4-Step Guide to Optimize Your AI Marketing Strategy for Success

Imagine opening your email one day to find a message from a brand you've never heard of before promoting a product you just searched for online. The email is not only personalized to you, using your name in the opening line and referencing your recent search, but it also contains a discount for the exact item you were looking for. Sounds pretty great. This is the power of AI and machine learning in email marketing.

This article will cover an AI marketing strategy, the benefits of using artificial intelligence for email marketing, and how to incorporate it into your strategy. Book a free demo today to learn how our omnichannel marketing platform can help you gain a competitive edge, streamline your marketing efforts, and deliver outstanding results.

What is an AI Marketing Strategy and How Does It Work?

There are many reasons to use AI in your marketing strategy. Since this article focuses more on the how than the why, we’ll focus on one of the most compelling reasons: Automation. As digital marketers, it can sometimes feel like our list of tasks is ever-growing.

There’s always a new medium to deliver content or a new social media platform to trend on. The truth is that we simply can’t hit all of the marks without a little help.

Automating Marketing Tasks with AI

That’s where AI comes in. AI can automate many of a marketer’s repetitive tasks, from scheduling meetings and appointments to reporting on campaign metrics and optimizing the placement and timing of advertising campaigns. With the correct set of tools, AI can do all of that for your business and more.

The Data on How Marketers Are Using AI

To learn how marketers use AI, we surveyed 1,000 digital marketers in the industry. This included those who actively work in digital marketing within the United States, whether freelancers, in-house marketers, or agency marketers. Of the 1,000 marketers we surveyed, 209 already use AI in their marketing strategies.

The results below show how likely the respondents felt regarding the future use of AI in their businesses. The expected comfort level with these AI tools drives many of these reactions.

When we talked to freelancers, in-house marketers, and agency marketers, each had different comfort levels they felt with integrating AI into their campaigns:

• Freelancers: 46.72% said they felt comfortable integrating AI into their campaigns, 27.51% said they were somewhat relaxed, and 25.76% said they were uncomfortable.
• In-house Marketers: 39.1% said they felt comfortable integrating AI into their campaigns, 33% said they were somewhat relaxed, 27.9% said they were not comfortable
• Agency Marketers: 37% said they felt comfortable integrating AI into their campaigns, 34.75% said they were somewhat relaxed, and 27.59% said they were uncomfortable.

Freelancers: The Most Enthusiastic About AI

In all three cases, more people felt comfortable than anything else, but we see some variance, like freelancers feeling the most relaxed of all three groups. This may be because marketers working on their own may be the most excited about the time-saving potential of AI tools and have the least barriers to entry regarding procedures.

What is an AI Marketing Strategy?

An AI marketing strategy involves leveraging AI technologies to optimize and improve marketing efforts. Essentially, AI in digital marketing uses algorithms, machine learning, and predictive analytics to do tasks, such as:

• Gain deeper insights into consumer behavior
• Personalize marketing messages
• Streamline operations
• Increase the effectiveness of marketing campaigns

AI's Dominance in Advertising and Media

According to data from Grand View Research, the AI advertising and media segment dominates the global AI market, capturing 19.5% of global revenue in 2022. This prominence is reportedly due to the expanding use of AI in marketing, which is becoming increasingly popular. Other sectors dominating the market share alongside advertising and media are the BFSI (banking, financial services, and insurance) and healthcare sectors.

Benefits of an AI Marketing Strategy

Adopting an AI marketing strategy offers several compelling benefits that can significantly enhance a company’s marketing efforts and overall efficiency. Here are some key advantages of AI for marketers: Enhanced Personalization: AI enables businesses to deliver highly personalized marketing messages based on individual customers:

• Behaviors
• Preferences
• Purchase history

This level of personalization, such as that employed in AI email marketing tools, increases customer engagement and satisfaction, leading to higher conversion rates. Optimized Marketing Spend: AI tools can optimize budget allocation across different channels and campaigns by continuously analyzing each channel's performance and reallocating resources to maximize ROI. This helps reduce wasted spend and improves overall marketing efficiency. Efficiency and Automation: AI automates repetitive and time-consuming tasks such as:

• Data analysis
• Customer segmentation
• Content creation

This benefit is one of the top-rated advantages of AI in business, as almost eight out of ten respondents in a UVIK-cited survey stated.

