, a digital marketing agency along with Rohan Mehta, as she envisaged a great potential in the digital space.

Everyone is talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) these days. It seems that AI is all-powerful, and can be used for everything from creating an intelligent chatbot, to operating your air conditioner. But in the context of digital marketing, did you know that the most common use of AI is to segment and then target your audiences? Your consumer is the crux of your campaign, and AI helps you speak that consumer’s language in the best way possible. Forget inside-out marketing efforts – in 2019, every marketer must move outside-in. And AI can help you do that.

Here are five ways in which AI can help your target your marketing efforts more than ever:

1) Group Your Users Together

This may seem elementary, but grouping your users together is one of the first steps towards marketing success. With AI-powered CRM software that can segment users based on a wide range of behaviour patterns (age, purchase intent, lifestyle, demographics, marriage status - the list is endless), you will be able to understand your consumers’ needs better than you ever could. The minute a user is added to your database, it will be slotted into one of these buckets. Your marketing efforts will be more customized and personalized now, because you will have a more streamlined audience(s).

2) Follow Your Users Around The Internet, With AI

With even YouTube offering Custom Intent Audiences now, almost all social platforms give you the ability to convert an interested customer into an actual one. If someone is searching for your product or service on Google but then drops the search, you can use programmatic software to literally ‘follow’ that customer around the Internet with targeted ads until he or she actually buys your product/service.

3) Set Up Customer Flows That Make Sense For Your Brand

With an AI-driven CRM software, not only can you group and segment your consumers, but you can also set up marketing funnels that direct a specific user through certain steps based on his or her behaviour and prior actions. For example, you can set up a funnel such that a user will be sent a certain newsletter once they submit an email address, and once they receive that newsletter, another action can be primed depending on whether they just open it or actually read it.

So, AI can help segment your audience and take them along a journey that will ultimately lead them to your product or service!

4) Use Ai To Create Lookalike Audiences, And Then Some More!

Once you have groups of users that are working well for you and delivering business results, why not use AI to create lookalike audiences? These audiences will extend your reach beyond your existing base, to audiences who are almost or just as likely to buy from you.

When you find something that works for you, why not replicate it using the power of AI?

5) Understand & Analyze Audience Insights With AI

There is no point in segmenting and targeting your audience if you are not analyzing how this is working for your brand. With AI, you can understand your audiences and their behaviours in the most accurate way possible. Data can be used in new and innovative ways to understand what your users are searching for, when and where.

So before you even strategize a campaign, use AI to understand your audience deeply. Why do people take certain online journeys? Knowledge is power, and knowledge powered by AI is even more valuable!

In conclusion, AI constitutes anything that replaces human effort with computer intelligence. But that doesn’t mean your marketing efforts and audience segmenting & targeting should be devoid of human effort. Use AI to complement the insights, strategies, and content that you and your team already have. Use AI to develop a more consumer-centric marketing plan than ever before. Finally, use AI to be where your audiences are, instead of directing your audiences to where you want them to go.