There is more and more talk about AI (Artificial Intelligence) in digital marketing. It’s influencing the way we approach digital marketing at an alarming rate, and many PPC (Pay-Per-Click) professionals are starting to wonder about the security of their role. Technology is increasingly becoming more intelligent and more adaptive, which leaves us wondering about the need for PPC professionals in the future. In reality, AI is nowhere near replacing humans in digital marketing. The best solutions will occur when professionals and AI work together.  

What is Artificial Intelligence?

AI is a term commonly used for machines that have intelligence and can think and react— at least in part— like humans. AI has been the catalyst for the next industrial revolution and can provide solutions for many of the world’s existing problems. While AI is eliminating jobs, it’s also creating new ones, along with the possibility of new industries.  

How is AI Influencing Digital Marketing?

Artificial Intelligence is changing many industries, including finance, manufacturing, and marketing. It increases efficiency, optimises your marketing message and helps you personalise your content for your clients. For instance, specific actions can trigger emails that you send to potential or existing customers. AI is changing the way that brands connect to their audience. It reduces the workload that many PPC professionals have as it can analyse massive amounts of data in a few seconds. AI makes it so much easier to personalise your message to your audience. There are many aspects of AI that change the way we speak to our customers.  

Chatbots

A chatbot uses AI and natural language processing to interact with customers. Chatbots can boost engagement when it’s integrated into your website or social media pages. This technology can help several customers at once, and it’s available 24/7. You can choose whether the chatbot simply greets your customers or helps them with the entire purchasing process. Chatbots can also allow users to talk to a person or be referred to a specific part of the website. As AI improves, most customers won’t even realise that they’re not talking to a human.  

Semantic Search

A semantic search is when the programme understands the intent and contextual meaning of a search term. This helps users get results much faster, as the machine understands the relationship between words and contextual meaning.  

Content Curation and Creation

Content creation is an essential aspect of content marketing. AI can produce content from raw data into readable and exciting narratives. Content curation is the process of gathering and organising information on a relevant topic. AI can recommend products based on users behaviour, which is part of the curation process.  

Targeted ads and Predictive Marketing

AI can generate and improve ads targeted at specific interests. Personalised advertising is the top priority for digital marketing professionals, and AI makes this process much more manageable. It can use search history, demographics, previous purchases and other information to personalise advertising to specific users.   Predictive marketing is based on what the future holds. AI can help make these predictions more accurate through data mining, machine learning and historical data analysis.  

AI Tools that You can Integrate

There are a variety of AI tools and programmes that can help digital marketing experts.  

Google Cloud AI

A safe and seamless tool you can use to create a chatbot or talent network. You can use a pre-trained model for large-scale services and integrate it with your website AI.  

Market Brew

It makes sense of the changing environment of search engines and implements these changes within hours. The predictive services that Market Brew offers help you stay ahead of the pack.  

Emarsys

This tool helps you to personalise your message on a large scale. It’s an omnichannel marketing platform designed to accelerate business and marketing outcomes for its customers.  

Siftrock

Siftrock helps you to harness the AI in your email marketing campaigns. It’s a marketing automation plug-in that works in your inbox to deliver specific messages to certain users.  

Zoomph

Zoomph measures sponsorship, ROI, engagement and other aspects of using influencers to sell your product on social media.  

Future Proofing Your PPC

When PPC was first launched, professionals used to do everything manually. Since then, it has become more and more automated. This is nerve-wracking for professionals, especially younger ones. The term AI is recklessly thrown around, and the fact that it’s often called disruptive technology only adds fuel to the fire.   It will take many years for machines to be as effective as humans in many aspects of marketing. AI is better at finding correlations and working through data sets but can’t replace humans in higher-order decision making. Machines are taking over the repetitive and tedious tasks but can’t replace professionals in marketing.   AI can offer an improved user experience and save time. It can make more accurate future predictions to help you make informed decisions. It can’t make the decisions for you. Even with the intelligent AI solutions that are cropping up, there are still many decisions that only human PPC professionals can make about their campaigns.   To future proof your role as a PPC professional, the best thing you can do is learn how to use new technology and integrate it into your strategies effectively. Essentially, you need to make sure that you hold skills that a machine can’t replace.  

Final Thoughts

News of how AI is changing the way we live is everywhere. This tends to make PPC professionals nervous, as AI is also changing how we approach digital marketing. While AI is making marketing more manageable and more effective, it won’t replace humans anytime soon. Make sure you future proof your PPC by acquiring skills that machines can’t replace.