Related Reading

• AI Email Marketing
• AI Email Marketing Tools
• AI Content Marketing

How to Design an AI Marketing Strategy in 4 Steps

As artificial intelligence technology continues to improve, more business leaders are tapping into its potential to boost marketing performance. AI marketing refers to how brands use artificial intelligence to understand customers and improve their marketing efforts. This includes using AI tools to collect and analyze data on customer preferences and behaviors, allowing businesses to create more targeted, personalized campaigns that enhance customer experience and drive sales.

The adoption of AI among Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) is rising. According to a survey conducted by the American Marketing Association in August 2019, the implementation of AI had increased by 27% in the previous year and a half.

A global survey by Deloitte in 2020, focusing on early AI adopters, revealed that three out of the top five AI objectives were related to marketing:

• Enhancing existing products and services
• Creating new products and services
• Improving customer relationships

Many companies are now using AI for various purposes:

• It handles specific tasks like digital ad placement (also known as “programmatic buying”)
• It assists in broader tasks, such as improving prediction accuracy
• It augments human efforts in structured functions like customer service

Creating Your Own AI Marketing Strategy

1. Identify Goals and KPIs

You must set goals you wish to obtain from your AI marketing plan. If it’s your first time planning a marketing strategy, you can start by establishing some growth benchmarks you believe are attainable for your business. Nevertheless, if you have past marketing data to refer to, you can use the metrics you’ve already collected to measure the performance of an AI-powered marketing campaign.

If our marketing team is working on a new client project, we look to industry benchmarks combined with historical data (if it exists). We consider revenue-tied metrics that drive brand success and focus on maximizing that one thing.

You’ll want to focus on maximizing key performance indicators (KPIs) such as sales revenue, which is the direct revenue generated from sales. It’s a clear indicator of market demand and the effectiveness of our marketing strategies.

Predictive Analytics Tools

Tools like IBM Watson, Google AI, or Salesforce Einstein provide sophisticated predictive models to forecast sales trends and customer demand.

Dynamic Pricing Software

Tools like Competera or Pricefx use AI to adjust pricing in real-time based on market demand, competition, and other factors, maximizing revenue potential.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer Lifetime Value is understanding the total worth of a customer to the brand over the entire duration of their relationship. A higher CLV suggests successfully retaining customers and maximizing revenue from these relationships.

CRM with AI

Platforms like HubSpot CRM or Zoho CRM with AI capabilities can analyze customer interactions and transactions to predict future behavior and identify high-value customers.

Personalization Engines

Tools like Adobe Target or Dynamic Yield offer personalized content and recommendations to customers, enhancing their experience and increasing CLV.

Conversion Rate

The percentage of website visitors or campaign users who take the desired action (like making a purchase). This metric helps understand the effectiveness of your marketing messages and strategies in converting potential customers into actual customers.

AI Chatbots

Tools like Drift or Intercom use AI to engage website visitors, providing instant assistance and guiding them toward conversion.

A/B Testing Tools

Optimizely or VWO, with AI features, can automatically test different variations of web pages to identify which version converts the best.

Cost per Acquisition (CPA)

This measures the average cost of acquiring a new customer. It is crucial for profitability to keep this number low relative to the average purchase value.

Programmatic Advertising Platforms

Platforms like The Trade Desk or MediaMath use AI to automate ad buying, place ads more efficiently, target the right audiences, and reduce CPA.

Ad Performance Tools

Google Ads and Facebook Ads Manager use AI to optimize ad campaigns, targeting and tweaking them for the best results.

Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS)

This metric evaluates the effectiveness of advertising campaigns in generating revenue. A higher ROAS means that our marketing efforts are translating effectively into sales.

Marketing Analytics Platforms

Tools like Moat or Google Analytics offer AI-driven advertising campaign performance insights, helping optimize ROAS.

AI-Powered Attribution Models

Platforms like Convertro or Attribution use AI to accurately track and attribute conversions to the correct channels, ensuring that advertising budgets are spent where they are most effective.

Is your goal to get more phone calls, sales from e-commerce channels, or more form completions? Whatever your target metric is, that will be the focus of measuring the success or failure of your AI-assisted content and strategy. Make sure your goal is a hard number, which is easy to tell whether or not you’ve reached it.

Choose one thing to focus on and define your entire AI marketing strategy around it.

