Artificial Intelligence, Real Results

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By: Wise Marketer Staff |

Posted on September 13, 2018

Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms offer marketers a way to automate routine, mundane tasks, allowing them to focus on higher-value work and strategic thinking.

By Len Vraniak

For the past several years, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has been a vocal critic of Artificial Intelligence (AI), often decrying what he sees as potentially evil implications of the technology.

Musk’s conclusions about AI may be debatable. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg seems to be leading the charge as one of Musk's most prominent critics in this area. Regardless of one’s feelings about AI, there is no denying that the technology will continue to have a major impact on many aspects of our lives.

Including loyalty marketing.

Entrepreneurs are diving into this market segment, with products designed to leverage AI to improve marketing. Albert, Acquisio and Trapica are a a few of the entrants in this growing field. These platforms enhance the work of marketers by automating tasks like managing ad performance and leveraging machine learning to increase engagement and conversion rates.

Earlier this year, The Wise Marketer’s Bill Hanifin discussed AI as an essential part of marketers’ ability to use customer data to its fullest. He noted that “the marketing application of AI will bring satisfaction to your customers in the form of communications that are on target, offers that really do hit the mark and brand reinforcement that triggers referral and recommendation.”

 

[dropshadowbox align="center" effect="lifted-both" width="80%" height="" background_color="#ffffff" border_width="1" border_color="#dddddd" ]The beauty of using AI to augment the work of marketing professionals is that it can achieve that vision by easily running A/B testing, offering real-time measurements of effectiveness and quickly and seamlessly replacing poorly-performing images or copy.[/dropshadowbox]

 

AI also changes the way marketers interact with, and interpret, the data they receive. Hanifin points out that this shift places the onus on analytics teams to craft more effective stories from the data, and that’s where the intersection of AI and traditional marketers gets interesting.

Advocates for the technology point out that AI takes on the more mundane aspects of marketing. Bringing AI into the marketing arsenal, they argue, offers human marketers the chance to eliminate repetitive, often administrative work, and instead focus their brain power on higher level, strategic thinking and planning.

Marketers are freed to dream up unique experiences for customers that drive loyalty and extend the brand’s reputation and reach. The AI systems are left to categorize those customers in many different ways, use past customer behavior to project future behavior, target each segment with those unique offers, test multiple versions of the offers and winnow them down to the most effective approaches in real time.

AI offers the possibility of real results, allowing both the technology and the human marketers focusing on their respective strengths. Realizing the possibilities of this partnership over time should engender strong loyalty for AI among loyalty marketers.

Len Vraniak is a reporter for The Wise Marketer.