Pros And Cons Of AI In Marketing: Tips For eLearning Marketers
Did you know that by 2030 Artificial Intelligence (AI) is expected to generate more than $15 trillion globally? At the same time, there are estimates that AI will boost local economies by as much as 26%. That's what we discovered in a recent Price Waterhouse Cooper (PwC) study. It makes you think about what kind of potential AI will have in marketing specifically, and we can't help but wonder about the pros and cons of AI in marketing for the years to come.
AI in marketing paves the way for endless applications, from task automation and data analysis to customized content creation. However, it doesn't come without potential risks.
So, what are the advantages and disadvantages of AI for eLearning marketers? And which are the best AI marketing tools you can use?
Read on as we explain the pros and cons of AI in marketing, explore use cases, and offer a step-by-step guide on integrating AI into your next marketing campaign.
What Are The Advantages And Disadvantages Of AI In Marketing?
First off, what is AI in marketing? AI marketing is any process that uses AI capabilities like data collection, data-driven analysis, Machine Learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) so that you can get customer insights and automate critical marketing decisions. To add to that, in the last few years, marketers have used AI technologies even more widely, not only to generate content but also to improve customer experience. Ultimately, AI helps marketers deliver more accurate results.
Before you choose an AI tool for your organization, we suggest you thoroughly explore the types of AI marketing applications available. Also, make sure to look at how other businesses use AI-powered marketing apps to do business. Tag along as we share valuable tips and use cases of when and where you can utilize AI in marketing.
Let's take a deeper look at the pros and cons of AI in marketing.
Advantages Of AI In Marketing
Marketing has yet to fully utilize AI for more significant impact and results. Thankfully, new strides are being made so that digital marketers like you can improve customer interactions and even make better product recommendations. AI can even assist you with content creation and more. Much of what we once had to do manually can be automated efficiently with AI.
Let's see what you can achieve by implementing AI into your eLearning marketing strategies.
1. More Predictable Customer Behavior
Trying to target everyone that falls under your eLearning company's niche will cost you lots of resources—both in time and effort. Thankfully, you can avoid all this mess by sifting through scattered audiences using AI systems. With the help of AI, you can identify the prospects that are most likely to convert to your eLearning offers. If you implement an AI tool, you can use its statistics decision tree. That way, you can define marketing objectives and review past data with the assistance of AI. Talk about better decision making and insights, right?
In addition, another cool thing you can do is use AI and Machine Learning models to analyze customer behavior. By doing so, you can identify patterns. Those patterns will help you develop your digital marketing strategies. Another excellent idea is to establish these models based on your objectives. For example, what do you wish to achieve with your marketing efforts? Is it to increase conversion rates for your LMS? Improve website traffic? Or perhaps lead generation? AI can be a great tool for reaching your marketing goals more efficiently and by spending less.
2. Improved Analysis Of Customer Engagement
You must know by now that measuring customer engagement is critical to determining what went well and what didn't, mainly due to customer acquisition costs being far higher than customer retention costs. One way you can use AI is to make it track each campaign. Then, AI can provide better insights into which customer segments marketers should target. What's also great about AI tools is that they can provide insights by comparing old and new clients. By doing so, AI can teach you how to produce more regular customers that resemble your ideal buyers. Along the way, you can improve customer experience by targeting previous clients. It's also fascinating that it delivers pertinent info about what your clients want and how to target them individually. As you can understand, AI is the key to personalized marketing and improved customer experience. You can even use it to track your audience's behavior. The insights you get will help you engage with your audience more effectively.
For example, AI is a great way to examine real-time consumer discussions. Best of all, it can help you determine the reasons behind these discussions on different social media platforms. As a result, you'll be able to better target clients by utilizing effective activities for each audience. All in all, AI is critical for successful customer relationship management. Gaining and analyzing real-time insights to help you with the optimal next step is what makes AI unique. Viewing and analyzing preferences will reveal what promos you can use to keep brand loyalty high. Of course, many big companies have already tried integrating AI with Virtual Reality to offer customers a free "try-on" of their products.
