Guide to Optimising Digital Marketing with Artificial Intelligence

Guide to Optimising Digital Marketing with Artificial Intelligence

“AI has the potential to define its own rules, determine new paths, and unlock unlimited potential to advance the (marketing) industry.”

– Paul Roetzer, Author of Marketing Artificial Intelligence: AI, Marketing, and the Future of Business

The worldwide Artificial Intelligence (AI) market is consistently growing – almost doubling from $93.27 billion in 2020 to $184.04 in 2024. It’s also expected to continue growing, with one source predicting it will surpass $826 billion in the next six years. 

Furthermore, by 2030, AI will potentially contribute a staggering $15.7 trillion to the global economy, according to PwC’s well-regarded Global Artificial Intelligence Study: Exploiting the AI Revolution. 

All these facts show that AI is one of the most revolutionary technologies of the modern era. 

AI has reshaped many aspects of the contemporary world in just a few years, including how companies operate, design their business models, deliver their offerings, connect with their customers, and amplify their impact in their industries and communities. 

More and more business leaders are now aware of AI’s transformative power, which explains why a recent McKinsey survey found that the percentage of surveyed organisations regularly using AI has nearly doubled from 2023 to 2024. 

The McKinsey study also found that the average organisation uses AI most often in marketing and sales, where the adoption of the technology has more than doubled between 2023 and 2024. 

It’s fair to say that AI has revolutionised how businesses market their offerings and communicate with their audiences, particularly in the digital sphere.

This article highlights four key ways AI has transformed digital marketing and created new opportunities for organisations optimising digital marketing success.

AI in Marketing: A Match Made in Heaven

Today, AI tools help digital marketers accelerate value creation in numerous key areas. From helping them to create creative content to effortlessly implementing tailored paid search advertising campaigns, AI tools are helping to infuse a new vitality in optimising digital marketing programs.

AI-powered marketing technologies empower marketers to cut through the noise and transform raw information into valuable, actionable intelligence. 

With this intelligence available at their fingertips, they can improve audience targeting, create detailed customer profiles, and implement personalised marketing messages tailored to individual customers’ preferences or behaviours at any scale.

The modern digital marketer can also confidently rely on AI to optimise social media marketing, inform and enhance search engine optimisation (SEO), forecast the results of marketing campaigns, and leverage data to improve future campaigns. 

Further, with AI in the marketing toolset, digital marketers can intelligently automate many repetitive marketing tasks to save time and increase marketing ROI, including budget allocations, email personalisation, lead qualification, and testing creatives and content.

With such a wide range of marketing use cases supported by AI, it’s not surprising that the technology is expected to increase the productivity of the marketing function by 5-15% of total marketing spending. 

Now, let’s explore four essential use cases for optimising digital marketing where AI can generate immense value for your business.

#1. AI Simplifies Ad Creation for PPC Advertising

“AI-powered technology enables advertisers to reach more people in the right moments for much less than it would have cost decades ago to buy a billboard or create a television commercial.”

– Paul Roetzer, Author of Marketing Artificial Intelligence: AI, Marketing, and the Future of Business

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising – also known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – has been around for decades. The PPC advertising model predates several years of Google, the undisputed PPC behemoth. 

Since the model’s inception in 1996, its fundamental idea has remained the same: users click on an online ad on a search engine results page (SERP) on Google, and the advertiser pays Google a fee each time someone clicks on the ad.

Today, PPC advertising is viral among digital marketers, for it brings a horde of benefits – measurable and immediate results, local targeting, cost-effectiveness, driving qualified traffic, and remarketing, to name a few. 

To garner these benefits, curating a compelling ad is at the heart of every PPC campaign; if your ads cannot invite clicks in the first place, all other cogs in your PPC machinery will simply fall flat.

A PPC ad comprises three fundamental components- Headline, Display URL, and Description. An intimate knowledge of how these components work in unison is also an absolute must to give the ad its eventual appeal and to make it click-worthy. 

