How Many Marketers Are Using AI to Power Their MarTech?

We’ve all heard about the potential uses of artificial intelligence for years now, but this technology was finally brought to fruition and accessible to everyone only in recent years. In fact, use of AI in marketing went from 29% in 2018 to 84% in 2020, and it’s steadily increased from there. Basically, if you don’t incorporate AI into your marketing efforts, you’re missing out on the chance to increase your productivity, conversion rate, customer satisfaction, and other benefits that modern technology can offer. 

Fortunately, it’s easy to start using AI in marketing because most major MarTech tools now rely on it to get the best possible results. If you’re curious to see how MarTech uses AI to help marketing professionals, take a look at the programs that are available and the number of marketers who already use them.

How Do Marketing Technology Programs Use AI?

The main point of AI is to collect large amounts of data to help with identifying patterns and making predictions for the future. As you might imagine, most marketers can benefit from this in some way, since letting marketing tools take on this job frees you up to do other tasks that require some creativity and a human touch. So, which marketing technology tools use AI and in what way? Here’s a sampling of the MarTech tools to consider and how they can help.

Content Creation

Marketers always need new content for blogs, eBooks, social media pages, and more. But most don’t have the time or desire to write it all from scratch, which is why so many marketing tools now use AI to craft content. More specifically, they tend to use Natural Language Processing to determine which topics readers want to see, and then they can generate customized content that marketers can edit and make their own. Some examples of tools that use AI to write content include Jasper, Copysmith, and Frase.

Lead Generation 

One of the most important but time-consuming tasks for marketers is now greatly aided by AI. The MarTech tools that use AI can collect tons of data from numerous sources within seconds and analyze it to generate quality leads. Such tools also typically integrate well with the software your team is already using, promoting a streamlined automated workflow. AI-based tools to try for improved lead generation include Zapier, LeadiQ, and Leadspace. 

Customer Segmentation

Segmenting your audience is crucial if you’re focused on personalization, and AI helps with that. Certain MarTech tools that depend on AI can review data – including the demographics, online activities, and preferences of customers – and personalize all marketing materials using this information. This means your audience members will see different emails and other content depending on their specific needs and where they are in the customer journey. Examples of MarTech tools that use AI for segmentation include Dynamic Yield, Selligent, and Qlik Sense. 

Automation

One of the best reasons to lean on AI is so you can easily automate tasks ahead of time, leaving you with more time to deal with anything that can’t be automated. Fortunately, AI MarTech tools can automate everything from lead management to social media posts. For example, you can use AI software to automatically send follow-up emails and texts to customers, schedule social media updates and blog posts for the week, and show your target audience ads when they get to a specific point in the customer journey. Some examples of automation tools for marketers include Hootsuite, Omnisend, and MeetEdgar.

How Many Marketers Use AI?

Now that you have an idea of how marketers can use AI, you should know how many actually do. As you might imagine, AI has gotten more popular every year as people have slowly learned to trust it. Granted, there are still some holdouts who are wary of giving modern technology too much power, but we expect that to change as they realize what it can do for them in the workplace.

Semrush compiled statistics about AI in marketing and reported that just 7% of businesses don’t use AI yet. Of the marketers already using AI, 40% said they use it to improve the customer experience. In fact, 34% said AI is the most important type of technology to help with this part of their marketing efforts, with 80% of marketers relying on chatbots for the customer experience as of 2020. 

This idea is supported across numerous sources, as other studies state that 84% of marketers believe AI has helped them deliver more personalized customer experiences. Expect this number to rise as more marketing professionals get familiar with and begin to depend on AI-powered MarTech tools. Of course, this will require marketers to spend more time with these tools to see for themselves that they can increase efficiency, customer engagement, conversions, and more. 

Have you used any AI-based MarTech programs that make it easy to personalize your marketing efforts, automate tasks, and get better results overall? If so, which ones are your favorite? And if you haven’t used AI for marketing yet, why not? We’d love to hear your thoughts on using AI to power your marketing efforts.