In the past, it was reasonable to talk about how digital marketing tactics differed from traditional advertising. In 2023, the vast majority of marketing makes use of digital channels – which means that top marketing tactics and top digital marketing tactics are essentially the same thing. In our current market environment, successful digital marketing is not really possible without adopting artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. This article contains some useful tips to help you use artificial intelligence in digital marketing to your advantage in 2023.

What is AI Marketing?

AI marketing is any marketing strategy that uses AI tools to collect data automatically, and automatically initiate certain actions under certain predefined conditions. Marketing automation makes your marketing campaigns fast, efficient, and free from possible human error or bias, so AI marketing is generally preferable to traditional marketing.

Fast, efficient marketing is essential in the online environment. There’s no such thing as ‘office hours’ when your business is on the internet. Your customers could be present online at any time, and your competitors’ content is also present 24/7. AI can provide customers what they need, when they need it. It can simultaneously analyze customers’ behavior to inform future decisions regarding campaigns.

Why is AI Marketing Important?

In the current very competitive marketing environment, the use of AI digital marketing campaigns can spell the difference between success and failure. AI helps you understand exactly what your customers are looking for.

Using AI in digital marketing can be effective in promoting customer loyalty. AI helps streamline the purchasing process, so your customers are more likely to be satisfied. The more satisfied your customers are, the more likely they will be to keep coming back to you, and spending more money on your products and services. Happy customers even bring you additional business, because they tell all their friends about the wonderful customer experience they had.

How AI Marketing Can Work for You

Seeing how fast AI technology is developing, marketers need to integrate AI technologies immediately into their marketing strategy if they don’t want to get left behind. Every marketer wants a better understanding of what customers want and need – their perceptions and their behavior – and that is exactly what AI can deliver.

Analyzing Your Data

AI solutions are very efficient at analyzing data coming in from several different sources simultaneously. They can tell you exactly what consumers do and how they do it, whether google ads or an email marketing campaign is more likely to reach them, and which social media platforms they prefer. Every time someone clicks a link, your trusty AI analytics tool will know about it. It will know how long a customer spends on each page, what they buy, and even how long it takes them to respond to email marketing material.

AI systems are really good at analyzing large volumes of data.
AI systems are really good at analyzing large volumes of data. – Source: Hypeinsight

This kind of customer data is critical for giving AI marketing campaigns the best possible chance of succeeding with particular customers. AI marketing tools help marketers predict in advance what customers will need at which stage of the customer journey, and to customize their digital marketing campaigns at each stage to maximize conversions.

Processing Natural Language

Natural language models are central to voice recognition technologies. The type of AI employed in voice recognition is especially important, because voice search is popular when looking for info online. Therefore, you need to accommodate voice search optimization in every marketing strategy, including social media marketing, digital ads, and influencer marketing.

Voice recognition software has improved by leaps and bounds, so that voice can be efficiently converted to text.
Voice recognition software has improved by leaps and bounds, so that voice can be efficiently converted to text. – Source: Onlinewebfonts

When voice search is a factor, websites have to be optimized differently for SEO purposes. When you type keywords into your browser and search for them, short and sweet is the way to go. For voice search optimization, it’s preferable to use long-tail keywords (like ‘most expensive brand of women’s clothing’) rather than shorter keywords (like ‘clothing brand’). And obviously, the kind of speech recognition that digital marketers use relies heavily on AI.

Content Creation

Even if you use the best AI technology, all your digital marketing tactics will be pointless if you don’t have quality content. Human intelligence is still usually better when it comes to creating content than artificial intelligence. Human judgment is needed to determine what layout works well and what doesn’t. But even if humans are needed to drive the content creation process, AI can still help the humans by providing guidelines on what content is ideal for what situation. Just make sure that when your AI-driven content is finished, you make use of quality AI Content Editing Services to make any adjustments that may be necessary.

When it comes to creativity, humans usually have the edge over AI.
When it comes to creativity, humans usually have the edge over AI. – Source: Medium

Search Engine Optimization

The most important thing you have to do if you want people to buy your product is to create the best content for your site – but that won’t help you if nobody ever finds your site. That’s why you also need Search Engine Optimization as part of your digital marketing tactics and AI optimization. To understand how to stand out in the SERPs, you need to understand how search engines work.

