AI Marketing – The Complete Guide

AI marketing is the term used to describe marketing activities that use AI technology in some form. It involves leveraging artificial intelligence to automate processes, analyze data, and make more informed, real-time decisions. By integrating AI into marketing strategies, businesses can enhance personalization, streamline workflows, and deliver better customer experiences at scale.

Recent developments in the sophistication of widely available AI tools have opened up countless possibilities for marketers. From generating creative content to automating customer interactions, AI has transformed the way brands engage with their audiences. Some of the most common applications of AI in marketing include:

• • Content creation: Tools like ChatGPT and Jasper can generate blog posts, ad copy, and social media captions tailored to specific audiences.
  • Personalization: AI enables marketers to deliver hyper-targeted recommendations and offers based on individual behaviors and preferences.
  • Data analysis: Machine learning algorithms can sift through vast amounts of data to identify trends, predict outcomes, and inform marketing strategies.
  • Customer support: Chatbots powered by natural language processing (NLP) provide instant, human-like responses to customer inquiries.

The concept of AI marketing is not new. In the late 90s, for example, Columbia University published a research report on the use of AI to predict future consumer behavior — an application now commonly used by companies like Amazon to power their product recommendation engines.

However, the pace of AI development has grown exponentially. What once required highly specialized systems is now accessible to teams of all sizes through intuitive platforms and tools. In the past decade alone, AI has become deeply embedded in marketing, transforming everything from ad targeting to email automation.

Today’s artificial intelligence in marketing is driven by advancements in machine learning, predictive analytics, and large language models (LLMs). These technologies allow marketers to not only react to customer needs but anticipate them, creating proactive and dynamic campaigns that resonate.

AI is no longer a futuristic concept; it’s a practical tool shaping how marketers engage, analyze, and optimize. From automating repetitive tasks to delivering hyper-personalized customer experiences, here are some of the most impactful ways AI is transforming marketing today:

1) Personalized Customer Experiences

AI analyzes vast amounts of customer data to deliver tailored experiences. Platforms like Amazon use AI to recommend products based on individual behaviors, but businesses of all sizes can leverage this technology. With tools like the ON24 Content Hubs, marketers can curate personalized experiences, delivering relevant content to prospects and customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

2) Predictive Analytics for Better Decision-Making

AI-powered predictive analytics helps marketers anticipate trends, customer behaviors, and campaign performance. For example, machine learning can forecast churn rates or optimize pricing strategies. ON24’s Performance Analytics empowers marketers with actionable insights, enabling them to make data-driven decisions for maximum impact.

3) Automated Content Creation and Optimization

Creating high-quality content at scale is easier with AI. Tools like ChatGPT and Jasper generate blog posts, ad copy, and social media captions. But optimization is just as important as creation. The ON24 AI-Driven Content Engine analyzes audience engagement to recommend and optimize content, ensuring it resonates with your target audience.

4) Smarter Ad Targeting and Media Buying

AI simplifies programmatic ad buying by automating the bidding process and identifying the best ad placements. It ensures ads are displayed to the most relevant audiences, increasing ROI. Google Ads, for instance, uses AI to optimize campaigns and predict which users are most likely to convert.

5) Advanced Chatbots and Customer Support

AI-powered chatbots, such as those using natural language processing (NLP), provide instant, 24/7 customer service. These bots can answer common questions, guide users through the sales funnel, and even handle complex inquiries, freeing up human agents for higher-level tasks.

6) Enhanced Email Marketing

AI elevates email campaigns by personalizing subject lines, optimizing send times, and crafting dynamic offers tailored to recipient behavior. With ON24’s Integrations, marketers can seamlessly integrate AI-driven insights into their email marketing workflows, ensuring every email drives meaningful engagement.

7) Real-Time Social Media Insights

AI tools monitor social media platforms to track brand sentiment, identify trends, and even predict viral content. Marketers can use these insights to refine their strategies, engage with their audience in real-time, and stay ahead of the competition.

8) Visual and Voice Recognition in Marketing

AI technologies like visual recognition and voice search are opening new avenues for engagement. For instance, tools like Google Lens allow users to search for products by uploading images, while voice assistants like Alexa provide new ways for brands to interact with customers. Personalization at scale

McKinsey found that personalization in marketing can help businesses drive revenue increases of up to 25%. AI can make it easier to realize that outcome. Businesses can use AI engines to enact marketing personalization projects on a large scale, leading to more unique and relevant buying journeys for customers. 

