What to look for when buying AI marketing technology

When you think of artificial intelligence (AI), think of machine learning. AI is here to help with efficiency, and marketers can leverage the technology by using machine learning to better understand a target audience.

But, if you are new to AI, it can be difficult understanding what technologies are better suited for your company. This article will help you with the decision-making process when it comes to selecting AI for improving the efficiency of your marketing efforts.

Understand what needs improving

It is never a good idea to jump into buying technology without fully understanding what you want to improve within your organization. Again, technology is about efficiency.

It is not about having the latest and greatest for the sake of it. Smart marketers will get the most bank for their buck by leveraging technology to improve the overall customer journey, thereby fully understanding what needs improving from an efficiency standpoint.

When AI is leveraged within marketing, it can help you to anticipate the next move your current and even potential customers will make. You must address their needs to keep and get their business.

In this world of instant gratification, your audience will want those answers immediately. Otherwise, they will do a simple Google search to find it elsewhere.

You can use AI in your organization to improve the customer journey by doing the following:

• Increase response time between your company and your target audience.
• Identify current customers who are at risk of leaving and understand why.
• Increase your visibility from a digital perspective since most customer research is done online.
• Provide hyper-targeted messages to your audience in real-time.

Once you identify the area you want to focus on first, you will be able to see the type of AI technology that is needed. So, if you want to increase your response time, chatbots that leverage AI may be a good solution for you.

Here are some other types of AI technology:

• AI-enhanced advertising
• Personalized website content and push notifications
• Hyper-targeted email messaging
• AI-powered churn prediction and customer insights
• Automated image recognition

Pick AI technology based on improvement

Now that you understand what needs improving to create a good customer journey, you need to identify the technology. The following lists some AI technology options on the market:

AI improving response time:

1. Tidio communicates with your website visitors in real-time and creates personalized offers. This is a great tool for e-commerce companies.
2. Manychat is a chatbot for your Facebook Messenger.
3. TARS replaces the forms on your advertising landing pages to quickly capture leads.
4. Smartloop enables automated conversations on Facebook Messenger, website and more.
5. Botsify can be used on Slack, Facebook Messenger and website. It collects user data in forms.

AI identifying disengaged customers and gathering customer insights:

1. Nudge keeps your customer relationship management system updated with every contact and interaction.
2. PeopleAI identifies stagnant deals and creates a roadmap for every opportunity.
3. Crystal provides information about the personality of each contact, offering suggestions on language to use with the customer or prospect.
4. Conversica automatically contacts and follow ups with leads through two-way email conversations.
5. Quill identifies facts and language that are important to use in sales scripts and company reports. It produces content to meet your business objectives.

AI developing personalized content:

1. Segment provides personalized experiences throughout the entire customer journey. It categorizes and sorts based on website traffic.
2. Yusp recommends products to website visitors based on platforms associated with your company.
3. BrightInfo creates personalization with the content on your website by making use of widgets that automatically display during a visitor’s click flow.
4. Qubit utilizes omnichannel personalization by generating content offers based on what is viewed across devices.
5. Bronto provides advanced personalization through email by evaluating what creates more compelling and clickable messages.

AI enabling automated image recognition:

1. Amazon Rekognition identifies objects, people, text, scenes and activities to inform you on what is and is not safe.
2. Google Cloud Vision API integrates image recognition by leveraging an API.
3. LogoGrab detects logos, marks and brands to help you monitor visual content across media.
4. Talkwalker provides access to companies for text and image analysis while alerting you when someone refers to your company.
5. Imagga helps you to classify images based on specifications.

This should go without saying, but your website is extremely important when it comes to AI. Even today, companies are using their website as an online brochure.

The world is ever-evolving, and digital has been at the forefront for some time. Therefore, to properly utilize these tools, you need to be able to have a website that is built to capture data.

In a world of uncertainty, AI is becoming more questionable because businesses want to have some element of predictability. Currently, AI uses an amount of historical data.

But, as society continues to evolve, AI will be more solution-oriented opposed to data-centric. These tools should help you to utilize the data and come up with a solution to build a personalized and more customer-centric sales journey.

Ashley Schweigert is the owner of Marcom Content by Ashley, LLC.