The Opportunities and Challenges of AI on Digital Marketing

While 2023 marked the general market's first introduction to robust generative AI, 2024 marked the rise of AI in all facets of how people live and work. It promises a longer reach and faster analytics or production capabilities for anyone who can harness it—but global industries are seeing just as many challenges as they are seeing opportunities. Small and local businesses across the country are encountering the same paradox, especially when it comes to marketing. There are dozens of ways to use AI for social media management, content marketing strategy tasks, and SEO optimization, but there are potential pitfalls and drawbacks along the way.

Partnering with a digital marketing agency like Decographic can help you navigate AI marketing opportunities with more safety and efficiency. Start by exploring these growing opportunities and the challenges that surround them.

The Opportunity: Chat Bots and Instant Communication

90% of shoppers want immediate communication and answers to their questions—and if they don't get the right answer in ten minutes, that's not fast enough for most of them. This demand for fast answers and problem resolutions was rising before AI came onto the scene, but AI offers novel new ways to satisfy the demand. For example, you can build out a chat bot on your website or client dashboard. If it's powered by robust language learning models, it can translate almost any customer question into a searchable query, find the answer, and generate a human-sounding response—a comfortable arrangement for the customer even if they know they're talking to an AI.

The bigger and more detailed the knowledge base, the better the bot can serve your customers. This is ideal when you simply don't have the manpower to keep human service lines open 24/7.

The Challenges

However, it's not as simple as downloading a bot and integrating it with your website. Some of the challenges you'll need to grapple with are:

• Training the bot: Out of the box, it can only give pre-formed or simplistic answers.
• Wrong answers: AI doesn't think like we do—it uses pattern-finding to guess both the right answer and the right way to say it. If it goes wrong, you can quickly lose customers to frustration and mistrust.
• It needs a lot of information: If your website is new or you don't have a strong online presence, the knowledge base your bot can use is limited. You can solve this by growing your library of blog posts, tutorials, metadata, and internal documents.

The Opportunity: Predictive Analytics

Big data has been a core element of business operations for years now, and AI can help businesses do a lot more with analytics. For example, smart algorithms and tools can synthesize the data along pre-established workflows. Even smarter AI can "brainstorm" data queries and pull out unique insights. Generative AI can repurpose the data into prompts, suggestions, and reports. 

If you have a small business or you're trying to forecast potential growth in new markets, having an AI-powered analytics process can transform how you make business decisions for the better. On the day-to-day level, you can do tasks faster (or get them done without doing them yourself). On a bigger-picture level, you can make more confident budget and business decisions because you can more clearly see how shoppers, your business, and whole industries are behaving.

The Challenges

Again, the ideal scenario requires a lot of nitty-gritty effort to get to. There's also the potential for your AI tools to go off the rails without proper maintenance and management. Some of the biggest challenges businesses face when combining AI-powered predictive analytics with marketing are:

• You make expensive assumptions based on bad data, which can burn through your marketing budget and make you miss opportunities.
• You send the wrong messages to different segments of your audience, and they lose interest in your brand or feel betrayed.
• Lead scoring goes awry, and you don't give the right customers the right level of attention.
• Your pricing strategies might be based on incomplete data, missing the mark.

Ultimately, there are two key challenges here: insufficiently clean and robust data powering your AI's decision-making and insufficient monitoring to catch problems early on.

The Opportunity: More—And More Personalized—Content at Scale

One of the biggest uses of generative AI is generating: code, videos, blogs, and even email marketing campaign content. The manual labor of researching, writing, animating, and editing good content in any medium has been a big bottleneck for many small businesses.

AI offers companies the ability to produce more content aimed at increasingly narrow segments of the audience. By using this content to post regularly, keep contact with audiences, and always have something of value to entertain shoppers with, your brand can quickly cultivate a stronger following.

The Challenges

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. While companies can use AI throughout their content marketing strategy—and even for future web design or web development projects—it's not ready to do so alone. Here are some of the challenges any business will need to stay on top of:

• Bad content: Stiff, unnatural, and boring writing will hurt your traffic; if it's not compelling, it won't work. The downstream effects also worsen your website's domain authority.
• Incorrect content: Generative AI focuses on patterns and best guesses, not actual knowledge. So if you have a technical or niche business, your educational content will need a careful proofreading workflow.
• Staying on message: AI doesn't know your brand or your customers like you do. You, or a consultant from a digital marketing agency, will need to create detailed instructions and train the AI.

The Opportunity: Personalized Product or Content Recommendations

Personalization is nearly as important to shoppers as immediacy. Even without today's advanced AI, websites and online marketplaces were starting to make personalized suggestions for shoppers based on their purchase history, the pages they visited, the time of the year, and dozens of other factors. AI can supercharge these efforts to both pinpoint the exact product a shopper wants and present it in the most appealing way.

You can use these same AI-powered tools to recommend another video or blog post to your viewers, get tailored suggestions for the next topics of your email marketing campaigns, and A/B test the popularity of short-release products or menu items.

The Challenges

This AI use case has many of the same challenges as the other marketing opportunities on this list: you need the right data—and lots of it—to get good output. You also need a pro at the helm to make sure the AI is learning and growing properly.

Meet the Challenges Ahead With Decographic By Your Side

At Decographic, we give businesses the support they need to experiment successfully with those same opportunities and make them a successful part of your business operations.

Our online marketing services include SEO optimization, content marketing strategy sessions, web development, and more—and now we help incorporate AI-powered bots, work tools, data systems, and content creators into the mix. 

Reach out today to see where
you can start making AI do work for you.