Predictive analytics and AI-driven insights

One of the main use cases for AI technology is its ability to rapidly understand and analyze huge datasets. That can be applied in marketing to generate powerful insights based on audience analytics data, which can then be used to optimize marketing strategy.

Enhanced customer experiences

Creating positive customer experiences is an important element in marketing, and AI can help in a lot of ways. One of the most popular — using AI to power customer support chatbots — can ensure customers get quick and effective answers to questions, decreasing friction in the buying journey.

Good content is the cornerstone of any marketing strategy. But content can be both time-consuming and costly to create. AI can help accelerate content marketing efforts by allowing businesses to create net-new at scale in mere moments rapidly.

Tools like ON24’s generative AI engine, for example, can be used to create and curate derivative AI-generated marketing content from webinars, including blog posts, e-books and transcripts.

That cuts down the amount of time brands have to spend on what was a previously laborious task, freeing up time to work on improving other areas of the marketing funnel.

Content personalization

AI isn’t just useful for generating content, it’s also great at curating personalized customer journeys. Businesses can use AI tools to analyze user data and develop unique content funnels for distinct audience groups through tailored content recommendations and messages.

This rapid-fire personalization can help improve customer engagement with brand content which, ultimately, results in an increased conversion rate and more revenue. It also appeases the growing demand from consumers for personalized experiences.

Chatbots and virtual assistants

Potential customers are likely to have plenty of questions as they move through the conversion funnel. And while content (including AI-generated content) can answer a lot of them, it’s always useful to offer an alternative.

AI chatbots or virtual assistants are ideally suited to the task. They can provide real-time 24/7 customer support, delivering quick and accurate answers to diverse questions. This is great for improving customer experience, but it’s also a huge resource-saver, freeing customer support teams up to focus on more important matters or more technically complex situations.

Customer segmentation and targeting

Marketing is more effective when tailored to suit specific audience needs and preferences. That can be achieved with effective segmentation — splitting an audience into smaller groups with shared demographics or interests. But manual audience segmentation is complicated and time-consuming.

AI helps by analyzing existing audience and customer data and automatically generating segments based on shared demographic features or characteristics. Marketers can then use these AI-generated audience segments to craft better, more personalized content strategies.

Generating marketing content, like social media posts, emails, blog posts or whitepapers, is one of the most prominent applications of AI-powered Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools. Even though this is a relatively new field in commercial AI, plenty of AI-powered content marketing engines can help you create content fast.

One caveat, however: while content marketing is one of the biggest AI marketing trends in recent memory, it still has a lot of room for improvement. It often requires a human editor to correct factual mistakes and incorporate a brand’s voice into the material.

Causal AI for improved decision-making

Causal AI differs from predictive AI through its ability to identify causation versus correlation. Predictive AI can observe an event and predict an outcome based on similar examples in the data it was trained on. In contrast, causal AI can identify the underlying cause of an event and its relationship to the eventual outcome.

This is a huge advancement, meaning causal AI systems could help businesses make more successful decisions. Those decisions could, in turn, help drive marketing strategy and contribute towards achieving key marketing goals.

AI-enhanced visual content

NLP tools have revolutionized how businesses create written content. But AI is also applicable to visual content thanks to developments in diffusion. Already, tools like Bing AI have AI-powered image generation features that are freely available. And the underlying technology is only going to improve.

That means marketers in the near future could access tools that allow them to generate, edit and optimize visual content like images and videos for social media with a fraction of the effort it would have previously taken.

Natural language processing in customer support

The potential applications of AI in customer support are only just being touched on, and there’s plenty more to come. Already, AI chatbots are at the center of the conversation, thanks to their capability to quickly and effectively answer customer questions 24/7.

However, AI could also be used in other areas of customer support, including automated helpdesk content generation and technical writing.

AI can affect both elements that calculate marketing return on investment. This means it can be instrumental in achieving significantly improved marketing ROI.

Most obviously, it decreases costs by completing marketing tasks in a fraction of the time and expense it would take a human. In terms of revenue, the data analysis and content generation capabilities AI tools unlock could help businesses to build more effective marketing strategies which attract more customers, quicker.

