The AI Boost that Can Take Social Marketers to the Next Level
By
Damian Rollison,
Director of Market Insights at SOCi
It’s remarkable how quickly marketers have moved to embrace the benefits of AI. The recent SOCi AI Marketing Transformation Index revealed that 95% of marketers believe AI tech will have a dramatic and game-changing effect on their efforts. Social marketers stand to benefit from this technology evolution in particularly meaningful ways. Indeed, AI’s capabilities seem tailored to address some of their perennial pain points, offering a more efficient and effective method of engaging with and understanding brand customers.
With popular tools like ChatGPT, AI-powered tech has leveled up its ability to generate content that feels useful and – somewhat paradoxically – more human. Generative AI presents a powerful opportunity to optimize social profiles; respond to customer comments; develop, modify, and refine content; and personalize interactions more efficiently than ever. Timely, personalized responses make customers feel like they’re part of the conversation with the brand, which in turn increases trust and loyalty. Social is also an important channel for brands to tap into marketplace trends and anticipate customer needs. AI can make those processes faster and more comprehensive and can even surface insights marketers may not think to look for.
Enabling Meaningful Interactions With Customers
AI helps social marketers to improve the interaction between the brand and its customers by staying connected to, and processing data from, all crucial customer touchpoints. With the power of AI, social marketers can collect and analyze information like social media inquiries and online reviews at scale, and can deliver more personalized experiences to customers in the form of relevant content and timely responses. This is a great way to keep customers engaged and confident that the brand cares enough about their business to offer a personalized touch. According to SOCi’s Local Visibility Index (LVI), high performing retailers generate an impressive 149% more engagement on social media versus retailers who are unresponsive to consumers online.
Even before today’s generative AI tools captured the world’s attention, businesses had been using AI for customer support. But generative AI has raised the bar for customer support chatbots, making their output both more “human-like” and, by processing so much data and generating results so quickly, more comprehensive and useful. Brands have found that AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants, beyond simply reducing wait time, can automate answers to frequently asked questions and deliver relevant, data-driven recommendations to customers. Supporting this, SOCi’s LVI found that responsive, highly visible retailers generate almost 2x the YoY revenue and drive 4x as many consumer actions through online channels when compared to the average brand.
Making Sense of Big Data
If we look behind the curtain at the workflows that back up social marketing efforts, we find that AI has the power to automate repetitive tasks like social media management, email marketing, and even customer segmentation to help optimize outcomes and reduce overall workload. Properly used, AI can free marketers from various forms of manual work, allowing them to focus on better connecting with their customers and finding new ways to use social platforms to boost the brand’s bottom line.
One of the great challenges faced by social media marketers is that of drawing meaningful, actionable insights from the data generated by social platforms. This is where AI and machine learning algorithms come in. AI can efficiently process and analyze large volumes of data, and can help marketers identify patterns in consumer behavior that can inform future social strategies. For example, Verlo Mattress, a leading manufacturer and retailer of mattresses for consumers, was struggling to manage its social media and local reviews. With AI, Verlo Mattress was able to improve its review management performance and control the tone and brand voice of AI-assisted responses to customer reviews. Verlo Mattress now has a 97% review response rate, and saw an 89% increase in Facebook impressions quarter over quarter with more than 2,300 impressions driven per location.
Social marketers should consider that freeing data from its disparate channel-specific silos is, whenever possible, always the best option. The output of AI tools improves as its input increases in scope. Social marketers should look for solutions in the tech marketplace that can bring all relevant customer data into one unified data warehouse. Doing so will help marketers derive unforeseen value from the data they have.
AI and the Co-Marketing Opportunity
In summary, AI has the potential to increase overall efficiency and productivity for the social marketing team. Though powerful, AI tools can’t yet replicate human experience, human empathy, and the ability to place information in the right context. And yet these are all among the most important attributes for interacting with and serving customers across social media. AI allows social marketers to devote more time to providing that invaluable human touch.
It’s clear today that AI is not about to take away marketers’ jobs – it’s positioned to act as a powerful co-marketing tool. Indeed, according to SOCi research, 69% of marketers believe that in the workforce, marketers who adopt AI will replace those who don’t. Anyone not on board yet with AI needs to start looking closely at how their marketing specific goals can draw value from the technology. Eventually, late adopters will be struggling to catch up. Right now is the time to gain a competitive edge for your brand.