3. Target Specific Audiences With Ads
Prospect persuasion is one of the biggest hurdles in marketing. Any eLearning marketing specialist will tell you how challenging it is. Convincing people you don't know that you have the best product for their needs is challenging. Fortunately, you achieve prospect persuasion by pairing AI with predictive consumer segmentation. Also, you can pair AI with virtual assistants or even use intelligent design to create more personalized customer experiences. The days of traditional advertising are ending, as it is far less effective. Instead, eLearning businesses that utilize marketing targeting people based on specific preferences have much to gain. Consequently, more and more marketing specialists are taking advantage of the rise of AI. You can use tailored data to predict whether customers will be interested in purchasing before asking them for cash or credit.
Want to know more about finding and targeting your ideal buyers?
Read this: Your Ideal Buyer Persona Is Not A Unicorn
4. Leverage Marketing Automation To Save Time And Effort
Achieving automation and personalization via AI is an ideal combo for anyone wanting to achieve a high level of marketing personalization. My favorite advantage of AI in marketing is that it helps marketers automate digital marketing while keeping audience targeting.
And if you want your eLearning business to gain the upper hand in getting clients, this is vital. In fact, it's what every eLearning company needs in our fast-growing market. Nowadays, you can use AI systems to automate search engine marketing (SEM), pay-per-click (PPC) ads, SEO, keyword research, conversion rates, and social media marketing (SMM).
Additionally, you can use AI to optimize your messages and target the right consumers at the right time. Using AI, not only can you easily identify topics likely to attract your audience's attention, but you can also create content that is more digestible by your audience because it's about something they love. Also, add chatbots to the mix, and you get all the automated processes your site needs to give customers a better idea of your eLearning services. If you're looking for a cost-effective method that increases the customer base, I can't think of a better solution!
If you are into SaaS, make sure to read AI For Business: 6 Ways A SaaS Company Can Benefit.
Disadvantages Of AI In Marketing
No one can deny that AI is a hot topic; 61% of marketers have already used AI in their marketing activities. However, embracing AI technology doesn't come without fail. While AI-powered platforms have become more common, there are many issues with using AI for your marketing.
Here's what I want you to remember:
- Machines can't replace human connection
- AI predictions/analyses can sometimes be wrong
- Artificial Intelligence lacks human creativity
- AI requires vast sets of data and human intervention
Let's dig deeper into the most prominent AI challenges in marketing.
1. Lack Of Sufficient Infrastructure
To have AI power your marketing engine, you must first ensure an IT infrastructure is set. And along with that, you'll need high-performing hardware already in place. If you are dealing with one of the smaller companies, that means you have a low budget. Hence, setting up such an infrastructure might take a lot of work, mostly because the required computer system setup is too expensive. Thankfully, you can rely on cloud-based solutions instead—that way, you'll need to use fewer resources and save on your spending.
2. Lack Of Sufficient Data
For an AI campaign to succeed, the data that your AI system will require should be of high quality. Plus, AI will need lots of data to understand it all. In addition, any existing data sets must be clean. So, if the data is of low quality, your AI campaign is either set to fail or will have a low impact because of unreliable data.
3. Insufficient Budget
Any decent marketer wants a tech stack and other MarTech tools to boost marketing efforts. And AI systems are certainly giving a fillip to that. So, you risk going out of budget. Thus, you must find ways to prove to the leadership team how good AI can be for your marketing campaigns. In your arguments, you should include forecasting and highly relevant business data.
4. Lack Of Skilled Professionals
Unfortunately, the AI skills gap is huge. This means that even large businesses are still figuring out how to create in-house AI-based marketing solutions. To add to that, AI talent requires specialized skillsets. That means it's still growing slowly compared to other technology positions. Even if your eLearning business uses ready-made AI marketing tools, you must train your employees sufficiently to manage and interpret the results accurately.
So, before jumping on the AI-in-marketing bandwagon, there are plenty of things to consider. Most importantly, you should ensure that you and your people use the AI tool responsibly.
