The Benefits and Risks of using Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing

Artificial intelligence is dramatically transforming the digital marketing industry. Many organizations use AI technology for its incredible abilities in task automation, data analysis, and personalization.  

There are tremendous benefits to using artificial intelligence in the marketing industry, but there are some risks that you need to be aware of. This article will explore AI's potential benefits and risks in digital marketing.  

What is AI Marketing? 

Digital marketing driven by artificial intelligence is a broad field. AI and marketing are perfect for each other because they tend to align perfectly with marketers while generating the best results. Marketing experts have been able to maximize ROI for their campaigns and clients with the help of artificial intelligence.  

How Artificial Intelligence is implemented in Digital Marketing? 

Companies use AI to improve their digital marketing reach and results. However, consumers have serious misunderstandings due to a lack of knowledge regarding how artificial intelligence is utilized. Here are some common ways in which marketers are using AI.  

• Email marketing platforms are using AI for content personalization and data collection.  
• Advertisement organizations use artificial intelligence for digital ad placement and optimization.  
• AI is used to curate and collect content for digital marketing.  
• Companies are using AI chatbots for communication purposes. This helps them respond quickly to consumers and improves future interactions.  

AI is widely usable in digital marketing. Therefore, understanding all potential benefits and risks is necessary.  

Benefits of AI in digital marketing  

Using AI does not mean the need for human involvement is completely removed. Tools are to help you with digital marketing tasks and not replace you. AI helps to maximize ROI while optimizing efficiency. Some interesting pros of using AI are:

Streamline efficient digital marketing campaigns.  

AI tools can detect and automate repetitive tasks and accomplish them accurately and quickly. Moreover, machine learning can predict recent trends and track user behavior, which allows you to focus on specific segments of your campaigns and prospects that will convert into consumers who will provide the highest values.  

Generate high-quality content.

Recent improvements in AI content generation tools have allowed artificially generated content to reach maturity. Marketers can easily generate quality content, images, and artwork related to their business.  

• You can use AI to generate effective and unique topics and guidelines for content. 
• AI tools create finished content, saving time, and marketers only have to proofread and finalize the results.  
• Efficient AI tools help check grammar and remove mistakes from human-written content.  

Get deep insights into consumer behavior.  

AI tools can deeply analyze and understand data, which can benefit marketers when planning campaigns. Artificial intelligence makes it easier to analyze consumers' communications and preferences and guide prospects toward using services and products.  

This information makes recommending the right products according to the client's needs easier and quicker. It allows them to resolve customers' problems quickly and dramatically increase sales.  

 Personalization of marketing campaigns and products. 

Real-time personalization is an amazing advantage of artificial intelligence that businesses can benefit from. It regularly updates the data sets by managing iterative, continual processes and completing complex calculations.  

It helps personalize real-time marketing content, messages, and campaigns. Quickly responding to customers becomes easier. Moreover, depending on customers' feedback and suggestions, businesses can improve their services and products more easily, as AI will efficiently filter out the best suggestions.  

Effective time and cost savings.  

Artificial intelligence lowers staffing costs and saves time. The marketing industry is highly competitive; with AI, organizations can grow and manage tasks without paying huge costs and searching for talented individuals.  

It helps to improve customer interaction without increasing costs. For example, using AI chatbots allows one to communicate with many customers simultaneously instead of keeping consumers on hold and waiting for operators to connect with them online.  

Constant upgrades and improvements.

Artificial intelligence is continuously developing, upgrading, and improving. Some of the world's biggest tech brands invest their time, expertise, and money into improving various AI tools.  

• AI writers 
• Artists  
• Virtual personalities  

With continuous technological advancements, mass-market tools and applications will soon be available to all businesses.  

Risks of AI in digital marketing 

Undoubtedly, technology has various amazing perks, but it always comes with some consequences. Therefore, understanding the potential risks of AI in marketing can help marketers take protective measures.  

Lack of human touch can have a negative impact.  

Using AI technology like chatbots and other consumer-facing tools often feels unwelcoming and cold. Therefore, consumers often do not prefer interacting with AI tools in terms of communication.  

Undoubtedly, the younger generation avoids human contact and prefers to resolve their problems using technology and artificial intelligence. However, without efficient human contact, AI is even unable to detect, understand, and resolve various human problems. Therefore, lack of human interaction can be an issue for companies.  

Data quality can be compromised.  

The data used to train the neural network of AI poses one of the largest threats to data quality. Artificial intelligence (AI) is not smarter than the human brains who developed it, and it can only be smart enough as per the backend algorithms. It is very efficient at things but not smart enough since that depends on how well the backend models have been trained. 

Privacy and protection during data collection can be an issue.  

It is not far-fetched that AI may lose its compliance due to changes in privacy and data ownership rules and regulations. These rules are constantly evolving to maintain human privacy, and depending on the methods you use, your AI model can become unusable due to legal issues after one update. So, businesses should stay current with the latest regulations and take a cautionary approach regarding intellectual property rights while implementing AI models. 

Use of wrong algorithms leads to issues.  

It is important to understand that Algorithms can make mistakes. This issue is caused by logical errors in the algorithm code or software bugs. That's why we cannot solely rely on AI algorithms. We still need human input to help AI deal with things that it is not capable of doing alone.  

Such problems happen due to uncertainty while developing campaigns. For example, the original Internet chat rooms would block certain location names because they had expletives as a minor part of their name. This example is known as "The Scunthorpe Problem." 

How to manage AI's disadvantages? 

Remember that even when AI technology helps us, we still need to manage its disadvantages since it is not perfect for everything. Luckily, there are ways to find out and resolve the problems, and here is the process of how to do it:  

• Start by identifying the biggest potential risks of AI in your system. When picking up the initial risks, stick to as little as possible. In this example, we will consider unnatural content the biggest risk AI poses to your system.  
• Secondly, consider ways AI can be implemented in digital marketing that will cause the issues that you found in the previous step. For example, you might use an AI chatbot to generate blog post topics or email content.  
• Lastly, you need to devise a plan to identify and resolve those issues whenever they occur. For example, if you created an email that does not sound well and seems unnatural to the reader, you can change your email marketing campaign workflow and add a step that reviews the AI-generated content and optimizes it.  

AI will surely reduce the time and effort you spend doing things manually. Since AI will correct mistakes through an additional step in the workflow, this will not be a huge concern for you, and AI will still be helpful. 

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