Despite the rapid growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in marketing tech, many marketers remain daunted by the complexity and perceived risks of the concept. Well, we’re here to set things straight. First of all, contrary to popular sci-fi movies and conspiracy theories, the world is nowhere near being overrun by Terminators. Secondly, AI marketing does not have to be complicated at all, and it can greatly increase your business’s ROI. Our advice is to worry less about your AI becoming self-aware and more about how you can incorporate it into your marketing strategy in 2023. Below we define AI marketing and how it relates to programmatic advertising, and we explain how you can use both to your business’s advantage.
What Is Programmatic Advertising?
The main qualifier is that the process is essentially automated. The main objective programmatic advertising achieves is taking the human error out of the media buying process. Programmatic platforms can systematically select, bid/negotiate, purchase, and place the best media based on your target audience and budget. And, because it’s automated by a machine, placing targeted content on websites and apps can occur within milliseconds! Sure, a media buyer could itemize and select hundreds of sites to target, but in reality, the process simply isn’t scalable. Programmatic allows you to achieve real scale with targeting in a cost-efficient way. The second thing that programmatic platforms accomplish is the ability to do all of this instantly – at all times – every time someone navigates to a website. Each consumer is served an ad appropriate to them, or at least that is the goal.
Here’s How it Works…
There are two “sides” to programmatic advertising platforms. Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) help advertisers to buy digital ad spaces on online ad exchanges, while Supply Side Platforms (SSPs) help website owners to sell those spaces via auctions. In the moment it takes for a webpage to load – this entire process takes place to determine which ad is shown in that slot. The owner of the domain automatically sends any information about the person opening the page to an SSP. An auction is then opened on the ad exchange for DSPs to bid on. As previously mentioned, the winner of this bid is the winner of that slot on the website, and their ad is shown there. This is called Real-Time Bidding, and it is the fastest way to serve ads online. If you’re interested in the best way to serve digital ads – that’s where AI marketing comes in.
What is AI Marketing and How Does it Fit in?
In the bigger picture, AI can work wonders on scaling ad creation or even designing full websites! But while artificial intelligence can replicate most basic and uncreative human tasks, it cannot accurately simulate the emotional, empathetic, and compassionate nature of human beings, which are all core aspects of any good advertising. What it can do, however, is manage, influence, and enhance your programmatic ad platform on your behalf.
Most programmatic platforms use AI marketing to learn and improve – getting better with each task. Using all the demographic, psychographic, and geographic information available to it, an artificial intelligence will create predictive models to determine which ads will be the most effective, and to whom, in the future. We’re sure you’re already beginning to understand how beneficial this can be when integrated with programmatic advertising. Not only will your media be purchased automatically, with lightning speed, in real time, and at all times – but now it gets more efficient every time too! Programmatic platforms combined with AI marketing can help to minimize what you spend by improving the accuracy of your targeting, which in turn maximizes your ROI. The results are reduced costs, faster buys, and optimized marketing performance. This is the future of marketing, and arguably the “best” way to serve digital ads.
How to Incorporate AI Marketing in Your Marketing Strategy
The integration of AI into marketing is a natural one that depends entirely on your business goals and current marketing strategy. If you’re revaluating your target market, consider A/B testing with an AI marketing campaign to compare its effectiveness to previous results without it. AI can be used to pinpoint your target audience if you are unsure of it, or even to identify new personality characteristics among existing targets that may influence how you market to them. It can also be used to establish better relationships with your consumers by reaching them where and when they want to be reached. As a consumer yourself, we’re sure you’ve experienced being more receptive to a message based on where and when you received it. AI can even help to segment your target audience further – serving specific content optimized for certain subgroups of your target market.
The Bottom Line
Aside from saving your budget and maximizing your brand’s digital presence among ideal audiences, AI marketing allows you the time for everything but micromanagement. That means that even though AI can’t produce your creative content – it can provide you with the much-needed time to improve on it yourself. Of course, if you outsource your creative work and marketing, it’s best to find an agency with the AI and programmatic tools already at their disposal. Strategic Marketing is one such agency. With our own proprietary software tools, as well as the ability to leverage industry-leading programmatic and AI marketing platforms, we’ve been proudly serving clients in this field for several years now.
For more information on how we can add AI marketing and/or programmatic ad buying to your business’s marketing plan, contact us today!
