As competition leads to infinite choices, it becomes crucial for brands to be truly heard and seen by customers. In a deluge of options, what becomes imperative is connecting with the target audience emotionally, keeping them engaged, and securing a stable position for the brand within the customer’s radar. In the current landscape, brands have to constantly fight it out to become irreplaceable and build lifelong nurtured relationships. The strength and success of a brand largely depend on how a consumer perceives the brand, the degree of trust and association with it, and how loyal they are to it.
Branding, therefore, is important for any business. Period. And companies that effectively plan their marketing efforts and are able to differentiate themselves better from the competition have a much higher chance of success.
Why care to be heard and seen?
Branding is more important today than ever, because a good brand digs deep past all the clutter, and emphasizes the “what” and “why” of your business. A strong brand stands out even in a densely crowded marketplace. Moreover, consumer choice is not only about pricing. In fact, people have too many choices and too little time. Also, most of the products or services offered by brands are more or less similar in quality and features, which is why companies need to offer a compelling value proposition for consumers. The very reason, then, behind branding is to tell consumers why they should care, by conveying the value proposition through a strong emotional connection.
In their quest to be seen and heard by consumers, brands are pulling out all stops with innovative communication and marketing strategies to connect with them in new ways. Brands that offer meaningful and personalized experiences are already leading the race, leaving behind even the more established companies. However, creating personalized experiences at scale by scrutinizing millions of data points has transcended the realm of human capabilities, which is exactly why brands are now arming their marketing and branding teams with artificial intelligence (AI). AI-powered tools can help companies improve the customer experience they offer by understanding what makes consumers tick and using the abundance to predict their actions.
How does AI make a profound difference now?
Applying AI to optimize brand outcomes like intent to purchase, brand consideration, brand favorability or awareness in real-time can drive a 6X increase in brand metrics. How? Well, let’s take a look:
Anticipate behavior and responses: AI offers brand marketers the ability to understand and pre-empt customer behavior. This ability can have a deep impact on the sales and marketing function, and across each stage of the customer journey. The massive computational power of AI offers significant capabilities by diving deep into the huge pool of customer data to connect the dots across data points. It can help marketers understand how consumers think, feel and behave in specific situations. This helps the machine identify patterns and trends and—more importantly – predict response rates to advertising that strikes a chord.
Finding your ideal customers: AI can help you discover customers who will provide the most value to your business. It can analyze the attributes of ideal customers and help you find prospects with those same qualities. But AI also takes this process a step further. It can even give you valuable information about other developments in the space, such as which firms are making investments related to your line of business.
Content optimization: AI also helps optimize content to match the brand’s messaging with what consumers want to hear. AI-powered tools study online conversations across all touch points to identify the emotions that the content elicits in the audience and what content resonates with them the most. With the help of this data, brands can generate content to foster a deeper connection with their audiences.
Optimizing returns on campaigns: AI offers a huge advantage to marketers by allowing them to deconstruct each customer response and anticipate reactions to messages on different advertising channels. For instance, mobile video is capable of capturing audience attention and stands out as a format where the returns from AI-enabled optimization are not only instant but also more impressive than any other method. AI optimization delivers the biggest boost for the audiences who are further down the funnel. AI delivers proven results to boost a brand’s growth by up to 19X, as opposed to traditional advertising optimization.
Superior customer satisfaction: Brands are clamoring to make personalized experiences a standard of their marketing plans. However, achieving utopian personalized customer service without AI can be quite an uphill task. AI can help brands identify what works for their target customers and what doesn’t. With these results in mind, new strategies and customer targeting programs can be designed with greater accuracy.
AI-run ads: It’s time for brands to leverage AI and capitalize on the burgeoning demand for personalization. AI can be used to make brand communications more targeted and dynamic by leveraging those elements of content that produce the best results. As AI automates the collection and aggregation of data across touch points, marketing teams get access to insights which they otherwise may not have noticed through a manual analysis of data. For example, Harley Davidson used Albert, Algorithm’s AI-driven marketing platform, which led to a massive bump in sales leads by 2,930 percent, while saving the company’s marketers effort and time.
Relevant content and searches: AI-driven platforms allow marketers to match consumers with the kind of content (text, video, etc.) they prefer, on the channel of their choice. With their ability to handle massive amounts of data, these machine learning-powered platforms can organize, tag, and search content visually by cataloging images and videos based on their features.
SEO: Brands can use AI to make their content feature more prominently on search engine rankings, optimize search ad copy, or even optimize landing pages to enhance visibility. All of this can drive quality scores and conversions through various paid campaigns, ads and search results. Furthermore, AI can extend support in optimizing bids and budget allocations across many keywords, ad groups, and campaigns.
Retargeting: The basic principles of business will tell you that acquiring new customers is a more capital-intensive task than retaining existing ones. AI allows brands to enhance customer retention by retargeting their offerings to existing customers through effective messaging that presents before them an opportunity to make another purchase and then redirects them to the brand’s website.
The more information AI receives, the better the outcomes it can drive for the business. AI allows brands to do a lot to cut through the clutter and differentiate their offerings through actionable insights. It also has the power to unlock new opportunities that may not have been discovered by the brand so far. Brands which power their marketing function with AI can, therefore, blend the best of data intelligence that machines possess with their own human, emotional intelligence to give their companies a solid edge in the market.
