In today’s technologically advanced world, we witness the growth of startups more frequently than ever before. Young entrepreneurs join hands and start shoestring operations with external funding to bring about an innovative change in modern society.
When you plan to grow your startup, several things must get encountered – from hiring the right team to your product design. One integral aspect of any business’s success, whether small or large, is Digital Marketing, i.e., marketing or advertising your services or products on the internet to attract an audience.
No matter how perfect your end product is, it won’t survive long without marketing, and this is where digital marketing comes to the forefront. And modern technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) are rapidly gaining ground in the digital marketing sector.
At present, AI is affecting and transforming every aspect of our lives, which includes marketing strategies. With the competitive nature existing within the businesses, integrating AI to create data-driven digital marketing strategies is essential to maintain pace with competitors or even leapfrog them.
Artificial Intelligence & Digital Marketing
During years gone by, marketers, mostly owning a startup, hesitated to apply artificial intelligence to their marketing strategies. With time and innovation, the top successful companies have started adopting it and reaped the benefit. Brands like Spotify and Amazon have been using AI systems successfully to bring about a change in digital marketing.
For example, Amazon uses AI to display only the relevant products to a buyer based on previous views, searches, and purchases. This personalized experience practice increases the likelihood that the buyer makes an initial purchase or even turns into a regular customer.
What is a Data-Driven Digital Marketing Strategy?
In the digital marketing industry, most startups develop their strategy based on assumptions about your product, target audience, and performance. These assumption-driven strategies can lead to the downfall of your business even before it gathers pace.
On the other hand, a data-driven strategy is created solely on data and insights gathered through a thorough analysis of as much information as possible. Your decisions get based on these quantitative insights.
Market Research
Initially, you carry out full-fledged research about your target audience, interests, and competitors within the industry.
Setting Up a Buyer Journey
Before buying your product, a customer goes through a three-phased buyer journey.
In the first phase, they find out the advantages and benefits of your product. Secondly, they compare alternative solutions. Finally, they decide whether to buy your product eventually or not.
During the development of a digital marketing strategy, this buyer journey must get optimized.
Selecting Digital Marketing Channels
There are several digital marketing channels, which include email, social media, and content marketing. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) also factor in this step.
Launch, Analyze, and Rectify
Finally, you can launch the digital marketing strategy and keep on analyzing its performance. Identify all the problems and react immediately with alternative solutions.
Use of AI in Creating a Data-Driven Digital Marketing Strategy
Artificial intelligence (AI) combined with Machine Learning (ML) carry significant potential in developing data-driven marketing strategies. These revolutionary technologies excel at gathering and processing large amounts of data rapidly from which you can gain valuable insights.
Another advantage is the ease of automation. AI Algorithms can take care of tasks such as content research and come up with more in-depth results.
Let’s take a deep dive in understanding how one can use AI and ML in creating a data-driven digital marketing strategy to grow a startup:
Gain Valuable Insights from Your Customers
As mentioned above, the first step of creating a digital marketing strategy involves researching your target audience. AI helps in finding patterns at a large scale and provides actionable valuable insights.
AI pattern recognition helps to analyze large sets of data gathered from market research.
As an alternative, you can even use AI algorithms to generate vast amounts of data from discussion forums or social media. Using natural language processing, these AI algorithms can ease through countless reviews, articles, and posts.
The main aim is to carry out sentiment analysis, a significant advantage of Artificial Intelligence. With an AI tool, you’ll be able to identify the major trends, questions, and things that can get improved related to products like yours. You can also figure out your audience’s demographic details.
Competitor Research
AI tools undoubtedly provide you an instant edge over your competitors.
Using these AI-driven tools to track your competitors on social media can help you figure out their detailed strategy. You can gain stats on their types of posts, high-performing content, and posting frequencies. You can even gather useful insights into their followers, i.e., how they interact with your competitor through shares, likes, and comments.
AI tools also help in reverse engineering your competitors’ website analytics. Once your website gets launched, keep a close eye on bounce rates and page traffic.
Furthermore, AI and ML can even help in mining your competitors’ link profiles, which will boost your rankings in search engines.
AI-Optimized Buyer Journey
As soon as a potential buyer gets in touch with your brand, your AI will keep tabs on them. What particular aspect of a specific product interests them? What are they looking for?
These insights will then send personalized recommendations, adjust paid ads, and curate your website content. Researches and surveys have proven that customers are highly likely to purchase a brand that tailors content according to their interests.
Another crucial element of a buyer journey is customer service and AI significantly improves that as well. Especially during the comparison phase, prompt customer support can prove to be the clinching factor. AI ChatBots can answer routinely asked questions and even produce auto-generated email responses, which reduces the burden on your team to respond to urgent or complex customer queries.
Email, Social Media, and Content Marketing
AI helps brands even personalize Email Marketing campaigns based on user behavior, which means marketers can send emails triggered by specific actions. As a result, only relevant emails get delivered to your customers’ inboxes, with subject lines, messaging, and product recommendations all chosen based on that customer’s behavior.
AI tools can also improve your performance on Social Media platforms. These tools help analyze your past performance to figure out the right content to post. Overall, you will develop a social media strategy for maximum reach and results on each different platform.
When it comes to Content Marketing, AI helps produce high-quality content that drives organic traffic to your website. Based on your competitor’s performance and target audiences’ interests, AI tools can generate content ideas and indicate which topics will resonate with your potential customers.
Furthermore, the right AI tools can quickly scan through all existing posts and articles on a particular subject, helping you approach the topic, structure your content, and improve on the current articles or posts.
Deep-learning algorithms will improve your vocabulary and polish your grammar.
Boosting Your SEO
Without a doubt, SEO is crucial, and one of the top priorities for any digital marketing strategy’s success.
Integrating AI can provide a massive boost to your SEO techniques.
It’s essential to know that search engines like Google themselves make use of AI and ML algorithms. To influence these algorithms and get your business ranked higher, AI is a must.
Initially, AI can help optimize your keyword research. AI-driven keyword research is an asset in tackling the latest trends, such as the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) that has recently gained momentum.
AI can even be useful to optimize your content for voice search. Voice searches utilize natural language processing AI. Ensuring that your content is compatible with them will improve your rankings as almost 50% of the searches will be voice searched in the coming years.
In Conclusion, Integrating technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning into your digital marketing strategy from the beginning will help grow your startup and gain an advantage over your competitors. Your marketing approach will get based upon data insights rather than mere assumptions.
Harness AI tools for email, social media, and content marketing, as well as SEM and SEO.
In a nutshell, AI will give your startup an edge right from the start and set you up for long-term success.
If you plan to build a startup from scratch but are not specialized, look no further than 6DegreesIT. Our professional and highly-skilled digital marketers have years of experience using modern technologies, be it Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning. We will help create a result-oriented data-driven digital marketing strategy for your startup’s success.
Contact us today!
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