Is your brand’s mobile marketing strategy measuring up to the growing number of digital users? Today’s consumers are mobile-first, spending more time on the internet with their smartphone or tablet than a computer.
Your business or brand has to adapt to the changing times so that you can reach more mobile device-obsessed consumers and be one step ahead of the competition. One of the emerging mobile technology trends you can explore is artificial intelligence (AI). Considered the next big thing in mobile marketing, AI has started to create new marketing opportunities for various brands.
The potential applications for AI are hugely diverse, and innovative businesses are taking advantage of this. Ecommerce brands like Amazon are using AI to predict buying behavior. Even website builders like Bookmark are using AI to determine optimal web design. The possibilities are endless!
On the marketing side, Dresner’s 2019 Data Science and Machine Learning Market Study found that 40% of marketing and sales departments prioritized AI and machine learning higher than any other department in enterprises. A study by Gartner predicts that AI embedded in analytics and other marketing software will free up more than a third of data analysts in marketing organizations by 2022 through automating processes like personalization, lead scoring, anomaly detection, marketing performance management, and reporting.
With 64% of consumers expecting personalized shopping experiences based on their past interactions with a brand, AI offers a potential solution for hyper-focused marketing. It’s a matter of brands and marketers adopting the technology when the time is right.
Want to adopt AI for mobile marketing but not sure how to go about it? Take your cue from the five AI trends currently used by successful brands today.
Chatbots for a seamless brand-consumer engagement
Chatbots are computer programs that can engage people in human-like conversations through messaging apps to automate business transactions such as processing orders, booking flights and hotels, managing one’s personal finances, scheduling an appointment, and more. AI processes text or speech inputs and sends an appropriate response to the user.
These artificially intelligent messaging-based bots provide a huge opportunity for mobile marketers who aim to position their brand as a trailblazer in the industry. Adopting chatbots as part of your mobile marketing strategy can benefit your brand in several ways.
First, you can reach a wider audience. Acquire reports that approximately 1.4 billion people use messaging apps and are willing to talk to chatbots. Facebook itself has reported the creation of over 300,000 bots on their platform. While the exact number of bots being used for customer service has not been disclosed, businesses and customers exchange around 8 billion messages a day on Messenger.
Second, using chatbots helps reduce customer support costs (i.e., fewer customer service agents and less overtime hours) while boosting your operational efficiency. Research shows that as many as 64% of internet users see 24-hour service as the most significant benefit of chatbots.
Most importantly, this mobile technology trend makes seamless interactions between brands and consumers happen. With 47% of consumers willing to purchase consumer goods via a chatbot, customers see bot interaction as easy and reliable for their needs. The online conversation mimics the experience of shopping in a traditional retail store. Mobile marketers can further enhance user experience by creating customized recommendations for each consumer based on interactions with the chatbot.
Numerous businesses around the world either created their own messaging apps or tap existing platforms like Facebook Messenger, Slack, and Kik and have converted more customers by removing conversion barriers and allowing them to place orders by chatting or speaking directly through their smartphones. Some of the popular brands that use chatbots include Starbucks, Domino’s Pizza, Pizza Hut, and Spotify.
Building a chatbot for your brand is a lot easier and cheaper than it sounds. Businesses of any size can develop their own mobile technology. You don’t need a big development team, a massive budget, or extensive AI knowledge to develop an artificially intelligent chatbot. All it takes is using an open chatbot development platform to create a messaging-based bot in a matter of minutes.
Dynamic pricing for maximized profits
AI enables businesses to automatically set dynamic prices rather than fixed prices to maximize their profits. Dynamic pricing adjusts prices in real-time based on market demand and how much a customer can and is willing to pay.
This mobile marketing technology also predicts which consumers might need to be offered a discount before they convert and which ones might convert without the need for a discount. This way, price cuts are targeted only at consumers who will convert when offered a discount.
Online retail giant Amazon was well ahead of the curve in its early implementation of dynamic pricing. Nowadays, it finds major success with its deployment of AI to monitor factors like Key Value Items (KVIs) and Key Value Categories (KVCs) to set prices for certain goods and promote offers to specific users.
Your business, too, can leverage dynamic pricing for optimized profits by investing in a software that uses AI to manage your prices and revenues.
Consumer data analysis for better ad targeting
AI makes it easy for mobile marketers to craft more targeted and personalized marketing messages such as special offers and ads by spotting consumers’ behavioral trends and patterns. This mobile technology provides marketers with insights on consumer preferences and the best times for sending out those messages.
To understand and predict how a customer would behave, customer data is analyzed, including what they usually buy, what they’re talking or asking about, their demographics, location, and social behavior. In doing so, marketers find out which customers would make repeat purchases or the chances a particular prospect will convert.
This predictive analysis is well evident on the product recommendations of e-commerce sites like Amazon. For example, after purchasing dog food on Amazon, its algorithm will keep showing you similar or related products (e.g., dog accessories and pet care supplies) that you might consider buying.
Netflix, YouTube, and Spotify also have algorithms that work much in the same way to provide user enhanced experience through movie, video, and music recommendations that are relevant to every user.
Voice Search Recognition
There is much potential in voice search recognition for mobile marketing. Voiced-based devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home Mini are changing the way consumers interact with media and utility apps. Penetration of this technology and the sophistication of these devices are growing—Adobe reports that 36% of consumers own a smart speaker today, with 54% of owners saying their speakers accurately understand their spoken words. The same study cites nearly half of consumers (47%) use voice assistants on their smartphones most, with smart speakers coming at a close second (31%.)
These AI-based voice assistants continue to learn from customer interactions, queries, requests, instructions, media preferences, and more, giving marketers access to more data for profiling and segmenting users. This means you can offer more highly-personalized and hyper-focused messages when your customers are ready to hear them.
Your mobile marketing efforts can leverage voice search recognition through AI-powered voice analytics. With this, you can further optimize your content, improve user experience, and even rank in the voice search indexes.
AI and Blockchain
Another key AI technology to look out for is that which integrates with blockchain technology. Traditional AI is ripe with potential privacy issues, which is something that decentralization of data can help with. Blockchain can revolutionize the way we use AI to enhance mobile marketing campaigns while preserving the rights of individuals.
Here’s a quick infographic about some of the top AI blockchain projects in 2019:
Key Takeaway
Simply integrating AI into your mobile marketing efforts gives you a competitive advantage, especially if you’re the first in your industry to do it. What more if you manage to implement it successfully?
So, take advantage of its potential for customer engagement as well as time and cost-saving benefits before it goes fully mainstream.
