A Revolution in Marketing: AI Leads the New Wave of Digital Marketing

AI in digital marketing: trends and outlook

As artificial intelligence (AI) advances rapidly, marketing is going through an unprecedented revolution. AI brings marketers many new opportunities, and new challenges too. In an AI-driven era, traditional marketing is no longer enough: businesses need to change how they think and adopt innovative AI marketing strategies to gain a competitive edge.

Whether you are a sole proprietor, an entrepreneur or a marketer, AI-driven marketing tools should be part of your business plan. AI marketing helps you run and shape effective marketing strategies so you can reach your sales targets faster.

What are AI marketing tools?

AI marketing tools are software or platforms that use AI to support and improve marketing activities. They apply machine learning, natural language processing, data analysis and other AI techniques to help businesses build marketing strategies that predict a buyer’s next move.

All of this happens in real time, without human intervention. It is this ability to make automated decisions at extreme speed that makes commercial AI marketing tools so powerful, such as the products in the Adobe Experience Cloud family:

Adobe Experience Platform (an all-in-one content management solution), Adobe Journey Optimizer (B2C marketing automation) and Adobe Marketo Engage (B2B marketing automation) stand out among them. With Adobe’s generative AI, Adobe Sensei, they help you build a seamless customer experience.

AI marketing is not the future; it is already here

According to Salesforce, only 29% of marketers used AI in 2018, but by 2020 that share had soared to 84%.

Source: Salesforce

It is no surprise, then, that the global value of AI marketing is set to climb from US$12 billion in 2020 to a remarkable US$108 billion by 2028.

If you haven’t yet considered what AI can do for your marketing, now is the time to learn more. To help you get started, we have put together seven impressive Adobe AI marketing capabilities.

Content generation

Content is the main driver of digital marketing. Without it, companies struggle to sell their products or persuade consumers to buy. Writing and producing content can take hours every day. Marketers need to plan their goals, write copy, edit it, and then distribute it at the right time for maximum impact.

But capacity has its limits, and so does speed. Whether it’s finding the right asset for a campaign or editing work such as cropping photos, every extra task you take on delays your marketing. On top of that, there is so much material and so many assets to search through that you may never find the answer (or asset) you need. So you recreate the asset from scratch. Or you give up on personalization altogether.

With Content Intelligence in Adobe Experience Platform, you get the speed of AI, machine learning and our content-rich data platform, all working for you automatically. With this powerful combination, you can easily find and quickly adapt the assets you need, so you can personalize offers to match your customers’ preferences.

Smart content services such as smart tags, smart crop and smart imaging make reusing images and text easy. And because content creation is now automated, you can deliver these personalized offers to a large audience. Smart production and automated forms conversion then take your legacy PDF forms or content images and text and optimize them for digital delivery. Once that’s done, you can deliver the most engaging digital experiences and reap the revenue rewards.

In addition, Adobe Sensei GenAI in Adobe Journey Optimizer makes it easier to work smarter and faster. Ideate journeys with use-case playbooks: generate journeys from out-of-the-box templates organized by goal, industry and role; generate multichannel content with Adobe Firefly while following safety and ethics guidelines; automatically write on-brand copy in the message designer; and get recommendations for the best results.

Real-time personalization

Customers expect you to know what they want. One way AI marketing tools help is by adapting your sales and marketing strategy to create personalized experiences for any given customer. AI can use predictive analytics to better understand customers’ behavior and buying habits. It’s the same approach YouTube, Netflix and Instagram use to recommend what to watch or read.

Imagine being able to guide customers to specific products or services based on their past interactions with your company. Personalized experiences help them build a relationship with your brand. In fact, today’s consumers expect brands to deliver tailored messages, not generic ones.

Content personalization

Adobe Marketo Engage helps you manage, deliver and optimize personalized content so it always stays fresh and relevant. You can test how different versions of web and email experiences perform, learn which content works best, and optimize automatically in real time to increase conversions. With Marketo Engage, every interaction can feel like a conversation between close friends.

Web personalization

Web personalization in Adobe Marketo Engage lets you deliver personalized content to every visitor, even anonymous ones. Triggers and filters automatically personalize lead- and account-based experiences based on the content buyers find most relevant. Demographic, behavioral and geographic data help you improve web experiences and engage buyers with the content that resonates most. Built-in A/B testing and other performance metrics let you optimize your experiences with your best content quickly and confidently.

Automated cross-channel campaigns

Good AI tools for email, SMS and social marketing let marketers create effective emails, engage customers easily and maintain brand relationships. Multichannel work is one of the most repetitive tasks in marketing. With AI tools, businesses can cut the time spent researching, creating and testing content for each channel. Adobe Journey Optimizer makes it easy to reach your goals.

Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) is a marketing and journey automation tool built on Adobe Experience Platform (AEP). AJO uses AEP’s capabilities directly and integrates with AEM Assets Essentials, so brands can collect and use real-time and batch data and create and deliver 1:1 multichannel customer experiences.

Send-Time Optimization in Adobe Journey Optimizer, powered by Adobe’s AI services, predicts the best time to send an email or push message to maximize engagement based on historical open and click rates. Our machine learning models schedule a personalized send time for each user to raise the open and click-through rates of your messages.

For LINE, the most popular messaging app in Japan, Korea and Taiwan, ESi Technology’s all-in-one LINE marketing platform AIM gives you a lively way to run your LINE account, understand who your LINE friends are, and combine that with in-depth data analysis, so you can gain LINE friends, target audiences precisely and grow traffic more efficiently.

Chatbots

Today’s users want everything fast, whether it’s answers to their questions or details about a product or service to see whether it solves their pain points. Traditionally, they had to work through automated voice menus before they could enjoy the luxury of talking to a human agent about their problem or question. Not anymore, thanks to evolving technologies such as AI and machine learning. Now customers can simply go to the chat section of a digital product, ideally on their smartphone, and get all the information they expect.

Chatbots used to answer only simple questions. The new AI chatbots are programs that use artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to generate automated responses to customer queries. They simulate human conversation, so users feel they are talking to a real person as they solve their problem; customers can barely tell whether they are talking to a person or a bot. Behind the scenes, this experience is managed by powerful conversational AI tools such as Adobe Marketo Dynamic Chat, which serves brands in two ways:

1. It gives brands an agent that is always available, around the clock, so no question goes unanswered, which raises conversion rates

2. It gives customers the solutions they need, the satisfaction they deserve and the experience they want

Adobe Marketo Dynamic Chat is a powerful part of a brand’s cross-channel strategy. It engages website visitors based on their preferences and the content they browse, driving very high engagement.

It lets brands create a unique, contextual experience for every web visitor. Brands can easily communicate with users across channels, engage web visitors quickly and design conversations around each user’s interests, search history and preferred products or services.

Dynamic pricing

Dynamic pricing happens when the price of a product or service changes with market conditions and the supply and demand for the item.

AI tools can use this pricing strategy to earn higher profits, because it lets retailers update prices several times a day. Dynamic pricing is best seen on hotel booking sites and airlines, where prices rise and fall with availability.

Dynamic pricing is a strategy in which a business sells its products or services to different people at different prices. It can help businesses of any size grow revenue significantly and increase profits quickly and efficiently. It also offers flexibility and insight into customer behavior and the market as a whole.

Sales forecasting

To thrive, businesses need a revenue target and a way to make sure they hit it throughout a campaign. AI marketing applications let marketers understand and estimate likely sales from their customer data and past shopping behavior. This predictive insight shows businesses which products will be best sellers, how much stock to hold to avoid inventory problems, and which products need more promotion.

In Adobe Experience Platform, predictive analytics is enabled in an area called Data Science Workspace, where you can build a sales forecasting model. Short-term sales forecasts help with inventory, staffing and resource management. A time-series forecast of future revenue is an ideal metric to add value to a retail business dashboard.##### Predictive content

Predictive content makes the most of every interaction by using machine learning and predictive capabilities to automatically serve the most relevant content across your website, mobile and email. Machine learning crawls your website and automatically identifies your assets, such as white papers, videos, case studies and blog posts. Save time by simply choosing the recommended content.

Adobe Marketo Predictive Content

Marketo Engage works with Adobe Sensei to analyze behavioral, demographic and firmographic data, identify the right content for users and prospects, and deliver it at the right time on the right channel. Marketo scans and categorizes all content assets and adapts automatically to each prospect’s preferences along their buying journey.

