A quarter of a century after its appearance, marketing automation has not run out of steam, far from it. The advent of social media has caused the market to soar, reaching $1.65 billion today. However, automation alone does not explain this explosion.
In reality, Marketing Automation has become more effective simply because it has become more human. And that, thanks to Artificial Intelligence! Personalization and predictive analytics tools have largely contributed to optimizing strategies. And it is not over yet, let’s discover how Artificial Intelligence will influence Marketing Automation in 2018?
Segmentation: for more efficient marketing campaigns
What professions, what activities do they engage in? What are their buying habits? What are their behaviors? Artificial Intelligence makes it possible to answer these questions. From then on, you know who your customers are and thus how to respond precisely to their expectations. Thanks to this segmentation of the customer database, Marketing Automation will become more efficient.
First, bringing these buyer personas to light allows marketers to focus on the real target. Secondly, it makes it possible to further personalize offers for better alignment with the needs of each segment. The goal is always to optimize the conversion rate.
At present, there is no shortage of tools to support marketers. We can mention the essential Google Analytics which, in addition to being free, offers an astonishing ability to segment customers in real time. There is also its open-source counterpart Matomo (formerly Piwik). Yandex, Popcorn Metrics and Kissmetrics also analyze behaviors and provide valuable data to carry out email or retargeting campaigns more effectively.
More conversions thanks to better opportunities
Why waste time and money when you can achieve much better conversion rates with Marketing Automation? Well, by using Artificial Intelligence, you can directly focus your efforts on the “right leads”. In other words, those that will actually turn into customers. Indeed, beyond opportunity creation, powerful algorithms make it possible to continuously refine and enrich your customer database. It all depends on how you use the data provided by AI.
Which tools can generate qualified leads? Platforms such as Fuse Machines comb through millions of prospects to extract the best ones and obtain valid contact details. Conversica and Creative Guerilla, for their part, detect and handle the most promising leads by, for example, starting conversations.
A more human approach: NLG at the heart of content
It is not the first time this branch of AI has been highlighted. NLG technologies, or Natural Language Generation, will make the difference between basic content and a war machine. You know it: it is not only necessary to produce content, which Marketing Automation tools do very well, but above all to successfully address an ultra-diverse audience. This audience, now global, is also multicultural. Thus, NLG software that reasons, writes, and speaks like real human beings makes it possible to scale content. In particular by relying on vast databases.
In this field, Yseop is a benchmark. Its credo? Ensuring that any user can access a report or an analysis in their native language on the same web page.
Amazon Polly and IBM Watson Text to Speech have bet on converting written text into speech in several languages with a natural sound. Amazon Polly goes further by outright offering a range of human voices.
Even more impressive! From data — very often unintelligible to the average person — Quill by Narrative Science is capable of creating relevant narratives faithful to the company’s image. This NLG solution leverages what is essential and most interesting to help your consumers in their decision-making.
More effective visual content
No, it is no longer enough to show off with images deployed en masse across social media and email campaigns. To maximize the impact of this visual content, Artificial Intelligence makes it easy to find the right image, one that matches both the message to be conveyed and the brand’s values.
No need to spend hours on it! Nowadays, there are many image recognition solutions that save a considerable amount of time. We can mention IBM Visual Recognition, Google’s Cloud Vision API, Clarifai and Amazon Rekognition. Shapes, faces, text, objects, scenes from everyday life, activities… these software programs analyze and categorize a near-infinite number of images and videos. Not to mention the handling of inappropriate content. Planorama goes a little further and offers to automate even the use of these images in real life: store layout, space planning, etc.
A better user experience thanks to AI and Marketing Automation
Putting the user at the center of concerns regardless of the channel used, that is what we must now keep in mind. The priority is therefore to offer a higher-quality user experience by anticipating their needs, then creating intuitive and intelligent interactions.
Thus, to achieve your goals, you must have the right message at the right time, in the right place. However, to achieve this, it is just as essential to be able to measure customer satisfaction.
This is where Artificial Intelligence boosts the power of Marketing Automation! The services offered by the decision-making platform Pega rely, for example, on AI to act at the right moment. That is, by considering the context and even the user’s emotions. This is made possible thanks to analyses carried out in real time across all channels. Of course, AI means learning. Over the course of interactions, whether on mobile, through connected devices or via chats, these solutions become enriched with information and make it possible to be more relevant. Active.ai, which specializes in the financial sector, also relies on it.
Other Marketing Automation platforms such as ZetaHub process and analyze a phenomenal amount of data to track each customer individually. The objective remains the same: to understand and communicate intelligently. Cognigy, for its part, offers conversational AI solutions (voice assistant, chatbots…) integrating NLG technology to create rich and seamless user journeys across all channels.
In conclusion
Artificial Intelligence can considerably boost Marketing Automation in many areas if you know how to use it. Optimized lead management, a better user experience, more effective content, higher-performing marketing campaigns… In short, more sales with efforts concentrated on what matters most! These are not just promises, it is truly possible.
Article contributed by: Nicolas Finet
Nicolas Finet moved into digital professions after obtaining a degree in management engineering from Solvay University in Brussels. With 3 partners, he co-founded the platform Sortlist.fr in 2015, which helps very small businesses and SMEs easily find the web communication agencies that best suit them.
Follow him on Twitter: @nifinet