English content is by far the most widespread out of all languages, and Google is by far the most influential search engine for English content. Google is now able to make use of the latest AI technology when performing searches, but its earlier AI search algorithms still form part of its current algorithms. Therefore, it’s a good idea to have a basic understanding of how these algorithms work.

How Google Finds and Ranks Content

Google Panda was originally released in 2011. This algorithm was designed to improve the quality of the web pages that showed up on the SERPs. This update penalized sites with too little relevant content, or poor-quality content.

Google Penguin (2012) further increased the quality and relevance of search results by penalizing pages that employed keyword stuffing or manipulative link schemes in an attempt to improve their SERP rankings.

Any digital marketing tactics that involve keyword stuffing will be heavily penalized by Google.
Any digital marketing tactics that involve keyword stuffing will be heavily penalized by Google. – Source: Digitalseoland

In 2018, Google came up with the BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) technique and implemented it in its search algorithm. With the introduction of BERT, Google started using AI to understand the relationships among all the words in search queries, rather than just identifying keywords.

The Penguin algorithm still plays a role in all Google searches, and BERT is still instrumental in helping Google better understand queries. In addition (since about 2018), a new and important guideline has been introduced: EAT.

E-E-A-T and YMYL

E-E-A-T, formerly E-A-T, stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. Google utilizes its trusty AI algorithms to evaluate every website it searches. It is important that the content is created by someone with the necessary EXPERTISE or who has actual relevant EXPERIENCE.

Usually, this means that someone with a relevant degree, qualification (like a doctor), or experience, like someone who has undergone a certain medical treatment process, created the content.

A website or a person has AUTHORITATIVENESS when the majority of other knowledgeable people in the relevant field view that website or person as a reliable source of information. If others view your content as valuable, it adds more authority to it.

The TRUSTWORTHINESS of a website and its contents is largely determined by whether or not it contains legitimate info about its creator – including valid contact details. This is particularly important for websites used for online financial transactions. Part of the trustworthiness of a website could also be the accuracy of the information it provides. Depending on what you’re searching for, poor quality results could be anything from mildly annoying to potentially life-changing. Google uses the acronym YMYL to indicate topics that affect Your Money or Your Life. For social media posts, for example, E-E-A-T is less important, but when you have YMYL content, high E-E-A-T will be a crucial part of every successful content marketing strategy.

It's especially important to provide quality content when your content could significantly affect the wellbeing of your target audiences.
It’s especially important to provide quality content when your content could significantly affect the wellbeing of your target audiences. – Source: Whythehellwouldyoucare

How to Boost Your SERP Performance?

If you want high Google rankings, you have to create legitimate content, and avoid keyword stuffing and dodgy link practices (Google Panda and Penguin). You also have to maximize your E-E-A-T if you want to come out at the top of the SERPs – especially if you publish YMYL content. It’s relatively easy to search online and find out about the best SEO practices for improved site performance, so there’s already numerous resources to help improve SEO.

Basically, the two essential digital marketing tactics you need to employ are first, creating valuable content, and second, proving to Google (and its AI algorithms) how valuable your content is. Here are some of the best marketing strategies for accomplishing those two things:

Building quality links is one of the best digital marketing tactics, because the more links and mentions your site gets from other authoritative sites, the more authoritative your site will appear. Make sure you go for good quality links, rather than a large number of mediocre links, because Google is able to determine the quality of links surprisingly well.

You will be benefiting from AI technologies when you use online programs to help you identify broken links in your content, and to fix or replace them. There are also AI-driven marketing tools to help you find broken links on other relevant sites so that you can create link building opportunities.

Keeping Your Content Current

If your website covers YMYL topics, it’s essential that your content is always up to date. That means maintaining your website regularly and replacing older content should be a central part of your marketing strategy.

This task mostly requires human judgment, but artificial intelligence can also help you do this more quickly, easily, and efficiently. Speed and efficiency are areas where no human can compete with AI.

