Explore AI's role in digital marketing, from personalised messaging and predictive analytics to chatbots and content creation.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the way organisations around the world do business. AI can help businesses deliver greater benefits to their customers, improve internal processes and business models, and create new commercial opportunities.
Definition of AI
AI refers to the simulation of human intelligence and its processes by machines, particularly computer systems. Through the power of AI, these machines are programmed to think and act like humans.
The term AI can also be used to describe any machine that demonstrates traits typically associated with the human mind, such as problem-solving and learning.
Machine learning is a subset of AI, and refers to the ability of computer programmes to automatically learn from and adapt to new data without the help of humans. This automatic learning is enabled by deep learning techniques through the sourcing of large amounts of unstructured data, such as images, video and text.
Because of its ability to rationalise and take appropriate and timely actions to achieve specific goals at scale, AI is used in a wide range of industries today, from finance through to defence and healthcare.
Examples of how AI can be used in digital marketing
AI can help digital marketers deliver personalised messages to customers at appropriate points during the consumer lifecycle. It can also help them identify customers who may be disengaged from a brand and target these customers with relevant communications to encourage them to re-engage with the brand.
AI can also be applied in digital marketing through:
- Predictive analytics – Uses data to predict marketing trends and potential scenarios. By leveraging data with predictive AI, digital marketers can develop more effective marketing strategies and make better data-informed decisions.
- Chatbots – Chatbots are trained to have human-like conversations with customers using natural language processing (NLP). They can perform a range of tasks for customers, such as providing them with timely answers to questions, helping them to place an order, and guiding them through complex processes – all at the customer’s convenience.
- Content creation – AI content creation is where tools powered by AI, such as ChatGPT, are utilised to generate content. These tools can be used by digital marketers to generate anything from short social media posts to long-form blog content.
Pros and cons of using AI in digital marketing
With the global AI market expected to reach a projected value of around $2,025.12 billion by 2030 according to Fortune Business Insights, AI is undoubtedly transforming the way organisations around the world do business and market to their customers.
However, like many other technologies that have been introduced over the years, AI has its pros and cons.
Some of the benefits of using AI in digital marketing include:
- Saves time – Because of its ability to quickly process and interpret large sets of data and use these insights to rationalise and take relevant goal-oriented actions, AI is a very powerful tool in saving digital marketers valuable time, especially in terms of proactively and promptly responding to the market and customers.
- Optimises marketing campaigns – Digital marketers can harness AI to transform their entire marketing strategy by sourcing the most valuable data insights from large datasets and acting on these insights in real-time. AI tools can be used to make swift data-informed decisions on how best to allocate budgets, and to identify the most effective ad placements to engage customers, helping digital marketers optimise their marketing campaigns.
- Improves customer engagement – Crucially, AI can help digital marketers deliver the right personalised messages to customers at the right times, helping to boost and strengthen customer engagement. It can also help them re-engage customers that brands are at risk of losing to competitors.
Some of the risks associated with using AI in digital marketing include:
- Privacy concerns – Since AI sources large datasets, often including personal information, extra care needs to be taken to protect people’s privacy. AI systems may be able to identify individuals who were otherwise unidentifiable from the input datasets, potentially exposing these individuals to harm and making them vulnerable to cybercrimes such as scams, fraud, and identity theft.
- Bias in AI algorithms – Algorithms can be trained by humans in using biased data, often influenced by societal biases, such as racism, ageism and sexism. This is why bias in AI algorithms is a critical area of concern when it comes to AI, and as such requires a great deal of awareness and research globally to help devise solutions to the issue.
- Over-reliance on automation – One of the most popular arguments against AI is that machines can’t replace humans. While AI can certainly trump humans when it comes to efficiency and the capability to process and rationalise large sets of data quickly, there is still a need for humans behind AI tools to power them with the data and algorithms they need to work effectively. Over-reliance on automation makes it problematic for digital marketers to meaningfully leverage the strengths of AI tools and to identify and manage their weaknesses.
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