Efficient resource allocation

Applying available resources efficiently is another key component in improving marketing ROI. AI can help businesses manage resource allocation more effectively by analyzing the results of previous marketing efforts and identifying the best-performing activities to double down on.

It’s also useful for adapting and repurposing content, helping businesses get more from each asset they produce. ON24’s generative AI engine, for example, can automatically generate transcripts from a webinar and convert them into blog posts, e-books and more — extending an event’s lifespan and producing more leads.

Enhanced customer reach and engagement

The best marketing campaigns don’t just reach a large audience, they also create powerful engagement opportunities. AI can help businesses achieve both outcomes.

Generative AI content creation makes it quicker, easier and cheaper to maximize reach. AI can also be used to craft personalized copy that nurtures leads by engaging them based on their demographic category, interests or needs.

• Better predictive analysis: AI’s capacity to digest and analyze vast datasets in seconds means it’s already able to be used to aid marketing decision-making, but its abilities in this area will only improve as AI models grow through further training.As a result, it’s likely that future iterations of AI will be even more deeply involved in data analysis and decision-making, helping marketers to more effectively target, segment and engage audiences to deliver better results.

• Broader content generation capabilities: Textual content generation is one of AI’s current main use cases in marketing. But as the underlying AI models evolve, they’ll become capable of generating other forms of content, including images and videos, to the same standard.This is particularly valuable to marketers because there’s a clear trend towards consumers preferring video content from brands over other mediums.
  

• Pervasive AI assistants: Currently, AI assistance is primarily available through generalized AI chatbots or dedicated AI-powered marketing tools. In the future, we’ll likely see AI assistants integrated throughout all SaaS products.They’ll help marketers better use the tools by providing automated optimization suggestions, analyzing data, delivering key insights and more.
  

• More realistic conversational AI: Existing AI models like GPT-4 are often described as being conversational, but they’re still not at the point of being able to engage in truly human-like conversation.Their conversational abilities will improve consistently as AI models are trained on increasingly large datasets, meaning we’re likely to see AI chatbots that are practically indistinguishable from humans in the relatively near future.

Before you get started, it’s important to decide what exactly you’re looking to achieve by using AI in your marketing. Establish clear and measurable objectives that align with your broader marketing KPIs, like increasing content output by 50% or personalizing audience engagement for target personas.

Measuring your performance in relation to these objectives will help you to understand whether your use of AI is actually contributing towards your overall business goals, meaning you’ll know whether to keep going or adapt your approach.

Investing in training

To get the most from the AI tools you integrate into your marketing tech stack, you’ll need to make sure your marketing team knows exactly how to use them. That makes investing in training an important part of maximizing AI’s potential.

There are lots of ways to go about this, but the most important is to take advantage of any available training resources for the specific AI-powered marketing tools you decide to use. These tools often have a lot of functional capabilities that can deliver value in several different ways. Take the time to get to know the products in full so you can get the most out of them.

Testing for optimal results

As with any other element of a marketing campaign, it’s essential that you measure how your AI marketing efforts are going if you want to refine your approach over time. Make sure to collect data as you roll out AI-assisted marketing strategies and compare the results with your previous campaigns to see how results have improved.

Don’t be afraid to run tests and experiments if you think of new ways to integrate AI into your marketing process. Large parts of AI marketing are still uncharted territory, meaning you can discover new opportunities to develop a competitive advantage.

SmartText

Achieving webinar program success starts with high-impact promotions that drive registrations. With SmartText, an ACE-powered assistant copywriter, you can quickly craft compelling abstracts, emails and subject lines generated from a few simple prompts that capture attention and break through the digital noise.

Key moments

Every question asked, poll answered or even emoji reaction during a live webinar is an important signal of your audience’s interest and buying intent.

With ACE, you can unlock and use these insights with a heatmap analysis of audience engagement, down to the individual slide level. Then, you can use this information to produce short-form video clips for better sales follow-up and more targeted audience nurtures.

Q&A chatbot

A flawless webinar or virtual event requires rock-solid technical execution. Use ACE’s AI-powered Q&A chatbot to ensure your audience’s frequent audio/visual questions are resolved quickly and efficiently while allowing you to focus on meaningful audience conversations.