Generating Reviews

When customers are looking for products or services online, reviews by other customers are one of the most important factors that influence their choices. Poor reviews can damage your sales severely, but even a lack of positive reviews can be detrimental.

You can use AI to produce positive product reviews – but as always, having a real human to oversee the process is necessary if you want to make sure there are no errors in your AI-generated content.

Make the Most of Experts

If you can afford it, hire experts to help you create content as part of your marketing strategy. That way, you get authoritative information (especially if you are talking about YMYL topics), plus you will probably get additional traffic to your site from that expert’s target audience.

Here again, humans outperform AI. Being an expert, or having followers, is not something that an artificial system could ever do. However, AI can be helpful in identifying the best industry experts or influencers to reach out to.

Publish your Credentials and Contact Details

Now that keyword stuffing is out and EAT is in, your viewers want to know that what they’re reading is written by someone credible – so give them what they want! List your degrees or experience, the awards you have won, or the events where you have made presentations. The most obvious ways of doing this are either to create an ‘author bio’ to go with your content, or to include your biographical information on the contact page of your site.

Any type of official-looking document that helps establish that you really do have the skills you say you have adds to your trustworthiness.
Any type of official-looking document that helps establish that you really do have the skills you say you have adds to your trustworthiness. – Source: Cpapracticeadvisor

Sufficient contact information is particularly important in YMYL industries. In that case, your website needs to contain information on the different members of your team and how to contact them. There must be enough details about each team member to enable users to identify who will be able to assist them with their query.

Of course, you could always make up fake staff profiles, and give them whatever credentials you choose – but if anybody ever found out that you’d cheated, that would have a terrible effect on the TRUSTWORTHINESS of your page. You are strongly advised not to include any of these dodgy digital marketing tactics in your AI marketing strategy! Valid credentials are also something no AI system could give itself.

Google MUM

MUM (Multitask Unified Model) is Google’s latest artificial intelligence innovation. Penguin was all about penalizing people for keyword stuffing and dodgy link practices; EAT and YYML were values implemented to improve the quality and relevancy of search results. With the introduction of MUM, Google gained the ability to deliver highly relevant content in response to complex search queries. What’s more, MUM’s AI systems can find content in different languages, as well as different formats (such as images and videos, and not just text).

MUM’s AI algorithms are said to be 1,000 times more powerful than BERT’s algorithms! After the Panda and Penguin updates, searchers are no longer directed to low-quality pages of limited relevance to your search. However, if you are trying to answer quite a complex question online, you still have to do separate searches to find each little piece of information you might be looking for. But with MUM’s AI capabilities, Google has gained the capacity to understand your question so well that it can provide all the separate little pieces of information, all in the same search.

Google's Multitask Unified Model (MUM) employs cutting-edge AI technology to deliver the best possible search results.
Google’s Multitask Unified Model (MUM) employs cutting-edge AI technology to deliver the best possible search results. – Source: Molinare.es

To stay ahead with the latest emerging digital marketing trends, you really need to be on the ball this year! Almost before you get the chance to fully take in what’s going on, the recent trends in digital marketing get outdated, and new AI trends come in! But there are some current trends in AI no successful digital marketing strategy can afford to ignore.

Enhanced Cybersecurity

As more and more of our lives goes online, cybersecurity in the digital world becomes more important. Hackers are continually trying to get into corporate systems, while cybersecurity providers continually try to use AI to thwart the hackers, in a deadly race against the clock.

You need the best artificial intelligence solutions on your side if you want to outwit all the hackers who are continually trying to break into vulnerable systems and steal your data.
You need the best artificial intelligence solutions on your side if you want to outwit all the hackers who are continually trying to break into vulnerable systems and steal your data. – Source: Emerisis

Seeing that artificial intelligence systems excel at processing large volumes of customer data at high speeds, artificial intelligence is set to become more and more essential as it becomes increasingly important to protect our online world against criminals. So if you follow the AI trends towards making online security a key part of your digital marketing efforts this year, you won’t go wrong.

Increased Interactivity

Consumers are very spoilt in this day and age: they are lazy, and they require instant gratification. If you present them with a page of text, it doesn’t matter how incredible your information is, they just won’t read through the whole thing. More typical consumer behavior consists of surfing until they find something that’s more successful at capturing their attention.