Running a successful PPC ad campaign is no walk in the park. To realise the gains listed above, a marketer must be meticulous with implementation, monitoring, and optimisation. They need to put in a lot of effort to develop an effective campaign, meaning they need to:

• Choose the right relevant, high-converting keywords
• Arrange these keywords into the correct groups
• Identify the right audience to target
• Create fresh and creative ad creatives and copy
• Create attractive landing pages with compelling visuals and copy
• Optimise every landing page for maximum conversions
• Analyse performance data to improve targeting and minimise ad spend wastage

Marketers should also be aware of the various best practices that facilitate the creation of an impactful digital ad:

• Understanding your audience’s preferences and pain points will help you accurately predict their search queries. That, in turn, will allow you to lock in on the right keywords for your ad copy. 
• Make your ad copy about your customers. Instead of talking at your consumers, initiate a two-way dialogue with them – this will do a whole world of good to your conversion rates. Talking about your offerings’ merits is undoubtedly a part of marketing. Still, you can always frame them so that they revolve around the specific requirements of your target audience rather than existing in and of themselves.
• Lay uncompromising emphasis on sounding original. What you are trying to sell, a dozen others are, too. So, how do you distinguish yourself? The answer is to write ad copies that genuinely reflect your brand identity and objectives and never try too hard to “sell” to the crowd. 
• Check that your ad aligns with the content on your landing page. Whatever you have promised on your ad must also reflect on your landing page. A PPC “clickbait” ad will fetch you nothing except your audience’s wrath. 

All of the above can add to much confusion and stress. It can be challenging to overcome the various challenges involved in PPC advertising and to consistently and flawlessly abide by the above best practices. 

This is why bringing in reinforcements is an absolute necessity for PPC advertising. And what better reinforcement can you ask for than AI?

If you are overwhelmed with all the nitty-gritty involved in PPC ad creation, many AI tools can effectively rescue you and help you maximise PPC ROI. 

By feeding a detailed brief to tools like Copy.ai or ChatGPT, you can obtain a very close approximation of the PPC ad you have in mind. Adding these and other AI-powered tools to your PPC arsenal saves precious time by relegating all the grunt work to them. 

More importantly, you can invest more of your creativity and skills into the other aspects of PPC, where AI just cannot replace you.

Learn more about how AI tools can supercharge your PPC campaigns.

#2. AI Minimises Bid Management Challenges in Digital Advertising

“People spend money when and where they feel good.”

– Walt Disney, Founder of The Walt Disney Company

Suppose your organisation invests time and dollars in PPC or, indeed, in any kind of digital advertising. In that case, you already know that bid management is one of its most essential aspects. 

You also know that you need to get bids right for most of your digital ad campaigns because if you don’t, you may see an adverse impact on your ad spend and, ultimately, optimising digital marketing ROI.

So, what does the bid management process involve? First and most importantly, bidding on specific keywords to help your business reach its intended audience is crucial to achieving its desired marketing/advertising ROI. Some other important aspects of the process include:

• Optimising advertising campaigns and ad placements on various online platforms; Google Ads is one example
• Adjusting bids for your selected keywords, ad groups, and campaigns to maximise eyeballs and clicks on your ads
• Aligning keywords with campaign budgets to maximise your returns and achieve your advertising goals
•  Identifying and replacing underperforming elements in your ads to maximise ad visibility and, again, clicks
• Assessing ad performance and making fast adjustments to achieve the lowest possible cost-per-click (CPC) and the highest possible conversions

Regarding PPC and bid management, the stakes are very high. For this reason, one must never rely on instinct and guesswork alone to decide keywords, bidding strategies, budgets, landing pages, or campaign planning.

Another thing that you should not rely on is manual bidding methods. 

Your experience probably tells you that these old-fashioned and, dare we say, outdated approaches eat up too much time and too many resources. In today’s competitive digital landscape, you cannot afford to waste these valuable assets. 