8 Use Cases Of AI In Marketing
Unless you live under a rock and are entirely unaware of the influence that AI has on humanity, then I see why you still need to dip into it. Whether you are afraid of losing your job to AI or not, it has undoubtedly seeped into our lives in a way that makes it impossible to imagine a world without it.
AI adoption has grown by more than 270% by businesses in the last four years, according to Gartner. No wonder the most popular products we use today already have AI systems powering them. And it's not just that technology companies use it. AI can help functions like customer service and operations, as well.
Let's see in more detail how AI systems help marketers across each stage of the customer journey and how you can take advantage of AI, too.
1. Audience Targeting And Personalization
Did you know that more than 70% of marketers are interested in AI because of its personalization opportunities? When you want to win deals, you're better off sending the right content to your prospects. But what's the right content?
Customers these days expect you to understand what they want. Not only that, but they also hope you will showcase that in front of them. You can use AI to offer them content that is based on their needs. ML and AI can help you deliver more relevant and personalized experiences to your visitors. By combining the power of AI and ML, you can send out contextual content and offers. That alone increases your chances of converting leads into sales.
Every wise marketer in eLearning knows that it's the audience you show your ad to that matters. If you target the wrong people, don't expect great results. Thankfully, all the big platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, Quora, Reddit, Snapchat, etc., have tons of data that eLearning marketers can use to segment customers with specific criteria. For example, AI can look at your past audiences and how previous ads performed for those particular audiences. Also, AI considers the KPIs you use along with your performance data. Thus, it can help you reach audiences more likely to buy from you.
Care to learn more? Take a look at these:
How Can Iterative Testing Lead Your eLearning Marketing Campaigns?
How eLearning Brands Can Increase Conversions Through Data-Backed A/B Tests
2. Lead Generation
Do you want to get a list of leads closer to becoming your customers? AI can help you do that by diving into your existing data. Such data may include information about your ideal buyers. Moreover, AI can score leads if you give it preset conditions. Leads with the highest scores are the ones looking for a solution like yours.
By combining AI and lead generation, you can better equip your salespeople with the most suitable leads at the right time. Not to mention how much time you can save. After all, lead scoring from multiple sources is a real struggle if you try to do it manually. In case you're looking for AI tools for lead generation, consider LinkedIn's Sales Navigator tool. Another idea would be to give Growthbot by HubSpot a try. It integrates AI with CRM systems to generate leads. Last but not least, Conversica is another option that helps you engage in conversations with potential leads.
Want to learn more? Make sure to read these articles:
How To Build A Lead Generation Website For Your eLearning Business
5 Ways To Score Leads For Success By Targeting The eLearning Community
5 Ways To Successfully Nurture Leads And Close Deals With eLearning Prospects
3. Content Generation
Content creation using AI might still be in its infancy, but with programs like ChatGPT, MarketMuse, GROVER, and XLNET, things are getting more interesting. Why spend hours and hours writing content when you can have AI create content on its own? Any content marketing expert can see the potential of AI.
For now, programs like the above cannot produce exceptional content. But the technology for AI content creation tools is promising. What's usually missing is that AI cannot generate an emotive feel. Also, at the moment, the average reader can distinguish whether AI or a human has written a piece of content. AI might not be able to replace original content right now, but it can undoubtedly assist if given the right direction.
If you want to write a blog post, for example, AI can help you with your initial content research or even give you tips for your content marketing strategy. And all that happens easily with the tons of data it can find online. Instead of spending hours researching a topic and deciding on an outline, AI can do that for you.
For those of you looking for AI content creation tools, take a shot at ChatGPT, OwlyWriter AI, and JasperAI. If you haven't already, you can use an AI writing assistant like Grammarly to enhance your writing.
For now, content marketing services are only starting to understand the potential of utilizing AI. In the future, we might see AI writing attract page views, even in long-form content and with in-depth analysis. Writers and marketers, stay tuned!
4. Behavior Analysis
When looking to target your ideal buyers, you want to be able to analyze and understand their purchasing habits. So, if an offer is exclusive to a particular customer, you have a higher chance of conversion. With an AI system, even if you have thousands of customers, you can have that personalization easily. Thanks to AI and ML analytics tools, we can now learn more about the estimated transaction value. Also, we get more insights on the probability of someone making a purchase and the person's affinity towards our brand.
