With all the chatter about ChatGPT and other chatbots that use large language model processing, it can seem like artificial intelligence involves brand-new tools – and that can make AI seem intimidating. But in reality, AI is already part of the marketer’s toolkit – and in many different ways. From collecting and analyzing data to inform your digital marketing strategy in real-time to optimizing SEO, machine learning already drives strategy for many e-commerce businesses. But instead of utilizing only standalone tools that focus on just one question or problem, a future-looking marketing plan integrates AI across functions.

How is AI Transforming E-Commerce?

Whether you’re selling in a marketplace or directly to consumers, your e-commerce business is impacted by AI – even if you’re not using it yourself.

• Internet sales are increasingly shifting from websites to Amazon, Walmart, and other marketplaces, and these marketplaces use complex algorithms to show customers’ products, make recommendations for other products they might want, and encourage them to convert to a sale.
• Google and other search engines also use algorithms to analyze metadata and content to determine your business’s ranking on their search engine result pages (SERPs) – and generative AIs like ChatGPT are already disrupting search.
• As new businesses enter the market, they can leverage data analysis and AI to determine what product categories are the most profitable and quickly bring to market new, innovative products, often at lower prices, to sell to an established customer base.
• And your competitors are analyzing available data to craft marketing campaigns that will target your high-value customers and convince them to buy from them instead.

How To Design an AI Strategy?

To design an effective AI marketing strategy, consider your high-value customers’ priorities and determine what AI tools can best help you meet their needs effectively and efficiently – and help you convert their browsing into sales. Customers want to easily find relevant products and information through search, and they expect ads and social media engagement to be personalized. But they also want to choose what data to share, when, and with whom – and laws and regulations are catching up with their expectations.

With all that in mind, here are some key ways to integrate AI into your digital marketing plan:

Collect and Analyze Data

With the pivot to first-party data that respects user privacy, it’s more important than ever to have a firm grasp on what data your business currently gathers, what data it could access, and what an analysis could teach you about your customers. AI can help you understand past data and predict future trends.

Optimize Ads

Reaching new customers is all about discoverability, and paid ads like Google’s Performance Max can help your business target potential customers who are similar to your existing high-value customers. Effective ad buys are ones that are informed by past data, and AI can help your business determine what traits your current customers possess, identify new customers who match the same profile, and tailor a marketing campaign to meet those new customers where they are in the digital ecosystem.

Automate Common Processes

Whether you’re deciding how much to spend on an ad buy, which platform to run that ad on, or what segment of your customer base to target, decision-making takes time. By using AI tools to automate tasks and processes, including analyses that influence decision-making and social media campaigns, your business can be sure that your digital strategy is rooted in data and can react quickly to changes in the market.

Create Versatile Content

ChatGPT and other LLMs are already making waves when it comes to content, and for good reason. Marketing campaigns require a vast number of assets, from website and email copy to blog posts and social captions, and marketplace product listings require relevant, up-to-date metadata that might vary somewhat from site to site. Using LLMs to develop first drafts of assets around common themes can save your business time and money – as long as you assess the quality and accuracy of your materials.

Personalize Customer Outreach

Use chatbots for customer service and to offer potential buyers information to encourage purchase. Exploit your data – and your AI content tools – to create targeted campaigns and determine which customer segments and personas should receive what messaging, on what platforms, and for what products. And craft an AI social media approach that gathers data to inform strategy, from monitoring posts to learning about competitors to spotting discontent or reputation issues for your own brand and handling them quickly.

How Can NetElixir Help?

NetElixir is a future-first digital marketing firm, which means we started leveraging AI long before it went mainstream. We’ve invested over five years in LXRInsights, our proprietary, AI-powered digital marketing platform, and we are ready to help you find your niche, gain valuable, actionable insights into customer behavior, and stay ahead of changing trends.

At NetElixir, we know that a culture of experimentation is the key to a competitive advantage. By learning about your high-value customers and constantly developing and refining new ways to connect with them, you assure your business’s future success. LXRInsights will revolutionize your customer acquisition and engagement strategy by identifying your current and potential high-value customers and empowering your business to target, engage, and win them through more efficient and effective campaigns. ChatGPT integrates with LXRInsights to enable scaled content optimization that will reach the right customers where they’re shopping.

Ready to learn more? LXRInsights can be implemented as a standalone product, an add-on with your existing in-house or external agency, or as part of NetElixir’s full-service e-commerce solutions packages. Get started with LXRInsights today!