2. Assess Your Current Marketing Strategy

Before implementing AI, you must thoroughly evaluate your current marketing strategy and goals. This assessment provides a foundation for identifying opportunities for improvement and aligning AI initiatives with existing strategies.

Review Current Strategy

Analyze your current marketing strategies, including channels and content. Look at areas where your previous initiatives did well and where they could be improved. Then, base your new approach on that.

Identify Gaps

Compare your current strategy and goals to identify gaps and areas where AI can provide solutions. Look for quick wins that can fill content gaps quickly and with minimal effort before moving on to heftier content.

Define Opportunities

Determine areas where AI can enhance your marketing efforts, such as personalization, automation, and data-driven decision-making. For instance, if your brand benefits from video content, you might start by looking into AI video tools that can help you streamline the production process for your marketing videos. Imagen is an excellent tool for an AI marketing strategy.

Another example could be if your brand produces many images, and you could explore different AI-powered tools that aid and assist in generating graphics. This evaluation process also involves considering key marketing metrics such as:

• Customer retention rate
• Customer lifetime value
• Traffic and bounce rate
• Cost per lead Marketing ROI

For example, if a marketing team spends significant time creating and distributing blog content, an AI technology content generator could be an ideal solution to save time and resources while maintaining high-quality content output.

3. Research Keywords and Interests with AI

Keyword research is critical to any successful SEO strategy, and AI can significantly enhance this process. AI-powered tools can analyze vast amounts of data to:

• Uncover relevant keywords
• Identify trends
• Generate insights that inform content creation and search optimization.

Traditional keyword research methods often involve manual searches and analyses, which can be time-consuming and prone to human error. Marketers can save valuable time and resources by automating these repetitive tasks with AI.

Natural Language Processing is a crucial aspect of AI-powered keyword research tools as it helps understand human language better. It enables these tools to gather insights from user queries in search engines or social media platforms like X or Facebook.

We’ll talk more about AI marketing tools to use shortly.

Discovering Audience Insights with SparkToro

One of our favorite tools leverages AI to find interests related to a keyword: SparkToro. SparkToro is excellent at matching keywords with interests and offering expanded data related to your input. It’s a terrific tool for social media marketers and is well worth your time exploring. Let’s start talking about AI marketing tools befitting an AI strategy…

4. Selecting the Right AI Marketing Tools and Platforms

The whole deal with AI in digital marketing is that some sort of tool is working in the background of your marketing process, automating things for you. So what kind of guide would this be if we didn’t show you the best tools on the market?

Streamlining Your Workflow with AI Tools

In any facet of marketing today, there is some clever solution out there that can simplify your workflow. Whether it’s adapting video to text, transcribing notes from a podcast, annotating clickpaths from a recorded video session, or generating graphics, there’s a solution out there for it.

AI Marketing Tools: A Curated List

While there’s no way we could cram every deserving AI marketing tool on this list, we can highlight our top fifteen AI marketing tools, each of which has a distinctive strength that sets it apart among the vast myriad of solutions flooding the scene: AI Marketing Tools list for an AI marketing strategy.

Don’t feel you need to subscribe to every AI marketing tool. Many lists have overlapping functionality, so try one or two at a time as they suit your needs. Use the free trials and hone in on the solution that helps you plan more innovatively and produce better.

Related Reading

• AI Marketing Automation
• Marketing Funnel Automation

Create Personalized Experiences That Drive Loyalty and Growth with Rengage's Omnichannel Marketing Platform

Rengage is a comprehensive solution designed to seamlessly manage and enhance customer journeys. It provides insights and measurable outcomes without the need for coding skills. We focus on accelerating the customer journey from onboarding and activation to conversion and churn, enabling customers to unlock untapped revenue from existing users with ease.

Our platform allows you to: Gain valuable insights into your segments Run campaigns efficiently using an intuitive journey manager Measure the impact of your journeys on user conversion through our innovative journey moments and journey builder features

Book a Free Demo

If you're ready to transform your customer interactions into personalized experiences that drive loyalty and growth, Rengage is your platform. With Rengage, you can take your marketing strategy to the next level and achieve sustainable growth in today's competitive landscape.

Book a free demo today to learn how our omnichannel marketing platform can help you gain a competitive edge, streamline your marketing efforts, and deliver outstanding results.

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• AI Customer Journey
• AI Email Marketing Tools