How Artificial Intelligence Affects Digital Marketing

Prokopis K Theodoridis1 and Dimitris C Gkikas1

1University of Patras, Seferistr. 2, 30100 Agrinio, Greece
[email protected]

Abstract. This paper describes the current and potential relationship between
digital marketing and artificial intelligence (AI), proposing, at the same time,
ways of artificial intelligence (AI) engagement in app development. As a genuine
branch of Marketing science, digital marketing managed to create value to the
organizations and increased the engagement with the customers through
electronic services. Digital era has helped industries monitor their procedures
including branding, promotion, advertising, production, channel distribution etc.
Based on gathered data, interactive customer experience and a digital overview
of procedures and sales, business managers could make more accurate and data
driven decisions. Due to the excessive amount of data which is daily generated
customers journey and experience turn to become extremely complicated.
Organizations invest high budgets to cover the lack of information or the potential
customers which have never been mapped. The large volume of data generated
lead to a chaotic environment which marketer must handle. Users data daily
change and decision makers must deal with this reality. The need of use smart
applications within organizations emerges to better analyze, classify, optimize
and target audiences. Technology aware customers lead industries to bigger
financial investments and sophisticated solutions. Based on a high complex data
world, marketers must identify their needs and search for advanced technological
solutions. Business world manage to implement smart apps which directly affect
marketing world and decision makers. Intelligent data-based driven models could
lead to customer action predictions based on dependent variables of interest. Data
mining, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, deep learning could act
complementary to marketing science. User profiling, data classification, content
optimization, optimized targeted audiences, predictive models, search engine
ranking factors optimizations are some of the benefits that artificial intelligence
(AI) could provide and generate highly accurate results.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Digital Marketing, Big Data, Customer

Behavior, Decision Making, Predictive Modeling.
1 Introduction

On early 20th century following the steps of technological evolution, digital marketing
had a major increase of value where the need of digital promotion, digital advertising,
digital distribution and digital customer experience emerged [1]. Since 1988 when the
term “Digital Marketing” first originated there has been a radical expansion to business
world starting from small running to large scale businesses around the globe. Due to
the technological advances in the scientific area of artificial intelligence (AI), data
mining and computational analysis, digital marketing met a transition period of changes
which led from an absolute data-based driven approach to a new approach of data and
knowledge-based decision-making systems [2]. To make a qualitative marketing, user
and data analysis the need of saving and analysis emerges. Targeted audiences are the
key to success and profitable marketing campaigns. Marketing managers could use the
technology for their benefit to define the factors that affect marketing share. Such
technology could lead to effective and efficient decision making. Even though artificial
intelligence (AI) applies to a wide range of applications in several scientific fields it
shows that in Marketing Science struggles to apply [3]. Due to qualitative, quantitative
and strategic nature of the problems that may occur it seems that digital marketing
decision makers need more than an efficient computational approach. Factors like
knowledge that comes from professional experience, field of expertise, judgment calls
and multidimensional constantly changing and demanding environment make decision
making seem very hard task. The amount of data that is produced daily give marketers
the opportunity to analyze, design and implement applications that combine scientific
multifactor data aiming smart knowledge-based decision-making patterns
development.

2 Digital Marketing

Digital marketing manages to create a new market perception and a way of increasing
sales through internet. Digital era has given the consumers the opportunity to express
themselves and voice their opinion, giving them, at the same time, the power of choice
and influence. Brands have the chance to dynamically interact with customers and users
have the chance to search for information, product or services. Digital marketing gave
the ability to the businesses to expand their reach. Digital marketing has created value
for the consumers and the businesses. Brands primary goal is to build trust and
friendliness among their customers who buy their products or services. Due to its
personalized use, people who work for digital marketing industry can customize the
content to be more human-centric and user friendly. Users can post comments and
publish content in way that it can influence people and opinions for a brand. Content,
time, comments, interface, reviews, speed, image have a key role in digital era. Users
tend to reply positively to brands when the later manages to create a warm and
customer-oriented environment. User profile, targeted audiences and consumer
behavior engage the internet user with the business and create high quality services,
high volume of revenues and great user experience satisfaction [4, 5, 6, 7, 8].
2.1 Digital Marketing Customer Lifecycle

Digital marketing platforms were researched based on pRACE (plan, Reach, Act,
Convert, Engage).
Plan: Analysis and planning are the first steps that an organization must make to
identify any potential strength, weaknesses, opportunities or threads in the market and
identify the market share [9, 10].
Reach: Reach defines the start of the customer’s lifecycle. Main goal is to attract
more potential customers providing an engagement experience that will drive them to
purchase and eventually to create brand-products-services awareness [9, 10].
Act (Interact): This stage of the consumer journey is supposed to start drawing the
potential customers in and let them know about any product or service provided by the
organization. It refers to potential client persuasion to visit company’s website or social
media business pages, this is called lead generation. The company must carefully create
the pathway that the visitor will follow and keep interacting with the company [9, 10].
Convert: Conversions or Conversion Optimization is a marketing tactic where any
potential customer is converted in an organization member or customer and encouraged
to take a specific action. Conversion also refers to any desired action that marketers
have set as goal. Conversion refers to any action from a previews state to a new one
like "Purchased", "Added to Basket", "Registered as a member" etc. [9, 10].
Engage: Once the desired conversion is made, it is important to make all the
necessary actions to satisfy the customers keep interacting with the organization
through e-mailing, social media commenting or sharing, purchasing or reviewing. It is
a post-sale behavior that builds awareness, creates trust and leads to potential new
purchases or attract new customers [9, 10].