Adobe Marketo Predictive Audience

When you run an event, Adobe Marketo identifies the people in your database who are most likely to register or attend, while avoiding opt-outs. Predictive Audiences in Marketo Engage can also pinpoint who will not click the unsubscribe button when you send an email that doesn’t address their pain points.

Adobe Marketo Account ProfilingAccount profiling

With AI, Adobe Marketo Engage surfaces target accounts in seconds, so you can focus on running campaigns instead of searching for accounts. You can easily build multiple predictive lists based on your latest won accounts, new upsell opportunities and accounts in your database you may have overlooked. Then validate them and build personalized ABM campaigns through email marketing, paid media targeting and smart cross-channel nurturing.

Automated decisioning

One of the biggest benefits of AI marketing technology is that it can automate data-based decisions instantly. Data is everything in marketing. It can show you how customers will respond to your messages, or tell you the best strategy for your email campaigns.

Real-time decisioning makes powerful, in-the-moment decisions that respond to the customer journey. Adobe Offer Decisioning uses a central library of marketing offers and a decision engine that applies rules and constraints to rich, real-time profiles built by Adobe Experience Platform, helping you send the right offer to the right customer at the right time and making real-time personalization easier

One of the biggest benefits of AI marketing technology is that it can automate data-based decisions instantly. Data is everything in marketing. It can show you how customers will respond to your messages, or tell you the best strategy for your email campaigns.

Real-time decisioning makes powerful, in-the-moment decisions that respond to the customer journey. Adobe Offer Decisioning uses a central library of marketing offers and a decision engine that applies rules and constraints to rich, real-time profiles built by Adobe Experience Platform, helping you send the right offer to the right customer at the right time and making real-time personalization easier

Data analysis

Data analysis is one of the main uses of AI in marketing. AI can collect and sift large amounts of data from many campaigns and summarize the results. Adobe Marketo Engage offers a range of data analysis.

Marketing analytics

Adobe Marketo Engage helps you evaluate every touchpoint in the customer journey, so you can quickly identify the best-performing assets, channels and campaigns and focus on your performance and maximizing ROI. With highly visual reporting tools, Marketo Engage makes it easy to prove your value in your own style.

Advanced journey analytics

Map the entire customer lifecycle: see how many customers are in each stage and who is engaging where, and quickly identify the bottlenecks that slow deal velocity.

Adobe Marketo Engage shows you the whole customer journey and lets you connect lead and customer program data across every lifecycle stage, so you can see how efficiently customers move through your funnel. This helps you identify stages with low conversion rates, where sales can step in and you can update content. It also helps marketing and sales share data and insights and work together so customers don’t stall.

Multi-touch attribution

Validate and improve your demand and account-based marketing. Use Marketo Measure (Bizible) to trace revenue back to specific campaigns, channels and even individual content assets. Marketo Measure (Bizible) automatically collects everything you need to know about every customer interaction on every channel, rather than only the standard interaction tracking most B2B marketers use. With Everytouch Attribution records, you can also see which channels, campaigns and individual pieces of content drive the most pipeline and revenue and the highest ROI. Now you can increase the number of marketing-qualified leads and your conversion rate, and clearly validate the marketing attribution of the deals you close.

Sales analytics

Sales intelligence tools analyze buyer behavior in depth and help sales teams use sales engagement tools more effectively to get full value from that intelligence. Marketing and sales must put in more effort than open communication alone to see a return. Giving sales teams full visibility into customers’ footprints, how they engage and their likely next steps is essential for smooth, efficient, personalized outreach. Another Adobe analytics tool, Adobe Analytics, uses machine learning, AI and other modern data analysis to go beyond simple metrics, becoming industry-leading web analytics technology that delivers more accurate customer insights faster than before. It has been named a leader in web analytics. With Adobe Sensei, Analytics can organize, clean and prepare massive amounts of data at high speed. You can segment website data powerfully and get easy-to-read views. And you can manage all this data easily, letting anyone in the company find insights on their own while you focus on the deep data science that is your real job.

Summary

AI marketing represents the new trend and future direction of marketing. By using AI technologies and tools, businesses can achieve more precise data analysis, personalized marketing and automated processes, boosting competitiveness and marketing results. ESi has experienced Adobe AI marketing experts who can help you solve any challenge in AI marketing.