Innovative SEO : Inbound Marketing Blog

Hello Friends,

As promised, here I am with one more interesting topic – How Artificial Intelligence will effect the Digital Marketing & Career path in Digital Marketing. I believe this is something we as digital marketers are more interested to discuss & want to know about.

I will try to share my thoughts on this topic by covering different aspects/areas where we work in our professional life as digital marketer which I think will make it more easy to understand & relate to.  I believe that AI is & will effect digital marketing starting from SEO, Paid advertisement, Email Marketing, Landing Page optimization, Content Creation to Conversion Optimization.

Marketing Automation Tool 

To start with, we are not talking about any futuristic prediction here but at what level AI is already into Digital Marketing – a very simple example is Marketing Automation Tools (Eloqua, Hubspot & many more). Just try to recollect your memories 5 years back – Did you ever imagined that there will be system who can do all the automation for you during US hours ? Have you ever imagined that there will be Online Reputation management tool which can identify the user response (happy/complaint/suggestion etc) & respond back with automated content ? and we can see this today in 2017 that its a norm.

A few years ago firms use to hire a team of digital marketers to promote their business. The major tasks they were doing includes website analysis, customer analysis, keyword ranking, off page submissions, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, cold calling, customer feedback handling etc.

Now to perform these tasks companies doesn’t hire a team, they hire an experienced digital marketing person to perform all these tasks by using automation tools, marketing cloud offering wide range of tools to perform these task in less time with more accuracy. AI machine increases the efficiency of the marketing work by reducing the human efforts.

Oh, have you heard from your fellow members complaining that its difficult to find JOB READY candidate as even 3-5 years experience candidates also still doing directory submission ? We need to keep a check what are we doing 🙂

How to prepare for the future :

• Adopting to learn how to use marketing automation tool
• How to effectively optimize the automation process (for ex, setting automated campaigns to deliver emails who have not opened, opened but not clicked and so on)
• Be on the top of the game by knowing which tool is best at what (Not all tools are same, for example, Oracle’s Eloqua is suitable to large enterprises where as Hubspot works good even for SMBs – so thats where your human expertise needed & valued)

Adwords & other Paid Marketing Channels:

Avinash Kaushik, beautifully explained his recent post that, “With smart creative, smart bidding, and smart targeting there is no need for any human to touch AdWords or soon a whole lot of your Display campaigns. The results of Data Driven Attribution modeling, which use data from all digital campaigns, can now be directly plugged into AdWords which means without any reporting/analysis the platform will automatically optimize for the highest profit for your business – with no human involvement. This is not the future, it is Nov 2017.”

I hope you have tried CPA campaigns already in Adwords 🙂

Oh and how can we not mention about AdNetworks & programmatic ad buying ? Sounds familiar right ? Can you still remember 2010 where you call up your AdNetwork partner to suggest you websites & negotiate to buy clicks/impression & then try to relate it with your client & so on back in 2010 – Boom – 1 week man hours work now done in 1 hour with more accuracy & more relevant results.

How to prepare for the future :

• Shift focus from keywords & bidding to Strategize your adwords campaign. Optimize for Re-marketing with targeted audience for specific timezone which can help you further optimize your CPA.
• Optimize for acquisition (it may possible that few products/services get more leads but lead to closure ratio is less – thats where human expertise/knowledge/skill needed to take a decision) to increased the ROI.
• Gain expertise on how adnetworks work & how the click-fraud happens. Again, ROI decisions made by human & not the AI. Be a champion of what earns your profit.

Analytics : 

Normally, we try to find answers for,

• How can I make sense of all this data I have on our campaigns?
• Which customer would like a particular product?
• How can I personalize the user experience and make it ‘sticky’?

Well, I hope you have heard of Intelligence in Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, Google Optimize – Do I need to add more ? Everything is available & on demand without much human intervention.

How to prepare for the future :

• Be adaptable to new tools (Google 360 – Data Studio for tracking & analysis)
• Knowledge is power when it comes to analytics. One should know what is available to gain benefit of. For example, you should know that, its possible that you get notification through API engine of Google Analytics whenever your existing customers comes to a site – that too in real time – which can help you to close the deal speedily. (aha moment – but one should know that such tools are available to take advantage of) – thats where expertise are needed. Be on the top of the game.

SEO : 

From RankBrain answering your search queries and Facebook’s Deep Text creating your newsfeed to Klevu’s smart e-commerce search, neural networks and machine learning are changing the way online search works.  Oh and yes, Search Usage on Google mobile devices is increasing since its invention for which no data is provided about the VOICE KEYWORDS by Google.  Few of my friends says, Global top ranking is a myth now as Search is personalized now.

How to prepare for the future :

• SEO is evolving every day yet basic concepts remain same – be useful, be great, be unique & be trustworthy. If one has these 4 qualities then only thing required is to play around the tags.
• Research, Research & more research – thats what Google do so you should. Whats helping users, whats not. If you can catch the trend & technology – you are in.  For example, How product search on google mobile is changing, how near me is affecting the search business, how online queries converting into offline sales – this is only human can follow & not the AI. Only you can decide where can you get maximum customer from, Google mobile search, near me, how to videos or product search or anything else. AI can help you to optimize further for that.

Conversion Optimization:

Well, Forget about creating fancy landing page or A/B testing, have you heard about recommendation engines for eCommerce site ? and Chatbots ? and Automated Landing page variation testing tools ? Just compare 2017 with 2013 – 4 years & what have changed ?

How to prepare for the future :

• Again, Decision making is what Human’s expertise. Which AI bot to use for your business, which helps with pre-defined text with some sentimental analysis is something an expert can decide, so thats where companies will need you. To decide which bot to use, to implement & to monitor the bot to optimize it further.

Content Creation :

I have read this on some blog that, LA times has a bot called the ‘Quakebot’ that writes news about earthquakes, Forbes and Associated Press use similar natural language generation tools to create financial reports and the trend is only growing. Associated Press has reported using upto 3000 bot-generated stories in a single quarter, and that number is expected to increase.

Content is the human power right ? Well, no more.

So, If I have to summarize then I can say that, to survive & excel in this AI era one need to,

• Adaptable to technologies.
• Should know bits & peaces of all digital marketing as functional expertise will be taken care by AI
• Should continuously enhance their knowledge base to know what are different AI technologies available & how it can be utilized to enhance the business.
• Develop Analytical mindset – to study & help companies to decide which is the best AI for their business, why & how to further optimize it.

Digital Marketing has evolved over the last decade & it will continue to evolve & so do we. I don’t think, we should be afraid of AI as it will take our jobs, but I think we should be more adaptable to take mastery over it. Either you became a master Or you leave the game, there is no third option.

Would love to hear your experience & insights on Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing.

Keep Clicking, Keep Tracking!