2.2 Digital Marketing Platforms

Some of the most representing software applications were researched and presented.
Plan Platforms: Google Analytics tracks and reports website traffic, analyze
advertisements data and tracks social media traffic, browser technology, mobile-tablet-
website visits, user behavior, keyword searches, landing pages, geolocation etc.
providing an overview of the website behavior helping marketers identify potential
opportunities and strengths or threads and miscalculations [11]. Salesforce CRM helps
companies manage their relationships and interactions with customers and potential
customers. It maps business needs, solve problems, identifies opportunities allowing
companies remotely manage their work [12].
Reach Platforms: Websites consist of several web pages that can be accessed from a
browser. A website provides information depending upon different subject areas.
Different subject areas are the key to reach internet users and potential customers [13].
Blogger enables even simple users to create blogs, allowing at the same time multi-user
commenting and posting. Posts are displayed in a chronological order, where the most
recent are displayed first [14]. MailChimp helps industries find, reach and engage
potential customers through, product selling and surveys to news sharing and special
offers, newsletter [15]. SEMRush conducts SEO scans and reviews search engines
ranking factors to create the optimal content for high quality content and eventually
high ranking in search engine results [16]. Alexa provides technical support, problem
checking and reports to monitor the website condition keep aligned with search engines
ranking policies [17]. Google Ads creates advertisements for businesses, products,
services, increase brand awareness, drive traffic and increase customers engagement.
Advertisements consist of text, website link, landing page link, sitelinks. When the
number of click exceeds the total budget, the Ads stop running [18].
Act Platforms: Hootsuite monitors, manages and schedules posts to multiple social
media profiles providing broadcast digital services like post scheduling, account/pages
monitoring, content management, social media insights, team management, security
and post/page boosting [19].
Convert Platforms: Crazy Egg records any user action and keeps visual records to
understand users’ behavior in a website. It conducts A/B testing, to justify the proper
use of content, buttons, shapes, colors, fonts, images, etc. so eventually increase users’
experience and which will lead to potential conversions [20].
Engage Platforms: Google AdWords Remarketing can re-engage the audience of an
organization through remarketing and retargeting techniques reaching potential
customers who have left the website without performing any purchase action [21].

3 Artificial Intelligence (AI)

3.1 Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the study that includes computational procedures to

perform actions that human beings do and require a certain amount of intelligence.
Communication and learning represent the ways that humans show their intelligence.
Both ways require certain mental skills like synthesis, analysis, decision making,
judgment, organizing, reasoning, hypothesis, interpretation etc. [22]. Artificial
intelligence (AI) involves knowledge representation, search, perception and inference.
To generate results, artificial intelligence (AI) must define and read the data in forms
that will allow representation and processing. The way to succeed that is search and
inference. Referring to search there must sophisticated search algorithms to find the
optimal solutions. Then inferences are drawn for each situation. The way through
artificial intelligence (AI) leads to decision making start from data selection process,
continues pre-processing data, then data transformation, data mining plays a key role
to entire process, finally results evaluation will lead to decision making [23].

3.2 Artificial intelligence (AI) and Digital Marketing in Business

According to Domo.com internet users daily generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data.
Since customers attention is distracted by the huge volume of advertisements and data
across the marketing channels there must be a way to personalize data and target
audiences to increase conversions and revenues. Companies manage to increase their
revenues by optimizing the digital marketing campaigns, channels, audiences and
markets performances, measuring the impact to customers, revenues and improving
customers satisfaction creating personalized content. Artificial intelligence (AI), data
mining, predictive modeling and machine learning tend to satisfy marketers by helping
them identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threads, market needs, analyze
users and target audiences [24]. Effective and efficient data processing will classify
customers’ needs, increase ROI, customer satisfaction and driving growth. [25].
Artificial intelligence (AI) takes as input data coming from websites, sales, analytic
reports, social media insights and process them to produce optimized, accurate, highly
predictive results [26, 27].

