Today I invite you behind the scenes of 21st century marketing. I’ll show you how artificial intelligence is influencing the personalization of ads and content. You probably realize that it’s not enough to be online these days – success requires tailoring content and ads to individual user preferences, and that’s what artificial intelligence creates.
It’s what allows customers to buy faster and companies to market more effectively. As a result, companies build a better customer relationship, which translates into higher profits. See now how AI is revolutionizing the personalization of content and advertising, and how businesses can avoid common mistakes in this area.
Let me start with the observation that companies’ approach to marketing has become more mature in recent years. As recently as a decade ago, companies that regularly attracted customers or were thriving in the sales market had to develop marketing to support their operations, so they paid a lot of attention to the quality of the website. Over time, of course, thanks to eBay or Amazon, online sales began to develop and a whole e-commerce business was created.
In contrast, those entities that did not use marketing for direct sales very often did not even have a website. Imagine a factory that has basically only one customer and has no ambitions to grow, because it has contracts assured for several years ahead… From the point of view of such a company, maintaining a website could only make sense in terms of employer branding, that is, it would serve the purpose of letting job candidates know what the organization does.
This approach to marketing has changed. Even companies that do not acquire customers through active sales are investing in websites. Moreover, a simple website (a so-called business card) is not enough. Nowadays, customers are acquired through active online advertising campaigns, through social media, and through good positioning. For such marketing to work, websites need to be increasingly responsive, they need to be adapted to different platforms (the highest traffic on such an average website is generated by mobile activity). All this makes it necessary for entrepreneurs to pay more attention to how their website looks on a phone. Have you given any thought to this?
Just put yourself in the role of a consumer or recipient of services… How many times have you called on the heavens when an organization’s website took too long to load! If you want your company to count in the market, you need to take care of such details, eliminate any defects and fix errors that cause your website not to work as it should. Websites are plentiful, so you need to stand out and build a good association. Therefore, the people who are in charge of marketing in your company must be incredibly meticulous. If they treat certain tasks lightly, it will sooner or later reflect on the image of the company.
However, that’s not all. Your oracle is now the algorithms… They determine to be or not to be on the Internet. They make you pay attention to how a user feels on your site: whether he stays on it for a long time or a short time; whether this site loads quickly or slowly; whether the user experience (determined by the user’s movement through the site) is good enough for him to recommend this site to others, which in turn affects the site’s positioning on certain search results.
Artificial Intelligence is playing an increasingly important role in marketing, especially when it comes to language models (via GPT chat or other tools, the knowledge base available to AI has been available for several years). On the backend, on the other hand, artificial intelligence solutions have long been used to study audience preferences. This is massively used in display ads, that is, ads that appear in the form of different views, images that are tailored precisely to what a potential customer has recently searched for online.
Besides, AI has great potential in online stores. If a user busies himself in such a store for a certain period of time, and even more so if he has a rich shopping history, then based on his digital footprint artificial intelligence is able to generate a lot of information and use it to better tailor search results or just what will appear to the user on the first page of the store.
Everyone uses various online stores. You probably do, too. You might have noticed that whenever you visit one of such stores, you get a message on the screen like “You are running out of coffee stock, we have a special offer for you.” That’s the whole magic of algorithms. That’s still nothing! Maybe you’ve encountered a situation where you “walk out” of an online store empty-handed, because you didn’t find what you needed there. Then you open the site again and it turns out that the thing you were looking for or similar to it is there – a clever algorithm “found” it for you and put it under your nose.
All this makes every company that cares about a good brand hire specialists proficient in AI. Whether we’re talking about selling products or services, corporations or smaller businesses. After all, the lever to maximize conversions is to customize the offer to the user – the more responsive the offer , the greater the chance of effective sales. Without artificial intelligence, such full personalization of an offer would be impossible.
Imagine that you run a clothing store and you have a customer who visits this store regularly. After some time you already know her preferences, you know what clothes she likes, what cuts she doesn’t like, what colors she prefers, materials, when she was on vacation or if she is planning a vacation. This way, on the next visit to the store, the customer can get better support, you can show her something she is likely to like, after all, she is going to her daughter’s wedding soon.
In online sales it’s similar, but with AI the customization of the offer to the customer’s preferences is more efficient, because you operate on a much larger scale and in an automated way. So the mechanism is the same, but the leverage is already much greater.
The question arises whether consumers should be aware of how certain marketing tools affect their purchasing decisions. I will be biased here and say that I am in favor of increasing public awareness of the market. It is important to know that there are companies that use these techniques unethically, but there are also those that simply want to help the customer save time and give them what they are really looking for as quickly as possible. Algorithms greatly reduce the time it takes to find the right deal, and they don’t give you the cheapest or worst deals, but exactly what you need. Is it worth it for every customer to be aware of how they work? I’m not convinced. Are you? What do you think about this topic?
