AI is becoming more prevalent in our society every day. A powerful use of Artificial Intelligence is marketing. Now artificial intelligence can be used to find out who a target audience is better than ever before by doing all the research, analysis and insights instead of relying on expensive humans who might not have as much time or expertise to analyze trillions of data points from social media and other sources. This allows them to do more with less, saving time and money. In this article, we’ll look at how AI can find and understand your target audience so you know who they are, and what they like so that you can customize and share your marketing content to get better results.
Know your audience
Let’s think about something you saw online and shared with a friend. When considering who to share it with, you probably knew which of your friends would find it interesting. What if there was a simple way to do the same thing but with people you don’t know? How could you easily create such a targeted approach to sharing information when it came to your marketing? Artificial Intelligence can do that job for you!
The Old Fashioned Ineffective Way
In today’s world you should not be blasting out the same thing to everyone and hoping some sticks. I see that in many social media platforms. Like Clubhouse. A lot of people in there are ego-driven and appear to want massive numbers of followers as they feel this will make them look successful so they spend all their time to get a lot of followers – anyone. The strategy is their list. The bigger the list – the bigger the sale. But is it? Maybe, but if they are not targeted to the area of focus for your business, it wastes hours and hours of time and gives very little reward. For example, there is a gentleman on Clubhouse with a massive 25,300 followers. But, he admitted that he spent 600 hours in clubhouse in the first 2 months to get that! Seriously, that is a major amount of time for an entrepreneur. It is clear that his sole business is actually ‘getting followers on clubhouse’. Then he makes an offer to sell and probably gets a low percentage of his followers buying. But, for him it is a numbers game – and a very time consuming one at that.
How AI Can Supercharge that Process
Wouldn’t it be better to not have to spend 600 hours on a social media tool and let AI find your perfect target audience and analyze and understand not only who they are, how they segment, but also what their interests are, what media they consume, what language they use, and who their influencers are? That way, in less than an hour you can create an intelligent and targeted list of who your ideal audience are and create an offer that speaks to the right people in the right way. By doing this, instead of a 2% response you can up that to closer to 90% response. Like many things in life, it is not about quantity but quality – and AI can provide that. When AI takes over the research, analysis and insights tasks, it not only finds the right people for us but also learns about them – their needs, wants and pain points. That way we have an understanding of who they are so that we can speak directly to them in a language they understand with media.
There are answers that lie in the masses of data online, and in your own customer information, that can help you reach the right customers through better-curated insights that lead to a much cleaner list and offer. AI helps you surface these very quickly at a speed that would not be possible from a human analysis. Artificial Intelligence uncovers patterns that aren’t always intuitive to human perception. Marketers can get a refined list of target customers that are highly likely to respond positively to marketing communications aimed at changing their behaviours. AI synthesizes the data and identifies the most relevant patterns and traits that allows you to intelligently target. In our training course ‘How to Use AI to Really Understand and Find Your Ideal Customers‘ we show a free tool that does this from social media data for you very effectively.
Fixing marketing copy and images
One tool I had the good fortune to come across is incredibly powerful. It analyzes the target audience, and the marketing copy and images and suggests changes to words and images. In the examples of this in action that I have seen, sales increases of 300% were achieved from simply changing one word in the copy and the image. What I found fascinating about this tool was the fact that the image choices the AI made (that worked) were not intuitive. The creatives in each case were not happy about the image choice, and I could see why, but the results spoke for themselves in terms of sales uplift. The difference between a success and a failure may be as simple as a single word or a font size or an image. AI analyzes the information with the customers and closes the gap between the data and the actions required in the marketing to get what the marketers want Although currently this is out of the price range of small business but with more and more players in the market, costs are coming down fast and as soon as versions are available in the price range of small and medium businesses, I will be doing a training course on these. Make sure you are on the list to receive updates on new courses.
Know How to Customize
You cannot create one set of marketing and use blindly for everyone. Before AI, marketers used to broadly segment their customers and made decisions about their marketing content and send it out to a huge section of target customers. Now AI is changing the way companies find and understand and market to their customers and potential customers. Each and every potential customer is analyzed by AI. These may be using social media data, as well as individual website visitors, CRM records and more. AI can record and analyze every action made by every individual – those who visited your competitors website, your website, the products they browsed, the items they added to the cart and removed, the items left in the cart, a call-to-action followed and left in midway, customers who signed up but never visited, those in social media who have shown interest in your specific subarea, and so on. AI analyzes these behaviors of each and every customer and finds out the reasons behind the customers for stopping in their pursuit.
Personalization
Personalization is, as everyone knows, the key to great marketing strategy. Personalizing a segment of customers is what marketers normally try to do. But AI goes a step beyond that and comes with the content that could focus on converting a particular lead to sales by that person. It personalizes the content in line with what the customer wants to see. Now we can customize by person. And this is critical when you consider that the average person is exposed to around 6,000 – 10,000 brands messages every day. How can you make your message stand out? It would be very difficult, if not impossible, for a human to review all the online behaviors of their target customers and evaluate each and every one in great detail. AI can do this with ease. In our training course ‘How to Use AI to Really Understand and Find Your Ideal Customers‘ we review several tools that make understand each customer this child’s play so you can get on with the important business of helping them.
Taking it Further
There is actually a step further that you can go – context marketing. You can deliver your message to the right customer in the right channel at the right time which massively increases your conversions. In the old days marketers would set criteria for who to market to and what channels and messages to serve them. But this was not in the league of what AI can do. AI can target the customer at the right moment and present them with the content that is exactly tailored to them. There are so many powerful AI tools that can do this type of thing now and I am very much looking forward to seeing multichannel options for small business. However, there is one option for smaller business which does this within your website if you sell online. It analyzes the customers who have bought on the website and then when new people come to the website it can analyze which ones are likely to buy and create a personalized journey to the sale resulting in significantly higher sales. This can be used by large and small companies and Domino Pizza have had great success from this tool.
Where to Begin?
While AI tools represent a range of new functionalities for marketing that can really raise the bar on your marketing – when you have the right tools. Think about your target audience. What do you really know about them? Why do you think that? I strongly recommend you try the free tools I recommend in our training course to really get a grip on who your target audience is and what is of most interest to them.
