Digital marketing strategy has always been a moving target. Great strategies from a year ago might fall flat in today’s ad landscape. Innovation is the name of the game. New platforms, trends, and tools are constantly changing the way we approach the brand-consumer relationship. Savvy marketers and forward-thinking agencies are harnessing these new tools and turning them into big wins for their clients.
Artificial Intelligence in the ad world has been a hot topic for years. What was once thought of as a clunky, pie-in-the-sky gimmick has evolved into an undeniably disruptive force that’s reshaping the entire industry. While Chatbots and Generative AI programs have been grabbing headlines and making waves, machine learning has been quietly revolutionizing the modern marketing playbook with powerful new tools like predictive targeting, geo-intelligent consumer qualifying, omnichannel mapping, and continuous, real-time optimization.
I know, I know. That sounds like a lot of buzzwordy jargon. Let’s break it down
At their core, these AI-driven marketing strategies are about delivering your brand message to high-quality, hyper-relevant consumers who are primed for conversion. Machine learning targeting models use historical and real-time data to evaluate and assign predictive scores based on a series of behavioral, contextual, and psychological variables. Instead of just targeting a specific demographic or area, these models take things like the time of day and the frequency of visits to a targeted location, even weather patterns, into consideration when evaluating consumers. Only the highest-scoring consumers are targeted, eliminating ad waste and boosting your campaign efficiency.
The power of these predictive targeting models becomes increasingly obvious once you factor in the decline of cookie-based digital retargeting models. As consumer concerns about individual privacy continue to rise, the future of cookie-reliant strategies looks bleak. Machine learning-based models are built around non-sensitive statistical first-party data and consumer data attributes to deliver superior performance that is a privacy-forward approach.
Once contextually ideal consumer candidates have been identified, AI models can target them across platforms and devices for a seamless experience. Wherever your ideal consumer is directing their attention – smartphones, television, web, social platforms – these models will deliver your brand message. The model continuously monitors campaign performance, and strategies are optimized in real-time to maximize the impact of every ad impression.
Historically, marketers have played a numbers game: more eyes on your ads lead to more opportunities for conversion. It’s a simple and accurate formula, and it’s perfect for those brands with bottomless budgets who can afford to waste their ad dollars on low-quality impressions.