Digital marketing vs AI:
How artificial intelligence is transforming the landscape of Digital Marketing

Search engines understand more about their users than ever before. Google’s AI algorithms tie together billions of different behavioral signals and pieces of data behind the scenes to make every search result as relevant as possible, to show targeted ads and to create a streamlined, personalized online experience for every user – and it’s not just Google that uses AI technology. Marketing tools, social media, and e-commerce platforms such as Amazon also use machine learning to deliver tailored user experiences.

So, what does this mean for digital marketing? If AI does such a great job of marketing products, services and content to its users, does this make digital marketing teams redundant? What does AI mean for today’s marketers and how has it transformed the industry as a whole?

First, let’s look at some of the ways AI is transforming the digital marketing landscape today.

Creating Targeted Ads and Product Recommendations

One way in which AI algorithms work is that they are capable of showing relevant products and services to consumers. Google the phrase ‘wedding ring’ and you’ll find that ads for this product follow you across the web as well as social media – they’ll probably show up on your partner’s web and socials as well.

Over time, you might also start to receive ads for wedding venues in your city, wedding dress designers and florists. In this way, Google uses AI to take consumer data and deliver personalized product recommendations.

Taking this a step further, AI is able to tell businesses not only what products and services to advertise, but also the most effective ad content to use. Through machine learning, it is now possible to test headings, copy and images within search engine ads, social media ads and even websites. This AI feature iteratively learns and improves the advertising process to discover exactly what it takes to achieve a conversion.

Automating Repetitive Tasks 

AI has also automated repetitive marketing and sales tasks. Let’s look at an example.

In the old days, marketers would spend hours combing through their customer relationship management tools (CRMs) trying to gauge where a contact sat in their customer journey, ultimately trying to find warm leads who might be ready to convert. This is a huge amount of manual labor that relies on guesswork – and if you reach out with a sales pitch too early, you could risk losing a potential customer.

However, nowadays, modern CRM tools sort through customer data, using their browsing habits across the web to determine where they sit in your marketing funnel, which content they need to see to push them to the next stage and find the best time to give them a sales pitch.

Providing Tailored Content Experiences

Another important feature of AI is that it’s designed to constantly improve and tailor online content experiences.

Google’s RankBrain algorithm introduced in 2015 is a machine learning process that takes search terms and predicts what type of content is most relevant to users based on aggregated search habit data.

It is a complex process that can link thousands of related keywords to other variations and synonyms – so Google won’t just show you results that match your search exactly; it will analyze related terms to find other relevant content that you might find useful.

If I search for ‘social media platforms’, Google also displays results for ‘social media sites’ as it has determined that these are related terms.

This process also revolutionized the digital marketing landscape as it introduced the idea of search intent.

For example, if I search the keyword ‘Elvis’, Google is showing me film times for the current Elvis biopic as opposed to the Elvis Wikipedia page or a list of songs from his discography. Here, Google has taken into account not only the keyword I’ve used, but also an estimation of my search intent in order to make recommendations.

This is also a process used by social media sites such as Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. These platforms constantly gather user data to make tailored content recommendations, learning user interests and habits over time.

Digital Marketing vs AI?

So, in light of all of the above, why hire a marketing team? Why not upload products, services or content to your website and rely on search engine algorithms, social media machine learning and AI marketing tools such as CRMs to do the work for you?

Well, this tactic may work in theory, but whilst AI is working in your favor, it is also working for your competitors. How do you stand out from all that noise?

In addition, algorithms shift all the time. Google releases an update and suddenly the game is changed, rankings become volatile and marketers are scrambling to understand why. Paradoxically, the benefit of AI is also its downside – AI isn’t a person. You can’t ask it what it wants to see, and Google themselves are often vague about how their algorithms work.

A digital marketing team will constantly be working to track AI algorithm changes and understand the content they want to prioritize – finding ways to get these algorithms to notice your business in order to help you stand out from your competitors.

What’s the Takeaway?

Is AI removing the need for marketing teams – is it really digital marketing vs AI? The answer is, at this moment in time, no. AI hasn’t removed the need for digital marketing teams – and in reality, marketers are able to help modern business owners take advantage of AI algorithms. For now, at least, AI and marketing will continue to work hand-in-hand.

About the Author: Larry Kotch is the co-founder of The Brains, an award-winning digital marketing agency in London. Ranked #3 in B2B Marketing’s Global 30 under 30, Larry leads a dedicated, remote team of talented digital marketing professionals.