Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already part of our world. Taking advantage of certain benefits of Artificial Intelligence could positively impact your marketing efforts. As marketers, we have choices about how much we will allow AI to play a part in our strategies. Consider these pros and cons relative to your own AI marketing efforts.

AI in Marketing: What are the Pros and Cons?

Different marketing strategies call for different levels of automation and artificial intelligence or AI. It may be a fine line, but when done right, AI proves to be very useful – there’s a good reason why marketing and sales teams prioritize AI and machine learning and consider it a critical component of success.

AI marketing is a method of leveraging intelligence technologies to collect data, and customer insights, anticipate customers’ next moves and make automated decisions that impact marketing efforts.

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AI in Marketing: What are the Pros and Cons?

Artificial intelligence is everywhere. While stories about the pros and cons of AI being used to create content for news outlets or school assignments are still raising eyebrows, technology has already become a part of everyday life. Digital assistants like Siri and Alexa leverage AI to respond to user questions. Netflix uses it to serve up content, and AI lets Amazon recommend items for you to add to your cart.

What is AI Marketing?

Artificial intelligence (AI), a technology that has been making quite a phase of development, is a wonder. All the hype and speculation about the technology were well worth it. Different industries, including digital advertising, are gradually incorporating it to accelerate their growth.

Artificial intelligence is gaining popularity as a result of the following factors:

It is more precision-oriented and accounts for more accuracy and fewer errors, resulting in increased work efficiency.
For valuable insights, AI analyses more and deeper data.
With its advanced algorithms, it can enhance the capabilities of a variety of gadgets. GPS trackers, voice assistants, and home automation systems are a few examples.
Through progressive learning algorithms, AI can easily adapt to new input.

Artificial Intelligence has been used by many brands to connect with their customers. Amazon, for example, uses AI to recommend products based on their previous purchases, views, and searches. Marketing Automation includes a variety of CRMs that helps in data management and customer service.

How Does Artificial Intelligence Work?

AI capabilities now do things previously restricted to the workings of the human brain.

Artificial intelligence allows a computer to learn and think (almost) on its own. Obviously, while AI can be trained to process and analyze data, it does not possess the same cognitive abilities as the human brain.

It all starts with designing the AI to meet a specific goal. From there, it is trained on available data as it learns how to best achieve the given goal.

When it reaches a level of learning, the AI then takes on the data independently. Then, after analyzing all the data, AI makes predictions based on what it finds.

How Does AI Improve Marketing?

AI in your marketing strategies can benefit your small business, you need to know how it actually improves marketing processes in general. It can vastly improve how these parts operate and the results they achieve.

Analyzes Patterns

One of the best ways to use AI in marketing is to put it to work analyzing data. This is something that companies have been doing to some extent for years, but it’s much more advanced now. Instead of simply compiling data for someone to read and analyze on their own, AI can analyze it for them. While its results might not always be perfect, many companies have found it to be surprisingly effective.

Makes Data More Readable

Even though AI’s ability to make predictions is quite impressive, it still hasn’t gotten to the point where it can make decisions in all areas of marketing. You’ll still need trained professionals to do some of the more complex work.

AI algorithms to put all your company’s information together in a more digestible format. Longs lists of numbers can be difficult to read and interpret. A graph compiled with all your data from the last quarter isn’t. AI is quite good at turning your data into readable charts and diagrams.

Automates Content

AI writer, you can create blog posts, social media updates, and customer newsletters in a matter of minutes. These processes would normally take a team of writers much longer to do. Now you can have that same team review the work the AI has created, fix grammatical and factual errors, and tailor it to fit your company’s branding.

AI Marketing Use Cases

Data Analysis: Collecting and sifting through large amounts of marketing data from various campaigns and programs that would otherwise have to be sorted manually.
Natural Language Processing (NLP): Creating a human-like language for content creation, customer service bots, experience personalization, and more.
Content Generation: Writing both short and long pieces of content for a marketing strategy, such as video captions, email subject lines, web copy, blogs, and more.
Real-time Personalization: Changing a customer’s experience with a marketing asset such as a web page, social post, or email to fit the customer’s past preferences to encourage a certain action, such as clicking a link, signing up for something, or buying a product.
Media Buying: Predict the most effective ad and media placements for a business in order to reach its target audience and maximize marketing strategy ROI.

The Pros and Cons of AI in Marketing

Why has AI become important in marketing?

The importance of AI marketing cannot be overstated. As customers become more sophisticated and demand more personalized experiences, businesses need to adapt by developing smarter marketing strategies.

AI marketing offers a way to do just that by providing businesses with the tools they need to understand their customers better, anticipate their needs, and deliver tailored marketing messages. Moreover, AI marketing helps companies improve their ROI by reducing costs, increasing efficiency, and generating more revenue.

The Pros and Cons of AI in Marketing

Pros

Streamline and personalize the user experience

The days of one-size-fits-all being the right approach to marketing touch-points are over. When customers interact with a brand, website, product, or service, they expect the interaction to be personalized, and customized to their profile, needs, interest, and preferences. Platforms such as Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube have done this exceptionally well because they understood early that personalization translates to increased engagement, and sales, and becoming a fixture in your customers’ habits.

