We’re more than halfway through 2021, and by now most marketing teams are relying heavily on growth marketing/digital marketing, and for very good reason. But even that’s no longer enough right now. Just being growth-oriented and data-driven is no longer enough.
In order to increase your marketing results, move fast and be ready to outperform your competitors, you will need to use more technology and automation than ever before.
In other words, it’s 2021 and time to start using artificial intelligence (AI) in your marketing – but it’s actually a lot easier than you think.
In this article, I’ll talk about the definition and benefits of AI in marketing, as well as four practical ways to use it to achieve your goals. These include:
- Anyword for writing your best marketing copy on any channel
- Dynamic search ads to find keywords and headlines
- Google Analytics Intelligence – answers to questions you didn’t know you needed to ask.
- Helixa for an even deeper understanding of any audience.
What is artificial intelligence marketing?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a broad term that represents several technologies that help your business in both internal operations and customer service. For example
- Improving chatbots using natural language processing (NLP) to qualify leads without using forms.
- CRMs that use machine learning to analyze all aspects of customer relationships.
- Applications that use deep learning to take personalization to the next level.
The possibilities for using AI in your marketing strategy are constantly growing, and we won’t be able to cover them all in this post. (It’s impossible to cover them all anyway, as new technologies and companies are constantly emerging).
Why you need artificial intelligence in marketing
With AI in marketing, you can:
- Reduce operational costs by completing more tasks in less time and with a smaller team.
- Maximize budget utilization with data-driven solutions.
- Automatically apply optimization based on performance data.
- Write more effective texts to increase conversions.
- Make smarter bids in your campaigns.
- Build your marketing strategy around your team’s needs and marketing goals.
Simply put, using artificial intelligence in your marketing efforts will help you maintain a lean marketing team and scale your business faster and faster.
4 Practical Ways to Use Artificial Intelligence in Marketing
There are plenty of marketing tools and technologies that can make your marketing team stronger and more effective. But don’t worry, this won’t just be a list of marketing automation tools (I know you’ve already seen dozens of them).
Instead, I want to show you four of the most effective AI marketing tools and features you can use today that, frankly, will be better than humans at handling most aspects of digital marketing in 2021.
So here are four of my favorite ways to use AI in marketing:
1. Make your life easier with Google’s Dynamic Search Ads (DSA).
What it is.
Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) are search campaigns that work in the opposite direction from typical paid search strategies. Typically, you do keyword research, group your keywords, and then match your ads and landing page copy to your ad group.
With DSA, all you have to do is choose the landing pages you want to promote, and Google does the rest. Google’s AI scans the landing pages, selects the keywords for you, and then generates accurate ad headlines.
Why you need them
DSA campaigns have been around for a long time, but campaign managers have historically distrusted them because of their low effectiveness. However, Google has made significant improvements to DSA campaigns over the past few years, and I personally have been able to improve CPA in SEM by 60%, and that’s without counting the time I’ve saved by using them.
I personally think the name is inaccurate because it might make you think that DSA just creates dynamic search ads for you. They are actually responsive search ads (RSA). But DSAs actually do a lot more than that, and it’s all based on Google’s artificial intelligence (I think we can all agree that they know what they’re doing there in Mountain View).
How to use them
There are several ways to structure and manage DSA campaigns, but they are all similar.
For starters, you can try using them for a small section of your site, or maybe your blog or resources, and see how they do most of the work for you.
Just remember to exclude irrelevant keywords or even pages you don’t want to promote. For example, you’ll probably find it redundant if DSAs promote your Careers page.
Bottom line: Using DSA campaigns will save you the time of constantly searching for new keyword ideas and writing ads.
2. Use Google Analytics as your site’s analytics.
What it is
The Analytics Intelligence feature in your Google Analytics account uses machine learning to help you better understand your site’s performance and take appropriate action.
How it works
Because this feature is based on artificial intelligence, you can ask simple questions about your site’s performance and it will answer them just as if you had an analyst working for you.
You can think of it as a kind of Google Analytics assistant. For example, you can ask the question “Which marketing channel had the highest conversion rate,” and Analytics will show you a ranked list of your marketing channels sorted by highest conversion rate. This way, all the complexity of Google Analytics disappears.
In the example below, I asked Google Analytics the question, “Which landing pages are my most effective?” and got exactly the answer I needed:
Why you need it
Analytics Intelligence can also analyze your data and answer questions you didn’t even think to ask, but probably should have, and highlight things you should know about. For example, it will point out to you whether a certain landing page is performing better or worse than in a previous time period. This is definitely something you should be aware of and check about, but without it, you might not even notice it.
But there’s actually even more AI and machine learning being used here. Analytics Intelligence uses site data and applies smart goals, smart lists, session quality and conversion probability to your Google Ads account to create targeted audiences.
Bottom line: If DSA is your almighty campaign managers, then Google Intelligence is your analytics.
3. use Anyword AI to improve copywriting
For copywriting ads, landing pages, social posts and more.
What it is.
Anyword helps you come up with new ideas when things don’t work out and saves you time by generating and optimizing your marketing texts using artificial intelligence. It generates effective texts for almost any marketing channel, including (but not limited to):
- Email subject lines
- ad copy for Facebook
- Google ad copy
- LinkedIn ad copy
- Twitter ad copy
- Descriptions and product names
- Intro paragraphs
- Instagram captions
- YouTube headlines and descriptions
- CTA
Why you need it.
One of the biggest problems when it comes to writing marketing copy is that it’s almost a gamble because you can’t predict how it will work before you actually use it. To find out what works, you usually have to wait for SEO metrics to accumulate or spend time and money on A/B testing. Anyword has been trained using more than $250 million in ad spend, so it knows how to write selling texts.
How it works
Within the tool, each text option is assigned a predictive effectiveness score that predicts how well it will perform in an actual campaign. Anyword also offers more advanced features, including landing page text optimization and custom integrations.
Bottom line: Anyword uses artificial intelligence to save you the time, effort, and dollars required to create impressive copywriting and compelling ad texts.
4. Get to know your audience better with Helixa.
Take personalization to a whole new level.
What it is.
Helixa lets you know what’s distinctive and unique about any audience. You’ll get to know what they care about and what they’re saying online so you can personalize your marketing even more.
Why you need it.
While most existing market research tools rely on a single data source, Helixa combines multiple data sets to provide richer insights about any audience, using machine learning technology that combines all of this data into one easy-to-use tool.
Helixa gives you actionable insights that can keep you from making mistakes when reaching out to your potential audience.
Bottom line: The more you know about your audience, the better and more accurate your marketing will be, and with Helixa, you’ll get just that.
It’s 2021, and digital marketing is marketing with artificial intelligence.
The full list of tools, features, use cases and benefits of AI in marketing is endless. I’ve shown you four examples that I think demonstrate how AI can be used very intelligently and make your daily life as a marketer easier and more effective. These include:
- Anyword for creating effective platform-specific marketing copy.
- Google DSA for keyword research and writing optimized ads.
- Google Analytics Intelligence answers tough questions and shares information you didn’t even know you had.
- Helixa for deeper insights into your audience and more personalized marketing.
Artificial Intelligence is shaping marketing. Marketers who don’t take part in this transformation will be left behind and gradually become irrelevant. Focusing on data today is a must, but you must be prepared for the future as it is coming faster than you can imagine.
