Anirudh Singh

As technological and social advancements sweep the globe, the digital marketing industry is expanding rapidly. Every day new developments in the industry appear, and artificial intelligence is no exception. AI has revolutionised the path for digital marketers; by leveraging AI in digital marketing, professionals can employ data-driven strategies, enhanced personalisation and customer targeting, improved efficiency, and cost-effectiveness, gaining real-time data insights for campaigns. Therefore, understanding the role of AI in digital marketing has become incredibly significant not only for marketing professionals but also for firms to gain a competitive edge.

Artificial Intelligence: A Background

Before delving into the application of AI in digital marketing, it is first important to highlight its history. Putting it in very colloquial terminology as many know, AI is a form of technology that has the potential to think and act like humans and complete assigned tasks in mere seconds– those which humans may take hours to complete. The evolution of AI in digital marketing is not an earth-shattering development; the phenomenon can be dated back to the 1950s when researchers applied linear programming and game theory concepts to predict consumer trends, transforming into neural networks in the 1970s. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the boom of the Internet and E-Commerce opened the door for online marketing and advertising. From 2010 onwards, the advancement of machine learning, big data, the Internet of Things, and SAAS have changed digital marketing algorithms completely; now, marketers can leverage AI such as Chat GPT, Copilot, and many other AI-driven tools to complete tasks that would previously require many hours of labour.

Impact of AI in Digital Marketing

The impact of AI in digital marketing is very profound and visible in nearly every corner of the industry. For instance, AI has impacted the process of social listening and target marketing, especially using software like Emplify where marketers garner insights and data under one roof to streamline data management. Similarly, for search engine optimisation and content creation, AI can extract metrics from search engine databases in turn helping in the creation of content for target audiences. To enhance effectivity, AI also has a profound impact on email marketing and paid Google, Meta, Instagram and LinkedIn advertisements by formulating crafted content to audiences via optimisation of ad bidding strategies based on factors like behaviour, device type, and location. 

Benefits of Using AI in Digital Marketing

Before discussing the challenges and ethical considerations of the technology, it’s important to discuss the benefits of using AI in digital marketing. As much of the industry is aware, AI has many benefits for digital marketing; some of the most significant, however, are as follows. All of these benefits need to be properly acknowledged before a deeper discussion on the topic moves forward.

Prediction of Client Behaviour

For any business to grow, it is incredibly important to understand the behaviour of its client. Here, AI plays a vital role by making these efforts simpler and more cost-effective for marketers. AI tools can use statistical decision trees to understand customer behaviour, review past data, and suggest the best marketing strategy for marketers to better understand current and potential consumer patterns .

Customer Engagement

Understanding customer engagement is a challenging task for any marketer or agency;  it is frequently said that customer acquisition cost is far more than retention cost. Using AI-driven tools, marketers can scope out which customer segments they have to target to get the maximum acquisition. AI can also help them to track what each customer wants based on behavioural patterns, thus providing a blueprint for effective engagement that appeals to emotions.

Target Audiences

Selling a good or service to an unknown consumer is a very challenging and frustrating task. Traditional marketing saw the analysis of data and consumer preferences manually to target customers and sell their products; however, with the advancement of AI targeting customers and strategically segmenting them has become less time-consuming and more cost effective. Seemingly, all marketers need to do is feed their consumer data into AI which in turn generates tailored content, preferences and strategies to target the different segments who are interested in buying the product, thus broadening possibilities for marketers to strategise. 

Automation of Repetitive Tasks 

AI not only helps marketers and companies to engage the customer and target audiences but also helps to automate repetitive tasks. Through AI, marketers now automate pay-per-click (PPC), content for email marketing, search engine optimisation (SEO) and potentially social media content, which could have been traditionally laboursome and repetitive prior to AI’s initiation.

Customer Relations

Customer Relationships are all about loyalty and customer support, and AI has proven itself a strong candidate in maintaining these relationships. With AI assistance companies can gauge customer relationships that would require human capital traditionally. For instance, many companies have employed AI as the preliminary feature for aiding consumer queries in a format similar to texting. Although beneficial for cutting costs in many regards, employing AI for managing customer relations must be dealt with in a conscientious manner, as consumers often prefer human contact and possess queries that go beyond the scope of artificial means.

Overcoming Challenges and Ethical Considerations

One of the biggest challenges with AI’s use in marketing is the issue of transparency. In 2018, Amazon came under backlash when its AI recruitment platform collected the details of male and female candidates and favoured male candidates. Later on, Amazon relinquished that particular AI tool, but its use raises questions about transparency and bias in recruitment. If companies are using AI to collect data, they should remain transparent and inform people well ahead in advance about the purpose and application of their data collection.

Another challenge of using AI is privacy. Before collecting data to be used by AI, customers have the right to know how their data will be used and if they want to step out from this data collection. For instance, in 2020 Google was under attack when it collected the details of children under the age of 13 from YouTube without their parental consent and was fined 170 million dollars from the Federal Trade Commission. For marketers to employ AI, they must do so in a way that promotes accountability and ethical practices.

Bias is another common limitation to artificial intelligence. For instance, AI can be biassed if a marketer feeds the biassed data into it, which in turn yields untrue results which may be employed in a misconstrued way. Additionally, creators of AI software may possess inherent biases which in turn is implemented into the behaviour of their platform. For instance, AI’s use in creating photographs has perpetuated stereotypes, as seen in advertisements from EPIC museum in Dublin. Fact hallucination, reasoning errors, and use in creative sectors less driven by numeric data are all considerations that must be addressed and accounted for by marketers employing AI effectively. As such, knowledge of the technology’s limitations at the same level of its strengths is paramount to leveraging its use in marketing successfully. 

Future Trends and Challenges of AI in Digital Marketing

To conceptualise the future for AI and digital marketing, one can turn to the words of a key researcher in its field. “When it comes to how AI is shaping the future of digital marketing we need to understand its current role in digital marketing. AI not only helps us to understand consumer behaviour or enables tailored content, it’s also a great tool that enables marketers like us to anticipate future trends and needs.  But challenges are always there and will always remain there such as data privacy and biases and therefore to strike a balance between them and to ensure we remain on the right path is the hour of need for every digital marketer”, says Dr. Eamonn O’ Raghallaigh, PhD and Digital Strategist at Trinity College Dublin. As such, employing AI in a way that keeps the consumer at the heart of operations in an ethical manner can be extremely beneficial for garnering a competitive edge in the evolving marketing landscape. By employing its usage in relevant and ethical spheres while acknowledging and diverting its disadvantages, marketers can improve ROIs, provide valuable insights, and better target their consumers.