Few years ago, artificial intelligence (AI) was prevalent in science fiction movies. Over the years, tech giants such as Google played a crucial role in introducing the world to the exciting features of AI.

Tesla, a leading car manufacturer, even went ahead to use AI in developing and releasing the first ever self-driving car. The good news to marketers is that artificial intelligence will simplify digital marketing endeavors in the near future. It will focus on providing targeted marketing, predictive analysis and improved customer experience.

The Thin Line Between Artificial Intelligence and Digital Marketing

In the past, marketers were reluctant to include AI in their marketing strategies. After observing the benefits of this technology in other industries, marketers are more willing than ever to make use of the technology. The most common AI application that marketers can relate to is Google's RankBrain, that made its online debut back in 2015. RankBrain relies on artificial intelligence to intercept and provide simple responses to users' search queries on Google. For instance, if you search for Steve Jobs' age on Google, RankBrain will provide the correct answer and other similar queries related to your search.

AI and Digital Marketing in the Near Future

Google is always on the verge to learn and imitate human intelligence. Its RankBrain AI application is a good example of how the tech giant is expanding the possibilities of AI. Google has a voice search feature that accommodates over 20 percent of people's online searches. It is time for digital marketers to discover and appreciate such innovations since they will impact their ad campaign strategies in the future. Here are other exciting ways in which they will benefit from what AI has to offer.

Personalized User Experience

Enhancing user experience is one of the most important ways in which AI can foster digital marketing endeavors. Note that customers are a driving force to a business while content is an important tool to marketers for improving customer experience. AI enables digital marketers to conduct customized content campaigns by providing the data on customer interests, buying behavior and online searches.

As an AI application, a Chatbot helps both business owners and marketers to enhance user experience. This feature is usually available on websites and is currently under development to take user experience to a greater level. It's high time for marketers to start including this feature on their e-commerce or portfolio websites. This initiative aims at providing customers 24/7 responses. They can use chatbots to create customized ads meant to boost sales and track online purchases.

Besides Chatbots, innovations such as Rare Carat are gaining critical acclaim in the digital marketing realm. Such innovations focus on helping people compare the prices of certain products across different online retailers. Even though Rare Carat only compares diamond prices, there's hope for similar innovations in the future to help marketers in their endeavors.

Introduce Image Recognition to Digital Marketing

Not long ago, image recognition applications were only useful in identifying unique features of a photo. Today, these applications rely on AI to give detailed features of a photo. A good example of such applications is the Amazon Rekognotion that recognizes emotions and human faces in pictures. Social media giants such as Facebook have their own image recognition software programs for improving engagements on their platforms.

The exciting news to digital marketers is that in the near future, there will be image recognition software programs to map brands based on pictures collected from social media. These software programs will help in understanding buyer demographics, product consumption patterns and geographical potentials.

Enhance Decision Making Through Predictive Marketing

As people browse the worldwide web, there are AI robots that collect their search data for analysis. Marketers can also rely on AI to generate the data for them to make rational marketing decisions. In other words, marketers can create personalized and predictive campaigns based on people's behavior, future actions, and needs.

SEO will no longer be the primary tool for marketers to use in providing consumers with information they need. In the near future, there will be AI-enabled algorithms that will drive digital marketing campaigns to greater heights by analyzing what consumers prefer and suggesting to marketers what they should feature in their ad campaigns. When marketers get detailed reports for consumer preferences, they won't rely much on SEO and web traffic.

Enable Digital Marketers to Make Use of Voice Search Queries

Digital marketers will also optimize on voice search queries in the next few years to boost their marketing strategies. In a recently published blog, a representative from Google pointed out that about 70 percent of Google Assistant's search queries are in the form of natural language other than typical keywords or phrases.

Marketers need to identify the reasons why people use natural language and create campaigns that answers these queries. They can also create websites that provide clever responses to the questions that searchers ask. Typical questions use words such as "how", "why", "when", "where", "what" and "who". When creating content for marketing purposes, marketers should optimize their content accordingly.

Final Thoughts

Courtesy of big data and social media engagements, marketers and entrepreneurs know their targeted clients better. The reason why AI and its associated technologies need to penetrate the digital marketing realm is to bridge the huge gap between customers and marketers. AI technologies strive to save businesses and their marketers time and lots of cash by helping them to identify their enterprise related problems and use accurate consumer insights to solve them. AI technologies also help them to collect consumer data from various sources into one place to generate accurate insights.