Artificial Intelligence is one of the hottest topics in the marketing world right now, but it’s easy to get lost in the plethora of new features being introduced and tricky to understand where it can add value to your business.
AI combines consumer data and algorithms to tailor the user experience, including first-party data from your organisation and third-party data from social platforms and industry tools. Adoption of AI has more than doubled since 2017, with marketing and sales being one of the biggest growth areas. Spanning the full funnel, from acquisition to advocacy, the idea is to put the customer at the centre of communications and use AI to enhance their experience with the brand. In Meta’s recent Unlocking Growth 2023 webinar, the team highlighted AI as one of the biggest opportunities for social marketing in the year ahead, with a focus on three core areas:
- Performance Marketing
Embedding a test and learn approach to performance campaigns has always been key, and this is an area in which AI can be hugely beneficial
Although automation in performance is not a completely new concept, with campaign budget optimisation and dynamic ads being available for many years, these features have often felt limiting when it comes to creativity.
Nevertheless, the welcome news for brands is that they’re being levelled up.
Performance ads rely on machine learning to automatically find the most relevant audiences, ad placements and optimisations, helping to save you time in the process. In fact, 77% of advertisers testing these automated products said they saved several hours a week using them.
What you can test now
There are lots of automation options out there, but we’d recommend first testing the tried and true features from Meta to ease you in. All features are housed under the ‘Advantage suite’, but for now we’re going to focus on Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (a rebrand of Automated Shopping Ads) to improve bottom of funnel performance.
Using AI to eliminate the manual steps of ad creation and automate up to 150 creative combinations at once, you can quickly learn which ads are working whilst making the most of advertising budgets.
Meta is one of the most established and popular ad platforms in the social ecosystem, making it a great place to begin your testing alongside BAU ads for a low-risk introduction to performance marketing AI.
In a recent study comparing Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns to BAU conversion ads, the results really speak for themselves, achieving a 12% lower CPP and over 80% increase in ROAS.
Looking ahead
If you’re up for venturing outside of Meta, TikTok launched its AI ad solution in October. Smart Performance Campaigns use machine learning to “run performance campaigns at scale, while reducing the number of manual steps to drive results.” The platform claims that:
“In early tests for app promotion campaigns, over 80% of Smart Performance Campaigns outperformed manually set up campaigns”.
Currently, Smart Performance Campaigns are globally available for Android App Promotion campaigns – with more to come later this year for iOS and Website Campaigns – and brands should get in touch with a TikTok rep if this is something they’re interested in testing.
2. Customer Servicing
Artificial intelligence can also be incredibly useful when it comes to providing a quality customer service experience. Keeping up with messages, queries and complaints can demand more resource than is perhaps always available – particularly during busy periods.
In fact, with 79% of customers now expecting a response on social media within a day, it’s more important than ever to improve the efficiency of your customer service processes and, in turn, keep your customers satisfied. Enter: artificial intelligence.
Ways to use it
First and foremost, one of the simplest ways AI can be used in customer service is by using automated reply features on social platforms. By crafting a wellthought-out initial response to be sent automatically when the user begins the conversation, it prompts the user to provide more information until a customer service representative becomes available.
With 90% of customers rating an “immediate” response as important or very important, this initial automated message can make all the difference to your brand.
Taking a step up from automated responses, artificial intelligence can also be applied in the form of a chatbot. Chatbots use AI to identify the topic of the message and select the correct response from a pre-populated list.
This means that if the user asks a frequently asked question via DM on a social platform, the chatbot can reply almost instantly with the correct solution – often removing the need for a human customer service representative.
Consumer opinion
It’s evident that artificial intelligence such as automated responses and chatbots has proved key to improving efficiency within customer service, but how do they land with consumers? Exceptionally well, is the answer.
3. Creativity
Being creative is a key factor in finding success on social. However, with 51% of marketers struggling with consistently producing creative content for social platforms, it may be time to turn to innovation through other means, such as Meta’s AI creative tool or AI & AR filters on Instagram Stories, TikToks and beyond.
As we’ve seen recently, AI-generated art has taken the digital world by storm. Now, Meta has taken it one step further with AI-generated video content using their new tool, Make-A-Video. They explained:
[Make-A-Video] uses images with descriptions to learn what the world looks like and how it is often described. It also uses unlabelled videos to learn how the world moves. With this data, [it] lets you bring your imagination to life by generating whimsical, one-of-a-kind videos with just a few words or lines of text.
Make-A-Video follows Meta’s announcement earlier this year of Make-A-Scene, a multimodal generative AI method that gives people more control over the AI generated content they create. This looks to be the very start of a growing trend…
AI & AR filters, on the other hand, have been around slightly longer. Brands are beginning to find more and more creative uses for artificial intelligence across Stories, TikToks and other formats – some of which can directly result in higher conversation rates.
For example, some big names in the beauty industry are allowing consumers to try on their products before they purchase through filters. Artificial intelligence is the clever technology that tracks features, before AR comes into play to make the new hair colour, lip product or pair of sunglasses appear digitally on the user. What a game-changer!
AI at eight&four
AI technology is powerful, useful and relevant across marketing disciplines and business sectors.
At eight&four we’re using the technology to optimise performance, improve customer satisfaction and drive creativity across our portfolio. Here are just two examples of recent applications for our client Sandals Hotels and Resorts (chatbot and AR filter).
Why work with us?
Through our blend of social specialists and in-house creatives, we can help your brand tap into a whole new world of technology - leveraging methods such as test and learn alongside performance campaigns and community management to help enhance your marketing approach.
Drop us a line at hello@eightandfour.com to discuss how we can help you achieve your objectives.