3.3 Artificial intelligence (AI) ‘runs’ the RACE.

Artificial intelligence (AI) successfully ‘runs’ the RACE providing data-based

intelligent decision applications [9, 26].
Reach: Smart Content Curation identifies, classifies and suggests content according
past purchased products. Programmatic Advertising defines the targeted audiences and
applies advertisements to the most relevant users. Content Creation refers to content
writing applications that creates human-centric content based on optimized
personalized targeted words or phrases that trigger specific groups of customers.
Natural Language Processing increases customers reach and applies to voice searches
and voice commands through PDAs (personal digital assistants) [27].
Act: Propensity Modeling gathers and processes large datasets of previous users’
actions to predict users’ behavior. Ad Targeting predicts and defines which
advertisements high perform on specific users’ groups, in what buying stages.
Predictive Analytics predicts customer behavior before the customer has even started
the buying process. Lead Scoring examines the value of a potential sales lead and if it
worth the effort, based on data prediction analysis [27].
Convert: Dynamic Pricing identifies potential customers who need an extra motive
to convert. It invests money reducing at the same time profit from one product but
manages to increase customers. Re-Targeting creates users profiling and identifies
those who will revisit a website to purchase. Web & App Personalization personalizes
the content and the interface of a web page or app to increase conversion rates.
Chatbots, answer like humans to users’ questions, suggesting buys, completing orders
etc. [27].
Engage: Predictive Customer Service specifies and engages clients by reaching them
with offers, coupon and suggested info after completing purchases to increase the
engaging audience and avoid churning. Marketing Automation classifies customers and
use optimized content according to what time should contact them, what phrases would
trigger them and what offers should they make the business wants to reach them. 1:1
Dynamic Emailing makes sophisticated promotion of products and services relevant to
the recipients [27].
According to eMarketer.com survey about what the differences are between artificial
intelligence (AI), predictive modeling and machine learning, revealed that marketers
seem to not clearly understand. The problem lies to the point that instead of using the
words ‘machine learning’, ‘data mining’, ‘predictive modeling’ in different
conversations, they constantly use the word ‘artificial intelligence’ or ‘AI’ [27, 28].

3.4 Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Digital Marketing Business Platforms

Some of the most representing AI software applications were researched and presented.
Reach AI Platforms: RankBrain is continuously sorting search results and help
Google process search queries [29, 30]. Siri is personalized to each user and handles
voice commands like answer questions, make suggestions and performing tasks [31].
Gupshup sends personalized campaigns to targeted customers, enables transactions
from right within the campaign, qualifies leads and route them to the right sales person,
schedules meetings automatically etc. [32]. Meetcortex creates better content by
producing photo, video and text content optimized for audience and manages to reach
customers through content deployment at the right times to drive results [33]. Atomic
Reach delivers content marketing value, understands what content drives conversions
and creates optimized content for that purpose [34].
Act AI Platforms: SAS delivers intelligent, automated predictive analysis solutions
[35]. Phrasee creates unique marketing language for businesses that sounds human [36].
Evergage converts website visitors from targeted audiences to customers and interact
individually with users, creating at the same time leads [37].
Convert AI Platforms. SentientAscend provides high conversion by web & app
personalization and smart website testing [38]. Messenger Chatbot enables businesses
build chatbot to drive awareness, acquire customers, enable transactions etc. [39].
Engage AI Platforms. Seventh Sense sends marketing individually emails to
customers at optimal time and frequency. It identifies customers’ needs and sends email
when is most probable to be opened and responded [40].

4 Research Proposition

Search engines over the last years have been used by millions of users for information
retrieval. Sophisticated algorithms assemble a search engine and it highly difficult for
someone to understand or predict the outcome of search queries [41]. Search engines
rank websites and webpages based on ranking factor system. Known ranking factors
are almost 200 and each one weights differently [42]. Marketers in order to manage
increase conversion and sales try to create a traffic towards the websites. Traffic is
based on how qualitative search engine optimization a website has. There have been
several attempts from IT engineers and marketers to prove the importance of search
engine ranking factors [41, 43, 44]. Despite that search engines use more than 200
factors to rank webpages we propose to use only a subset of them and manage to rank
a webpage. A decision tree algorithm and a genetic algorithm wrapper will be used.
Each subset will get a fitness through a fitness model and then it be classified from a
decision tree algorithm. Only the best subsets will manage to pass from one generation
to the next.
5 Conclusion

This research has showed how adaptive can artificial intelligence (AI) be in humans’
daily life. It is a powerful sector of Computer Science that applies in every science and
it can be beneficial to some and dangerous to others. Thus, there must be organizations
which tries to keep artificial intelligence (AI) research mostly academic, rather than a
private research. Artificial intelligence (AI) also successfully answers digital marketing
problems. Due to artificial intelligence (AI) contribution, digital marketing success
depends on proper data management and handling, personalized content, targeted
audiences, adaptive services and correct timing. Data help industries sell their products
by targeting proper audiences, at the correct time, in the correct language, with the
correct message. Marketers manage to have high revenues. Businesses either invest
money on research centers to provide them applications either they build in house
research laboratories to optimize digital marketing techniques. Customer enjoy
qualitative content, services and experience. Digital marketing has a more dynamic
pace than ever before and creates sales out of nowhere. There are also some other
benefits which comes from the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing.
Unemployment is decreased, and new jobs are created every day. Data generation and
processing gives birth to new knowledge, providing a unique opportunity to provide
customers with products they really need, saving at the same time the planet’s
resources.

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