AI-based Tools that will help understand your audience’s needs and interactions

No matter how good or bad your products or services are, they become useless if you fail to present them to the right audience. This is why the first step a marketer should take before launching any campaign is to ensure they truly understand their targeted audience.[wl_faceted_search]

Once you know your target audience, you can focus on reaching that specific audience using the right tools.

So, the starting point should be the definition of your buying persona, which, according to Neil Patel, is “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” To create your own buyer’s persona, he suggests answering these questions:

• What demographics do they occupy?
• What does a typical day in their life look like?
• What are their pain points?
• What problem are they trying to solve when accessing your website or landing page?

Technology has transformed marketing.

Today’s marketers have many advanced tools to help them quickly understand their public preferences and buying behaviour.

With Facebook Audience Insights, you get access to aggregate information about two groups of people—people connected to your Page and people on Facebook—so you can create content that resonates and quickly find more people like the ones in your current audience.

Using the YouTube FindMyAudience tool, you can find the people who matter most to your business, discover new audiences, and learn how to reach them individually with relevant messages. Once you’ve identified your audiences, you can download your free audience profile and use the insights to start a YouTube campaign that reaches people most likely interested in your products or services.

If you want to work with an advanced marketing tool that identifies your customers’ most significant sources of influence  ⁠so you can reach them where they hang out, opt for SparkToro. SparkToro offers the advantage of crawling tens of millions of social and web profiles to find what your audience reads, listens to, watches, follows, shares, and talks about online.

There are many strategies for researching targeting interests, from using Google to search for categories related to your niche to checking your customers’ Facebook profiles to see which fan pages or interests they like. It is advisable to start by just trying a few and stick to the ones you find more useful.

Good marketers aim to reach their audience more accurately than their competitors by spending less and simultaneously achieving better ad performance.

Digital marketing is not the only area benefitting from the advantages of AI. Artificial Intelligence allows a deeper connection between marketing and sales, reinventing the traditional sales processes and changing the sales landscape completely.

When marketing meets sales

As Jill Rowley said, “#AI Will Reinvent Sales…and Sales Professionals”. Today, sales software does everything from scheduling meetings to identifying sales behaviours that close more deals. “That’s how artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the sales landscape today.”

For example, Nudge is a sales platform that uses AI to help sales leaders drive high performance. Nudge will keep your CRM 100% up to date with every contact, interaction, and relationship, simplifying your sales team’s activity.

PeopleAI helps teams close more business, maximizing their efficiency. People have developed a complete behavioural analytics solution that determines which sales rep behaviours are most likely to close a deal.

Calendar improves time management by combining data from your calendar use. With Calendar’s intelligent scheduling link, sales professionals can easily find the best meeting times.

Crystal’s AI offers personality insights at the point of need, helping sales professionals communicate better with customers, prospects, and co-workers.

Troops’ AI helps sales pros maintain their sales pipeline more easily. It automatically tracks Salesforce data and presents it to them in an easy-to-digest way. A few clicks will do the trick.

Content marketing and AI

AI in marketing helps better target messages so that the correct information reaches the right person at the right time. With so much information, this kind of service has become a huge necessity.

For example, MarketMuse is good content marketing software backed by AI. The software analyzes web content, samples it, and builds pre-processed models called “high-dimensional vector spaces.” Then, it analyzes millions of articles on a given topic by understanding related issues and following links until it builds sets of millions of content items.

Of course, AI has its limits. Although AI excels at pattern recognition, it still needs a human to guide it and make decisions. There is always a trained human behind the machine to get the desired results.

NLP and marketing

In a world where Google dominates 70% of searches and half the searches have no clicks due to rich results, understanding how users will consume the different pieces of content is crucial.

Last year, to better understand searchers’ intent, Google introduced and open-sourced a neural network-based technique for NLP pre-training called Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT, for short).

By applying BERT models to rankings and featured snippets in search results, Google can do a much better job of helping users find the information they are hoping for. BERT is getting better at grasping the subtle nuances of language that computers could not understand until now. Hence, Google now understands the context of the words in users’ queries so that users can search for information more naturally.

SEO in the BERT era

As Google has changed how it processes users’ queries, its SEO strategies have also changed. Today, the best way to answer different user intents is to structure website content by adding schema.org markup. This will allow you to define certain entities to help search engines better understand your content. Structuring the content of your website correctly will enable you to reuse it in different environments to match different search intents.

Content structured in this way can help you build Actions for Google Assistant upon entity types such as how-tos, recipes, news articles, and podcasts. In this way, schema.org markup is also helpful for voice search. So, entities are interconnected into a semantically meaningful cluster. Entities allow us to present different angles of a complex concept.

Conclusion

A marketer’s ultimate goal should always be RELEVANCE. To sell more, we need to understand more about our customer’s problems and find better ways to help them. For best results, sales and marketing teams should work hand in hand, completing each other to improve customer interactions. AI technology integration and data sharing will be critical as the customer-facing disciplines converge.

To learn more about the future of voice search, you can check the video below: