Forget about what you know about marketing. Prepare to unlearn what you learnt until now. Gear up for an era when a piece of software code can decimate an entire industry or enhance the way you work — and yes, it can go both ways.

 

We’ve already know how the world has opened up to the bold new opportunities for entrepreneurship.

 

Remote work, virtual collaboration, the ability to reach your customers who are spread out globally, and the sheer ability to connect with anyone using social media are all realities as you read this.

 

Tactical priorities for your business, the kind of channels you’ll pick for your digital marketing, and the gradually — but surely — shifting tides of marketing merged with evolving technology is going to affect your content strategy specifically and marketing strategy in general.

 

Technology is here to stay. This is the kind of technology-driven era when technology predictions become reality by the time you are done reading this blog post.


Or by the time you are done watching a random video on Youtube.

 

If SmartInsights data is anything to go by, strategies and tactics as far as marketing is concerned seemed to have come a full circle (back to basics, anyone?) with the only difference being that evolving technologies such as marketing automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data will drive a majority of your marketing efforts.

 

Artificial intelligence isn’t just for marketing, just to be clear. As one of the hottest technologies that’s come to the fore off late, artificial intelligence finds applications across industries. The use cases are too many to cite.

 

Artificial intelligence is being used for speech recognition, personalizing apps, preventing data leaks, big data analytics, marketing, sales, customer support, logistics, fintech, health care, and even self-driving cars.

 

If that’s not mind-numbing enough, check out Appliedai for at least 100+ use cases for artificial intelligence.  

 

 

Your basic design services are no longer required

 

All along, we’ve believed that there’s no dearth of businesses with websites that don’t add any value to these respective businesses. In fact, most business websites suck.

 

In case there are business with websites, there’s a possibility that most businesses don’t use digital marketing in any capacity at all. If they do, for most businesses, the content marketing strategy they deploy also sucks.


We could have waited for all this sink in, to marinate, and give time for businesses to discover the benefits of maintaining an active digital presence.

 

Unfortunately, we can’t can’t.

 

Why, you ask?

 

For a strategic web presence, you’ll need professionals to build websites and manage your web presence for you. Profitable websites don’t just become profitable thanks to their existence; they become profitable because they purpose-built, well-maintained, safe, and secure.

 

If you just wanted 5 pages put together in a rush, there’s Wix’s ADI — powered by artificial intelligence — that can do the job for you. Or, you can use Jimdo, Firedrop, and The Grid  which can all help you with basic web presence for your business.

 

Similarly, there are tools that help you create designs (without the need for graphic designers). Adobe itself has Adobe Sensei and Adobe XD which are powered by AI. Then, there’s LogoJoy that can help you create logos fully powered by Artificial Intelligence. Or there’s DesignScape — Created by Adobe and the University of Toronto — that can help refine your design layouts for you.

 

If you are a designer, chances are that everyone else is going to be a designer too. As such, you’d have to find other ways to compete. Or designers might just become curators tomorrow.

 

By 2025, experienced designers won’t be creating icons, social media designs, and logos. Instead, they’ll find exciting opportunities with designs needed for emerging AI systems, according to Rob Girling of Oreilly.

 

 


Say hello to the era of assisted content marketing

 

To develop a profitable content marketing strategy, you need great content. Usually a mix of text, videos, images, and voice — high-quality content is only getting harder to produce. As if that wasn’t enough, brands now have a new job description as “publishers” — we can bet that no one saw that coming when content marketing started gaining popularity.


Manufacturing businesses which only used to focus on strategy, vendor management, raw materials, infrastructure, people, equipment, and outsourcing manufacturing processes are now finding it hard to adjust to the need to “produce content” — that was never really their business to begin with.

 

While a few businesses such as agencies, technology services, and others can easily use content marketing to their respective advantages, what do traditional business do to take advantage of content marketing strategy?


The fallout then? Since traditional businesses don’t even try. Maybe they’ll find this “new marketing” a little too much for them to handle.

 

Or they underestimate just how hard it is to develop content for these kind of businesses, they just give up.


Artificial intelligence can change that with assisted content marketing or AI generated content. Wordsmith — a natural language generation program — uses artificial intelligence to turn any data into insightful narrative.

 

Wordsmith already produced around 1.6 billion pieces of content in the year 2016 and this is only growing.

 

 

 

AI powered paid ads management

 

Artificial intelligence is making inroads into marketing at an unprecedented scale. You now have “software” powered by artificial intelligence which can be a substitute for the services of digital paid ads management agencies.

 

Thanks to automated, quick, and much more efficient paid ads management by platforms powered by artificial intelligence, algorithms can provide ongoing optimization, instant insights for better keyword management, more efficient ads management, tips for advanced and granular bidding strategies, and insights on how to manage your ad performance.

 

All of that is automated, efficient, quickly, and devoid of any human intervention.

 

Adstage.io has a product called “Automate” that can constantly monitor your ad campaigns, give you intelligent insights, and provide you with relevant insights and suggest bidding changes to your ad campaigns 24 x 7. Revealbot helps you set up automated rules to manage your Facebook campaigns with little manual intervention.

 

 

Social management, social analytics, & automation

 

Social media managers will either need to get smart or get out of the way.

 

Advanced product recommendation engines, social management platforms, social analytics platforms, social monitoring platforms, and social media management automation platforms are setting the gold standard today as far as managing social profiles for your business are concerned.

 

Artificial intelligence is now being used to power natural language processing engines to constantly monitor your social interactions, social updates, and brand mentions across the web.

 

Taking all of that data, in combination with automated rules that you can set, artificial intelligence can help you make your social media management work for your business.

 

Persado One, for instance, generates emotionally targeted messages for emails, snail mail, Facebook news feeds, Twitter, and any other channel.

 

Persado uses language processing powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and by constantly monitoring people’s reactions to previous brand campaigns.

 

Then, it creates emotional profiles for people to accurately send out targeted messages based on people’s emotional states.

 

More accurately targeted messages, branding campaigns, and communication with little effort.

 

 

Marketing automation

 

While Marketing automation has been around, even before technologies such as artificial intelligence came about, it’s only going to get better. Erstwhile marketing automation platforms will get smarter, all-inclusive marketing automation solutions get more robust, while new marketing tools will be introduced with more enhanced capabilities.


Marketing automation platforms promise complete or at least semi-automation capabilities such as automation with regards to automated email marketing automation, lead generation, lead scoring, instant CRM data synchronization, and more.

 

On top of the legacy features from marketing automation platforms, there are tools like Zapier and PlusThis which provide businesses capabilities to link one app with another without the use for API experts or developers.

 

Marketo Marketing Intelligence feature set features Marketo Content which takes the guesswork out of content strategy and content marketing, for instance. You also have access to tools like Smartech which provides AI-powered cross channel marketing and analytics.


Artificial Intelligence — as far as marketing technology & services are concerned — is only getting started.

 

It clearly looks like the days of dependence on humans for getting marketing work done and the days of humans driving marketing efforts are waning.

 

However, we are specifically excited about is the rich synergy between human effort and technology making it all the more rewarding to start, run, manage and do marketing for a business.