AI is the topic on everybody’s lips – or at least it is in the world of SEO – particularly as Google prepares to drop its new Search Generative Experience. We wrote recently about the impact that AI is likely to have on your SEO, but once you have got your head around that, what everyone wants to know is how it will improve digital marketing, and a lot of the questions are around speed.
The power of process
We have written before about how we use AI at Verkeer to improve client management, but in terms of how it’s speeding up marketing as a whole, it largely relates to process. Essentially, the focus is on how people are working rather than what they’re doing. We can already see the way that works in paid search, which has been using AI for many years and has grown exponentially.
The actual work involved in digital marketing is likely to remain fairly stable with the evolution of AI, featuring the same kinds of activity that brands are already doing. However,it will almost be like having a personal assistant to do the heavy lifting. That then means you have more time to pay attention to strategy – observing what’s working, what’s not, and making tweaks to improve outcomes. The more time you have to focus on that really valuable input, the quicker you will see results from your digital marketing campaigns.
Human intelligence
There’s been a lot of concern that the increase in AI will mean that human input will become irrelevant – the reality is quite the opposite. As things stand and seems set to do so for the foreseeable future, one of the key elements of using AI successfully in digital marketing is not to rely on it to make decisions. Strategic thought comes from people, but AI processes can underpin what we’re doing so we can make more time for the bit where human intelligence adds the most value.
For example, with paid search and social, the focus is on making sure we’re using the right bidding strategies for our clients and that’s where AI has been in play for the longest period of time. All the platforms that use paid search rely on AI to do the majority of the work, but it’s our job to monitor it and ensure that it doesn’t go rogue.
As a case in point, when Smart Shopping was introduced, everyone’s campaigns went mad on brand ad terms because they had the best performance rates. They had the best performance rates because people were buying from brands that they knew and were specifically searching for. Smart Shopping identified that success rate and as it operates by scaling up what works, everyone suddenly found they had 90% of their spend going into brand campaigns.
That’s not a great strategy for growing your business because while you do get good return upfront, you won’t scale your audience because you’re relying on people who already know about you and like you. The goal is to find and win customers who don’t know you and therefore aren’t searching by brand names – that kind of guidance needs a human touch.
AI is the key to scaling your customer base
More of our time than ever now is focused on how businesses and organisations can grow their audience through digital marketing by using AI to mimic existing audiences and reach other markets, while being confident that the established ones are looking after themselves. We can then channel our brain power, and time, into how we scale that process and more new audiences, quickly.
Once we’ve got that process in place, we have much greater capacity to look at everything we need to, in order to achieve fast and effective results for our clients. We can trust AI to do its job, but we have more time to look at shifts in the market, external factors, and pull that strategic element into it. That’s something that applies across all digital marketing channels, from SEO to paid search, informing everything from content structures to how we write different bits of code and how we communicate to different stakeholders – and in essence, that’s how AI will speed up your marketing results.
Do you need help getting your website in the best position possible to take advantage of future updates? Contact our team and we would be happy to help.