How AI is changing the role of the digital marketer – The Drum

AI has the potential to change almost every industry, and digital marketing is no different. Tom Welbourne, founder and director at The Good Marketer, looks at the evolution of AI and what marketers can do about it.

Huge growth is predicted in the global AI market over the next few years, with its value reaching $190.61 billion by 2025.

With this in mind, let's take a look at the impact AI is having on the digital marketing industry.

With so much data involved in the digital marketing industry, the impact that AI will have is huge. Common marketing tasks that involve data such as customer segmentation, campaign automation, and A/B testing will all feel its impact. AI will be able to carry out these tasks more efficiently than humans.

AI is also causing areas of marketing such as SEO, email marketing, lead generation, content marketing and predictive marketing to change. These changes will be disruptive, but as long as digital marketers stay aware and have an open mind, there's no reason to fear them.

AI has become a core component of search engine algorithms, including Google's BERT and Rankbrain. There are now also AI-powered SEO tools on the market that can help marketers, particularly with on-page SEO and content creation.

Tools such as MarketMuse help marketers analyze top-performing content, perform keyword research, create content briefs, and assist with other time-consuming activities. AI-powered content writing tools such as Jarvis.AI help you create original content and social media content using AI.

While these tools are useful, it's important to note that they only work well with human input. For example, one common issue with AI content writing tools is that they can struggle to incorporate a brand's tone of voice. This content can then require editing from a content writer to incorporate the brand's tone.

Another area of digital marketing where AI is having an impact is email marketing, particularly with email creation and email send times.

Traditionally, it would take a marketer a lot of experimentation to test out different subject lines to see which performs the best. AI can help marketers come up with subject lines that will generate a high open and click-through rate by using algorithms to analyze the results of previous marketing campaigns. This will help marketers improve their subject lines over time.

AI-powered writing software can also help marketers with the entire email creation process, from writing email body copy to suggesting images and promotions.

While primarily used for customer service, AI chatbots are a useful tool in a digital marketer's toolbox. On many websites today, visitors will be welcomed by a chatbot when they enter a page. Sometimes these are operated by a human, but often these chatbots will be AI-powered or AI-assisted.

This process can be useful for capturing the contact information of visitors who land on a page and solving their queries. Digital marketers can benefit from this as AI chatbots can help a business gain a continuous stream of new leads without a human present.

Similar to how AI chatbots help marketers and customer support teams simultaneously, the same can be said for AI functionalities in a CRM platform. Each CRM will have its own unique functionalities, but many can be set up to help identify factors that could indicate that a customer is close to churning.

For example, if a CRM has an integration with a SaaS product and analytics indicate that a user of that SaaS platform has not logged in for a certain period of time, a marketer could set up an email sequence that triggers when a user has not logged in or been inactive for a specified period of time.

Now that we've looked at some of the different areas of digital marketing, we can ask the question, how does AI impact the digital marketer's role now and in the future?

While the future is somewhat uncertain, what we can see is that AI isn't replacing digital marketers anytime soon. Instead, it's helping marketers automate and streamline cumbersome tasks, and helping them segment and personalize their communications with prospects and customers.

Some predict that instead of replacing marketers, the rise of AI will actually end up creating more jobs than it replaces. Many AI marketing tools require human input to work correctly, so this prediction has some weight behind it.

If digital marketers can keep up to speed with the changes that AI will bring to marketing, they will be well-equipped to deal with any significant changes in the industry.

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How AI is changing the role of the digital marketer - The Drum