• by Lou Jordano , Columnist, March 14, 2018

When you think of artificial intelligence (AI), what’s the first thing that comes to mind? If you’re a marketer, you may fear that it will take away from the essential human element of marketing. Or, that this up-and-coming technology will soon replace jobs or eventually make the roles of marketing analysts entirely obsolete. This sentiment couldn’t be further from the truth. Spoiler alert: AI is a marketer’s best friend. It allows them to be more effective by offering them the single most important part of their job: knowledge of their target audience.

Marketers may go into work every day completely confident in knowing who their customer is. And maybe they do. But there’s always more to know, and the online consumer conversation is where to find it. AI helps marketers parse through trillions of online conversations and find meaning to critically inform their campaign analysis. This analysis goes far beyond customers liking one brand over another. AI gives companies answers as to why that’s the case while uncovering motivational factors behind consumers’ intent to buy. This granular look at the consumer’s path to purchase allows brands to take action and amend campaigns or behaviors. 

As with all technologies, AI-powered image analysis is evolving incrementally. Many solutions allow marketers to identify logos within online images, but this is just the beginning. As the tech matures, the best AI-powered image analysis tools can also detect faces, actions, settings and more.

Here’s a great example of how AI can provide companies with valuable consumer insights. There was a leading guitar company that historically sold many more guitars to men than women. They recognized this and wanted to know what was causing the disparity, and if there was anything they could do to correct the imbalance. By analyzing the conversations of guitar-interested women, they learned that women are, in fact, very inclined to buy guitars. These conversations revealed roadblocks to purchase such as poor service in retail shops, fewer female musician role models, as well as male-focused advertising. 

How was the guitar brand able to gather this invaluable and very specific consumer information? 

Emerging AI technology allows you to ‘teach’ its algorithm what you would like to know from tweets, forum posts, product reviews, blogs, news articles, and even images. This includes specific emotive tags that may come up repeatedly, such as joy, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise or anger. Rest assured, all of this data collection isn’t just for the sake of compiling endless amounts of data. There’s a method to the data madness. Each of these mediums contain their own type of consumer insights that can’t be ignored. 

AI isn’t limited to helping marketers make decisions based on past campaigns. As social media analytics gives way to consumer insights, the uses become much broader. It is no longer about marketers measuring the effectiveness and engagement rate of their social campaigns. It is about uncovering trends, patterns and insights from consumer conversations. AI is the most effective way to help marketers anticipate the topics that are most relevant to their audience. What is your target audience talking about? What industry-specific topics or news items are driving conversation among them? There may be critical points of pain or gaps in the market that you can tap into before your competition beats you to it. 

No team of marketers or analysts could glean the volume or specificity of consumer insights that artificial intelligence produces. And, these insights benefit businesses as well as consumers.