Fortunately, you don’t have to! Manual bid management also makes it hard to assess ad performance in real-time and optimise bid amounts for various keywords—the result is sub-optimal bid amounts and, ultimately, poor ad performance and ROI. 

Again, you don’t have to live with these challenges.

The good news is that you can avoid them – with AI. Sophisticated AI tools like WordStream and Kenshoo are explicitly programmed to handle bid management. 

Both include potent capabilities that can optimise your bid management process in multiple ways.

For one, they consider many factors, including your budget, competition, audience behaviours, and market fluctuations, to implement optimisation measures and make real-time bid adjustments. 

They also analyse historical data to identify significant patterns and predict the performance of various bidding strategies. This information will help you make more solid decisions based on data-oriented insights rather than assumptions or guesswork and thus increase the likelihood of maximum ad conversions and ROI.

And there’s another benefit offered by these tools- they can be easily connected to your PPC account. Doing that makes it easy to quickly access, manage, and optimise any bid or campaign. Doing so helps to garner more attention and conversions with your digital ads.

#3. AI Makes Keyword Research and Campaign Execution for PPC and SEO Faster

“84% of bloggers and SEO specialists reported that AI influenced their SEO strategy in 2023.”

– Hubspot

Keywords are the heart and soul of both SEM and SEO.

When it comes to PPC, to ensure that the right people see your ads at the right time, you have to use the right keywords. 

Firstly, identify these keywords; this way, you can design compelling and relevant ads and landing pages that deliver more clicks and ultimately lead to more conversions for your business. Keywords are equally important for SEO. 

You can satisfy your target users' search intent by selecting and targeting the right keywords and using them meaningfully in your content. 

In doing so, you can grab more eyeballs, resulting in higher traffic to your website and potentially more profits for your business. In short, getting keywords right is critical if you want your ads and content to reach their desired audience.

And SEO and SEM success starts with keyword research. This is the process of discovering and analysing the search terms that your audience enters into search engines to resolve a specific challenge or get the answer to one particular question.

That said, every PPC or SEO specialist knows keyword research for search engines and ad platforms is easier said than done! When researching keywords, almost all of them have asked themselves challenging questions like:

• How do we find keywords that match what our audience is searching for and resonate with their queries or problems?
• There are many different options and possibilities. Which keywords should we choose and bid on for our PPC campaigns?
• What are the best-fitting keywords for the content we want to publish and optimise for SERPs? How do we identify that?
• Choosing long-tail keywords brings in less traffic but is less competitive, and general keywords may bring in more traffic but are highly competitive. How to choose?
• Informational or navigational keywords? Or are commercial keywords the way to go? Should we focus on transactional keywords for now? Where exactly to invest?

These are some common keyword research challenges. If they sound familiar, AI can be the lifesaver you have been waiting for! 

Many AI tools will help you simplify almost the entire research process so you can easily understand your audience's search intent, identify and target relevant keywords, and even generate high-quality content ideas based on these targets. 

The most intelligent tools will even aid you in analysing your competitors’ keywords and refining your targeting strategies accordingly.

Check out Ryan Robinson’s keyword tool to speed up keyword research for your SEO campaign. This free AI-powered tool will help you identify low-competition keywords, find monthly search volume, assess the ranking difficulty of different results, and ultimately rank faster in SERPs.

Then there are tools like SEMrush and Google Ads Keyword Planner that can analyse extremely high volumes of data near-instantaneously and generate search terms and keywords that are just the right fit for your PPC ad campaigns or SEO strategies. 

Some tools can also analyse and understand user context and deliver customised ad content accordingly. In doing so, they can amp up the relevancy of each ad and increase its probability of clicks and conversions.

AI tools can even support you if you want to run your ads on multiple platforms (but have felt too overwhelmed until now!). 

Leverage these competent resources to design and publish perfectly optimised ads to match each platform's unique formats or requirements. 

Additionally, AI-based tools leverage data to assess your competitors’ keywords and strategies and generate actionable and tailored insights for your specific requirements. 