Businesses that want to predict customer behavior usually rely on tools like Xineoh, Black Swan Data, Dynamic Yield, Cortex, and Logicai.io.
5. Deeper Understanding Of Customers
Every business knows that you can never stop having information on your customers. It's a continuous process of tracking how customers change their preferences. And you need to know when they are looking for their next eLearning product purchase. So, to keep your prospective customers' attention, you need to refine the way you understand them.
Of course, the first thing an eLearning business needs to do is find buyer personas before planning any marketing campaign. Once you have those personas in mind, you can start creating content. The content you publish should focus on what each persona wants to consume.
Do you want to create personas for your business automatically? You might want to take a look at Persona by Delve AI. It's a great and fast way to get incredible insights into your prospective customers' intent. Plus, it can even segment your audience!
6. Competitor Insights
The key to eLearning business success is knowing what your competitors are doing. Whatever a competitor is doing can be a strategy you can adopt or a lesson on what to avoid. And we are all in for corporate espionage done the right way!
You can use various methods to get competitor insights without being on the wrong side of the law. In fact, you can choose among tons of tools developed to help you understand the content your competitors create, the visitors to your competitors' websites, which tools they use, and so on.
For example, if you want insights into your competitors and their marketing strategies, then Competitor Persona by Delve AI is a solid option. Be it creating similar personas to your competitors or using market analysis and competitor keyword research tools, it can give you a multitude of ideas.
It's all about getting competitive intelligence right. Care to learn more about it?
Check this out: What Is Competitive Intelligence? Complete Guide For eLearning Marketers
7. SEO And Intelligent Website Audits
Do you want to improve page rankings and create a better strategy? Good—however, search engines are getting smarter day by day, and SEO experts are growing more cautious. That means they can identify if you're adding irrelevant backlinks or doing keyword stuffing. And we know by now that poor-quality content won't cut it. So, eLearning marketers must start using AI for SEO.
No more manual checks if your company name was mentioned somewhere. By leveraging the power of AI, you can boost SEO performance with tools like BuzzSumo and HubSpot. When you want to get your website to the top of the search engine results, "search volume" is a term that should be your number one priority. Tools like Ahrefs, WordLift, Bright Edge, MarketBrew, Pave AI, Dialog Flow, and Albert can help you improve your SEO strategy and create SEO-friendly marketing content.
In addition, you're better off using the right tools to monitor the "flow" of visits to your website. The same goes for your social media accounts. You must identify if any leaks might prompt potential buyers to back out before they hit the purchase button. AI-driven services can automatically crawl your website and notify you of any problems. Regular audits are vital to ensure your site performs well and avoid any SEO penalties.
Still wondering why SEO is important? Make sure to read our latest article.
8. PPC Advertising
You can go with manual or automatic bidding when setting up a PPC campaign for your eLearning product or service. The same goes for placement, etc. Obviously, we have to thank AI for that. You see, it's not only about having AI systems take over repetitive tasks when it comes to PPC management. AI for PPC is also great for improving your campaigns by optimizing ads, dynamic ads, etc. Also, AI takes care of showing your ads to the right people based on their browsing history. And, of course, it adjusts your bidding value. Combining all the above helps you achieve your objectives, including uncovering the most relevant keywords for you, etc. For example, many advertisers use software like Persado to generate personalized sales copy while leveraging natural language processing algorithms.
But, even though PPC can be a successful strategy for fast results, it needs human help to function.
If you don't know already, eLearning Industry's directory offers intelligent design and solutions for your PPC listing, thus allowing customization for your campaigns. Take a closer look to see how you can catch your audience's attention and increase conversions!
Key Takeaway
Developing and selling online courses can be a great way to make a living. Even better if you manage to create your own eLearning business by taking advantage of one of the best EdTech solutions on the market. You don't have to be an expert in web design or development to create high-end virtual learning experiences.
If you want more people to learn about your learning technology solutions or online learning offerings, an AI marketing strategy might save you money, time, and resources.