Interactive content engages your audience better than anything else.
Interactive content engages your audience better than anything else. – Source: Xoombi

One of the best ways of holding the attention of channel surfers is to provide interactive content. Consumers want tailor-made solutions that are ideal for their specific needs, and AI can help you produce interactive content to give them what they want.

They should be able to click a button to see security solutions either for businesses or for private individuals, for example, or browse for curtains according to color, fabric, price, or washability. Questionnaires and quizzes are excellent ways of providing customers with interactivity, and at the same time provide AI systems with valuable data about what customers are looking for.

Multimodal Content

If you want your website to lure the maximum number of visitors, including visuals has always been one of the most important digital marketing tactics. Now, however, you don’t just have to think about how to engage your site visitors: you also have to think about how multimodal Google MUM searches will be able to find the different types of marketing content on your site.

The introduction of Google MUM means you now have to enhance your existing digital marketing tactics by using visuals and other media to make you more discoverable in searches.

Conversational AI and Large Language Models

It can be easy to forget one thing about AI: it’s artificial. That’s the same as saying it’s man-made. If a certain program is able to act in an intelligent way, that’s because somebody painstakingly designed that program, writing millions of lines of code, telling it what to do in different contexts. The better the datasets you put in, the better the AI you get out.

LLMs can only work well if a human inputs plenty of examples which the AI model can 'learn' from.
LLMs can only work well if a human inputs plenty of examples which the AI model can ‘learn’ from. Source: Medium

The Large Language Models (LLMs) used by AI programs – as well as by Google, for better contextualizing user search queries – already work off huge datasets. As these datasets expand, AI capabilities will grow at an exponential rate. For your customers, interacting with your AI systems will soon be almost indistinguishable from interacting with human agents.

The Ethical Use of AI Technologies

With the use of AI already rising exponentially across all sectors of the market, it becomes more important to use this technology to improve people’s lives, rather than to give big business even more power. Ethical concerns around the use of AI technologies usually fall into one of two basic categories: concerns around bias and discrimination, and concerns around privacy.

Bias and Discrimination

Even if the imagination boggles with sci-fi stories about the machines taking over and running the lab, the reality is that however advanced your AI technology gets, it can only ever do what it was programmed to do, by a human.

Therefore, if an AI system is biased, that means the data that was originally inputted was biased. Humans are biased almost by definition: they never see anything purely objectively (like a machine does), but rather, as things affect them personally.

Since AI ‘learns’ from the data you put in, you have to be very careful you don’t put in any data that is not exactly the kind of data you want your AI system to learn. For example, as we know, in the past, women were underrepresented in the workplace – so if you feed an historical dataset into a machine learning algorithm, you are inadvertently teaching your AI system that males are more likely to be good job candidates than women.

Privacy

Seeing that AI systems have no judgment to call on to advise them how to judge fairly, it’s natural for people to feel a bit worried about how AI systems will use their personal information. Although face recognition technology can be very useful when law enforcement is trying to track escaping criminals, it’s very natural to feel alarmed when you think that the same software, in the wrong hands, could allow criminals to find out when your house is empty.

With so much of our important personal data online, security has never been more important.
With so much of our important personal data online, security has never been more important. Source: Pax8

Other Concerns

In many countries around the world, unemployment is high, leading to high levels of poverty. And now even more of the jobs that people used to do are going to be taken over by AI? What will that do to unemployment levels? In order to use AI in an ethical way, we need to ensure that we are not putting people’s livelihoods at risk.

Artificial intelligence technologies can bring you unprecedented business growth in 2023!
Artificial intelligence technologies can bring you unprecedented business growth in 2023! – Source: Redzonemarketing

Conclusion

It looks like artificial intelligence is here to stay. While there’s still some controversies regarding the ethical use of AI trends, there’s no denying the benefits it can have for businesses. From helping to conduct automated marketing research and getting a better idea of your customer’s needs, to optimizing social media campaigns and making your site more interactive, AI trends can be used in many different ways. Put the current AI trends to work in your AI marketing strategies in 2023, and experience business growth like you’ve never seen before!