Do artificial intelligence (A.I.) and privacy restrictions make you uneasy as a marketing manager? Well, have no fear! Recent and upcoming changes to A.I., automated digital ads, and heightened privacy restrictions are redefining how we reach target audiences—for the better.
Learn how to adapt to the rapidly changing world of marketing in this article.
A.I. and machine learning have the power to define their own algorithms, determine new paths, and unlock unlimited potential to transform marketing.
It’s easy to overlook, but we all interact with A.I. multiple times a day—often without realizing it.
These are all examples of curated content that aims to target individuals for an improved, personalized experience through the customer journey.
While it can feel somewhat intimidating to lose control of certain aspects of marketing, remember: A.I. is meant to help marketers and consumers. When used correctly, it can save valuable time and headspace while personalizing and properly targeting online experiences.
A.I. can automate repetitive, tedious marketing tasks and manually pull data for more efficient analysis. This makes better use of your agency time, putting money where it matters most.
Marketers used to spend a set budget, but now, we can spend media budgets more effectively
through sophisticated automation and more targeted ads.
The chart below shows the best days and times to deploy a specific digital advertising campaign. Our team of digital strategists used to have to pull this data manually across different platforms and advertisers. But thanks to machine learning, the process is much faster and more user friendly.
80% of marketers believe they’ll be intelligently automating more than a 1/4 of marketing tasks in the next five years.
Another example of time savings and auto-optimization from machine learning is Google’s responsive display ads. With responsive display ads, Google will automatically generate ad combinations for websites, apps, YouTube, and Gmail based on your uploaded assets, headlines, and descriptions. Google’s machine learning model determines the optimal combination of assets for each ad slot based on performance history.
What does that mean for your agency time? It means digital marketers at agencies have more time to implement recommendations and make performance improvements—instead of using that time to manually pull and analyze data.
In short, A.I. is a better use of your money and your agency’s expertise.
As A.I. becomes more prevalent, privacy concerns are on the rise. Some social media platforms have incurred billions of dollars in fines for failing to protect users’ data. Many people are worried they haven’t—or aren’t yet able to—give proper consent to advertisers, apps, and web browsers.
To address these valid concerns, we’re seeing big players rolling out privacy changes on their platforms:
In terms of how this affects marketers and digital advertising, we may start to see smaller data sets, less retargeting, and less demographic data. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still create personalized, positive online experiences with our ideal customers.
Now more than ever, businesses must ensure they’re investing in a fully integrated marketing strategy. That way, if privacy settings are limited on one channel, marketers have other ways in which to reach target audiences. For example, if paid advertising is negatively impacted, organic content marketing can be used to influence purchasing decisions.
Here is an example of an integrated marketing strategy:
Due to changes in privacy settings online, the importance of online community is at an all-time high.
A community is a group of people who share something in common. Customers and prospects all have something in common—and it’s our job as marketers to rally people together around that commonality for the betterment of the brand(s) we manage.
When building an online community, start by clearly identifying your ideal customer. Determine what content matters to them and where they are spending time online. From there you can mirror their behaviour and spend time on the right platforms. Create helpful, evergreen content (or buy/share curated content) to share with your audience.
Some of the places to establish communities for your brand include:
We hope this article has helped you understand the advances in A.I. and privacy settings that are—or will be—affecting marketing managers’ work.
In navigating these changes, start by getting crystal clear on your business goals. Every choice you make about which advertising strategies to deploy, on what platforms and when, revolve around the unique goals of your business.
If you’d like assistance in harnessing A.I. or building community while respecting privacy settings, tbk can help.
Every project and relationship starts with a conversation. Let’s talk about your business and marketing goals. Fill out our contact form and a tbk representative will be in touch as soon as possible to get the conversation started.