With these insights, you get an exact idea of what you are up against and where there’s scope to get ahead of the curve.

Once you have your keywords and have set up your SEO or PPC campaign, you can use AI to ease campaign execution. 

AI tools can help set up your campaigns, take care of ad placements, make adjustments in real-time, and automate the processes of setting up ad groups, reducing your workload immensely and expediting execution and results. 

Discover more about the value of AI for PPC and SEO keyword research.

#4. AI makes Content Creation easy, be it SEO, Email Marketing, or Social Media Marketing

“Content is King.”

– Bill Gates, Founder and Former CEO of Microsoft

In 1996, Bill Gates wrote an essay titled “Content is King”, in which he predicted how the importance of content will rise in the coming years. This was when the Internet was still nascent, and the digital age was yet to dawn. 

And today, these words have become something of a cliché. However, they remain relevant in the crowded, noisy Internet universe. 

Quality content that “speaks” to your target audience will attract them to your business and increase conversions. 

Well-researched, unique, on-brand content will elevate your brand’s recognition and value, increase inbound lead sourcing, and establish you as a trustworthy business, whether it’s on your blog, email newsletters, podcasts, videos, social media pages, or anywhere else.

But…how can you:

• Create high-quality content consistently, at scale, and without breaking the bank.
• Build content that ranks highly for relevant searches in SERPs.
• Deliver content that resonates well with each buyer persona on your channels.
• Analyse and assess content performance.
• Easily make tweaks so it meets your expectations regarding search traffic, views, social shares, click-through rate (CTR), impressions, and other metrics.

Modern digital marketers need to consider all these complexities regarding content creation. Fortunately, you can minimise and, in many cases, even eliminate these complexities. How? With AI, of course! 

You can now leverage AI tools to accelerate content analysis and consumer research and access valuable insights to simplify the content creation and publishing process. 

Many advanced tools use natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation (NLG) technologies. These help you easily create relevant and engaging content for various channels – blogs, videos, newsletters, emails, landing pages, PPC ads, and more. 

What's more, you can personalise each piece of content to ensure that it is tailored to the interests, preferences, and behaviours of individual members of your audience. This level of personalisation increases your content's relevance, ultimately boosting your brand’s digital visibility and profitability.

Let’s talk about social media now. AI can help you schedule your social media posts and ads. While you can streamline your content research process by generating content ideas, you can automatically gather and organise data and quickly find the key points to include in your content. 

Furthermore, AI tools can generate first drafts of ads, blog posts, product descriptions, and social media posts, speed up editing and proofreading, and even add attractive captions and subtitles to make your content more accessible and popular.

If you are pressed for time and need to curate first drafts quickly, try Writesonic or Copy.ai. These tools will help you create factually accurate content so you can effortlessly optimise your SEO, quickly publish attractive product descriptions, create high-conversion landing pages, and stay engaged with your community of social media followers.

Similarly, you can generate large numbers of meta descriptions at lightning speeds with ChatGPT, simplify landing page design with Relume, and Persado to deliver tailored content based on your audience’s preferences and needs, organise and deliver your social media content across multiple channels with Sprout Social, write SEO-optimised emails with Jasper, and create personalised web experiences based on real-time data with Optimizely.

Learn how these AI tools can help you create, personalise, and distribute high-quality content for your brand and audience.

Wrap-up

You must scale up and differentiate when optimising digital marketing efforts to gain a competitive edge in the overcrowded digital marketplace. And what’s the easiest and most cost-effective way to do that? AI. 

AI-based tools and platforms are a boon as they help you optimise your SEO and SEM strategies and create personalised content and engaging emails. What’s the best part for a marketer? You can streamline mundane, repetitive tasks and use the time and money saved to focus on other business-critical, revenue-generating endeavours.

The key is understanding what’s available and selecting the tools that best satisfy your needs. Do you wish to learn how digital marketing agencies can leverage AI to cut through the noise and get more bang for their marketing buck? Then check out our latest eBook!