Jul 30, 20244 min read

The Evolution of AI in Digital Marketing: How Machine Learning Has Transformed Customer Engagement Over the Last Decade

Updated: Nov 21, 2024

Publication Date: 30.07.2024

Today, we live in a period called the "big data" era. With the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in the world of digital marketing, the rules of the game are changing rapidly. In this new age, we have the technology to quickly collect information that is too much for a person to process. The use of artificial intelligence for this purpose provides serious convenience in many sectors such as banking, technology, and entertainment, and especially marketing. These technologies have greatly changed the way businesses communicate with customers in the last decade. It enabled enhanced personalization, deeper insights, and optimized marketing strategies.

The Transformative Role of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Artificial intelligence is the simulation of machines or systems that resemble human intelligence and perform tasks such as reasoning, problem-solving, and language understanding. Artificial intelligence in marketing; It involves the use of intelligent systems to analyze data, automate tasks, and make data-driven decisions. To be specific, artificial intelligence in digital marketing; can be used for customer segmentation, personalized targeting, content creation, AI logo creation, chatbot interactions, and predictive analytics. Today, artificial intelligence; It is frequently used by digital marketers for data analysis, reporting, market research, and access to article summaries.
Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence that enables computer programs to learn and improve without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning has the potential to revolutionize how marketers improve their performance. With the help of machine learning, digital marketers can analyze historical data to make strong predictions for future results and thus create personalized marketing campaigns more easily. It can divide customers into various target groups with the data it collects from social media interactions and website analysis.

How Did It Affect Customer Engagement?

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are an important tool in transforming the customer experience. It offers unique opportunities for today's consumers who expect fast and personalized services. AI has the potential to quickly meet this expectation with the insights it learns from customer data. With the data it collects, it can be an effective tool in areas such as personalized product recommendations and personalized marketing campaigns. Chatbots and virtual assistants can be used to increase customer satisfaction by providing 24/7 support for customer questions. By analyzing customer behavior, businesses can better know their target audience and create marketing campaigns accordingly. Automated customer support systems alleviate the workload of customer services by solving common problems, thus allowing customer service teams to focus more on complex problems. And most importantly, they never get sick, they always continue to work to help consumers and fulfill their duties. These are all important steps to creating strong customer engagement.

How do brands use these technologies?

Many well-known brands have contributed to the development of these technologies by using them for different purposes.

For example, Amazon's ML-powered recommendation engine generates 35% of its total revenue by recommending products based on users' past behaviour and preferences.
Starbucks uses predictive analytics to personalize marketing efforts, predicting when and if customers will make their next purchase. So it can send targeted offers and recommendations. Segment its customers with machine learning; It sends personalized offers to your phone based on your shopping habits and location.
Coca-Cola uses sentiment analysis to track social media mentions, allowing the company to quickly respond to customer feedback and trends. For any campaign, what kind of music, movies, cuisine, etc. should customers choose? They easily evaluate their interests in the fields and how they perceive the advertisements they encounter. It aims to achieve maximum efficiency by combining this information with easily analyzed trends. At the same time, in this way, it can produce various content regarding the popularity of different topics in different countries.

Future Trends: What Lies Ahead?

The future of artificial intelligence in digital marketing is promising. It is anticipated that advanced machine learning models will enable more detailed personalization in the future. As the use of voice and visual search tools becomes more popular, marketers will need to adapt their strategies to ensure visibility and relevance. With the development of Emotion AI technology, which understands and responds to human emotions, businesses will be able to understand customers' emotions and respond accordingly. It is anticipated that all these developments will increase customer satisfaction and subsequently customer loyalty in the future. A study by Salesforce found that 51% of marketers are currently using AI, and an additional 27% plan to incorporate AI into their strategies within the next two years.

Disadvantages

To get all this personalization, it is important for companies to have a deep understanding of their customers. Unlike traditional salespeople, artificial intelligence and supporting algorithms cannot see cues such as facial expressions. They can only analyze digital fingerprints such as clicks, page views, and purchase history. They're pretty good at telling us what a customer is doing, but they often do not work well at analyzing the reason for the behaviour. Therefore, evaluating digital behavioural data is important, but it alone cannot be sufficient to provide meaningful personalization.

Conclusion

Over the past decade, machine learning and artificial intelligence have significantly transformed digital marketing and taken customer engagement to a new dimension. As these technologies evolve, businesses must keep up with new trends and challenges to leverage the full potential of AI. By doing this, they can develop more customized, effective and personalized marketing strategies.

Marketers must accept that the purpose of tools such as artificial intelligence and machine learning is not to replace human marketers, but as a tool to support them, and keep up with evolving technology by integrating them into the process.

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