Overcome Writer’s Block

If you are a travel blogger, chances are, you struggle with writer’s block occasionally — even if writing is your passion. Don’t worry — it happens to the best of us. Instead of staring at a blank screen for hours, turn to an AI writing tool for inspiration.

These tools can create outlines, write content, and even generate ideas if you aren’t sure where to start. Plus, if you’re writing a repetitive affiliate post — you can always use an AI tool to come up with a creative way to repeat similar information.

AI Helps Cut Costs

If you don’t have the skills or time to create content to attract and educate audiences yourself, you’re going to have to outsource. While marketing strategists and copywriters will probably want pesky things like salaries and acknowledgment of their work, all your AI content marketing tool needs is an assignment.

SEO Optimization

Before you understand how AI writing tools can be used for search engine optimization (SEO) in affiliate marketing, it’s important to understand exactly how AI tools work.

AI tools scan thousands of resources online when creating content about a particular topic. This helps the tool learn more about the topic — similar to the process you would use for research. However, when AI tools scan the content, they can collect keywords or common phrases in the top-ranking blog posts to input into the content, optimizing it to rank on search engines.

Advanced Analytics

AI algorithms can process large volumes of data quickly and accurately, providing marketers with valuable insights. They can analyze customer behavior, predict trends, identify patterns, and make data-driven decisions. This helps optimize marketing strategies, improve targeting, and enhance overall campaign performance.

Personalization of products

This includes identifying possible potential customers based on data like purchase demographics, location, purchase history, etc. It also includes tracking and customer data with the products themselves. Under Armour recently made use of IBM’s Watson to combine their own customer data with third-party information to create personalized health and fitness tracking.

Hyper-Personalization

AI gives marketers accurate data on what their buyers actually want. It enables them to improve marketing and cater more specifically to their audience. AI-powered automation will enable marketers to hyper-personalize their marketing tactics for each customer based on various factors, such as geographic location, past purchases, and browsing history. AI can be used to personalize both marketing and product development based on what people are saying about the company in real-time, enabling your company to always have relevant content ready when customers need it.

Cons

Privacy hindering innovation

Users have a right to know what companies know about them, where and how their data is being used, and how it is being monetized. Whilst there are measures in place to afford consumer protection of their online data, most of the current legal frameworks. Whether this goes far enough is a matter of perspective and the laws are constantly being reviewed, but data privacy does impact how and the effectiveness of AI for marketers. Balancing the needs of customers and business is no easy task as under and over-regulation harms both companies, customers, and innovation in AI.

Inaccurate Information

AI writing tools can help shave time off the content creation process. However, it is important to remember that AI writing tools are just that — writing tools. You cannot rely on them to provide accurate information, research, or facts.

This means that all AI-generated content will need to be fact-checked by you (or a human writer) to ensure the information is correct and up-to-date and should be run through a plagiarism checker to verify that it is original.

Algorithms can be wrong

It’s hard to imagine that a computer could be wrong. And mathematically or formulaically they might always be “right” but humans are comprised of so much more than simple formulas and statistics. Humans are unique and have many varieties of tastes and preferences that cannot be dumbed down to a formula. The very thing that makes us human is the fact that we are constantly changing and growing, and there are always outliers.

Google Hates a Ripoff

Trying to reach the coveted “Featured Snippet” slot in Google search results? Marketing copy AI tools are not your friend. Because the machine-generated text is based on other copy found online, you risk plagiarizing the very content you’re trying to compete with. If Google deems your content unoriginal or too close to that on existing sites, it will be devalued in search results.

Lack of Human Touch

While AI can automate and streamline marketing processes, it may lack the human touch and emotional intelligence. Some customers may prefer interacting with real people rather than chatbots or automated systems. Therefore, striking the right balance between automation and human interaction is crucial.

Privacy and Data Security

AI relies heavily on data collection and analysis, which raises concerns about privacy and data security. Marketers must ensure proper data handling practices, comply with regulations like GDPR, and prioritize customer consent and data protection. A data breach or mishandling of personal information can lead to reputational damage and legal consequences.

Attack of the Clones

AI can create an overreliance on quantitative metrics and analytics when making decisions about your marketing campaigns. Because algorithms lend themselves so well to measurable results like clicks and conversions, marketers often emphasize these metrics when planning their campaigns rather than taking time to consider qualitative factors like customer satisfaction or brand loyalty. While these are essential aspects to consider when planning out your strategies, they don’t tell you everything about how effective they will ultimately be—and if all you pay attention to are these numbers alone, then there’s no room left for creativity or intuition.

Google Hates a Ripoff

Computers can’t do it without humans

The good news for us is that humans will always be necessary when it comes to marketing jobs. Computers can’t change their minds, make creative decisions, or use their imaginations. Creativity and cultural reference will be sorely lacking if your company only uses AI for content creation. Artificial Intelligence may offer certain solutions and efficiencies but, ultimately, humans are still the epicenter of the marketing world.