Gone are the days where products were mainly marketed on billboards and TV commercials. It’s now more common to reach out to your target market online, as the number of users on the platform has continued to increase. Market research from We Are Social and Hootsuite found that 4.72 billion people are using the internet every day and that the average user spends almost seven hours online per day.

There has been a significant change in training marketers to keep up with the digital shift. Some high-profile universities are even shifting their curriculum to revolve around digital marketing. For example, Emory University offers a dedicated course that tackles the basics of online marketing and disciplines like machine learning. Similarly, the online bachelor’s degree in marketing at Maryville University trains students on digital marketing topics like online events and SEO. They’re even taught key digital marketing skills like data analytics and social media management.

All these online marketing fields build around one approach, however – targeted marketing.

Target marketing and AI

Instead of creating a promo that caters to a broad audience, it’s much more efficient (and practical) to target a specific market. Targeted marketing is the method of first separating your market into segments that are most likely to buy your product (e.g., “40-year-old mothers,” “physically active teens,” etc.) and creating ads that tailor to these segments’ preferences. You can have more than one segment per product.

And as businesses seek new ways to better learn about their target market’s behavior, one technology has stepped up to the plate – artificial intelligence (AI). AI is a subcategory of machine learning, taught to make decisions using data given to it. A study by researchers from the University of Maryland and National Taiwan University outlines that any marketing campaign “that can benefit from personalized outcomes” should strongly consider using AI.

Incidentally, personalized outcomes are what target marketing is all about. Here’s how AI can and has improved targeted marketing campaigns in the present day:

Profiling

Whether it’s from your website or social media accounts, data is precious as it provides you with all the information you need to make the right business decisions. However, sorting through that much data isn’t easy, which is why AI is here to help. AI can sort your information, allowing you to create profiles for every customer, granting you extra insights into who your target market(s) are and how you should approach them. This profile comprises many things, from basic information to personal preferences. HubSpot’s email tool does this by analyzing your email subscriber’s activity and recommending subject lines, links, and other forms of content based on the customer’s profile and membership status.

Intuitive retargeting

Once new users visit your site, you can leave cookies (a type of JavaScript code) that will follow their activity around the internet. This cookie lets social media and Google algorithms know that it’s your ad they should display in front of the user that visited — this method is called retargeting.

But retargeting code alone isn’t sophisticated enough to distinguish users who have a firm intention of buying your products and those simply there for curiosity. AI can recognize these different behaviors, allowing you to send your ads to people with a higher likelihood of converting. In our post entitled Utilizing AI to Retarget High-Value Customers Effectively for Increased Revenue, we noted how AI could even help you segment your leads based on demographics and behavior characteristics.

Chatbots

AI runs chatbots, and in marketing, it applies to many things. For example, by analyzing the visitor data recorded on your website, chatbots can remember every customer’s journey, allowing them to offer personalized recommendations and discounts. The chatbot of one of the world’s leading meal-kit companies, HelloFresh, is an excellent example of this.

Even by passively allowing them to answer common queries, these chatbots can gather a lot of valuable data that can help improve your marketing campaigns. They’ll even sort the information based on the market segments you’ve taught them to recognize.

AI can do a lot to assist with targeted marketing campaigns, from collecting customer data to transforming said data into profiles. And with AI collecting all the insights for you, your team can make more informed marketing decisions, which increases your chances of converting leads.