Further Reading

• Google Marketing Live Recap: A Digital Marketer’s Perspective
• A Beginner’s Guide to Local SEO
• Social Media Marketing Tips

The post What is AI Marketing? appeared first on NetElixir.

Professor Wind founded the Wharton Think Tank. He has authored or co-authored and edited 30 books and has received four major marketing awards. Professor Wind sits on the advisory board of the Lauder Institute. He co-founded the Reichmann University, the first private non-profit university Israel, and he is working closely with Amelia, an enterprise conversational AI company. His most recent book, Transformation in Times of Crisis, has been a big hit, and it was terrific to have him with us to connect the key principles highlighted in the book with the evolution of and opportunities afforded by generative and conversational AI.

What is a Culture of Experimentation?

A culture of experimentation is an environment that encourages people to come up with new ideas and test them out, where failure is not only tolerated but celebrated. When team members take risks in this kind of culture, they are rewarded for these efforts – even when they fail. Professor Wind shared his “great belief” that the “only way to learn and grow and succeed is by continuously experimenting”. Without a culture of experimentation, companies are unable to grow and address new challenges.

Why is Experimentation Important in Innovation?

Experimentation isn’t just important when it comes to innovation – it’s the foundation on which innovation is built. By developing new ideas, testing them, failing, and starting over again, your company can rapidly explore potential new avenues and evaluate which will be most effective. History has shown us that countless inventions have come about through R&D efforts were people were seeking to solve entirely different problems, and your business can benefit in ways you can’t predict from experimentation. Professor Wind noted that a culture of experimentation offers companies a competitive advantage, and isn’t that what a successful digital strategy is all about?

How Can Companies Foster a Culture of Experimentation?

Creating a strong culture of any kind involves buy-in from leadership, consistent reinforcement, and ongoing commitment. There are several actions you can take to help your company foster a culture of experimentation.

• Set the tone. A forward-thinking CEO can set the tone for the entire company by encouraging people to explore new ideas, measure their results, and learn from their failures as much as from their successes.
• Engage your team. Companies innovate best when all employees are empowered to experiment and are made aware of the changing landscape. Companies can draw on the experience and inspiration of their entire team, heightening the likelihood of developing new and exciting solutions.
• Make experimentation easy. Give your team the tools and the time to try new things and test different ideas. If your employees have access to what they need to experiment and the go ahead to do it, they will be empowered to innovate.
• Build a framework. By setting standards for how experiments will be run and how they will be evaluated, and developing ethical guidelines for your employees to follow, you ensure that you’ll recognize success when it happens and be able to capitalize on it.
• Celebrate and reward all efforts. By showcasing all emerging proposals and experiments, not just the successful ones, companies demonstrate to their employees that failure is a part of every innovative endeavor.

What is the Role of AI in Experimentation and Innovation?

Generative AI is based on large language models that analyze and draw from enormous datasets. These algorithms, when fed specific directions or questions, can produce responses and recommendations instantly based on what they’ve learned from those datasets. While the information provided requires validation against other available data and the systems need to be regulated – AI is only as intelligent and accurate as the datasets it pulls from – Professor Wind hailed generative AI as a new and exciting opportunity for innovation and testing. He suggested that companies examine their current experiments and investigate what augmentation is possible through the incorporation of generative AI solutions.

“The number of ideas and the number of experiments you can design exponentially go up,” he said, “because of the help of generative AI and conversational AI. …[Y]ou are able to identify new opportunities for questions, or maybe the new problems, the new questions, or [the] new areas” for explosive growth, all because of generative AI.

How Can AI Support New Marketing Approaches?

Digital marketing is in a time of transition, and companies must shift their focus to be “customer-centered”, Professor Wind shared, with an orientation to stakeholders instead of only to shareholders. He advised that the “company’s responsibility is not only for maximizing shareholder value but also addressing the needs of customers, employees, [and] society in general.” AI can help companies to do both.

Generative and conversational AI offer us, Professor Wind said, the ability to “analyze data [with] that much greater detail and accuracy… [and] to customize [and] personalize the message.” Marketers should  pivot from a focus on customer segments to an approach tailored to the person being targeted. Professor Wind shared that the industry has begun to describe this as a “pilot look”, where the generative AI serves as the user’s co-pilot and “enriches the set of tools that every one of us have”, allowing us to be more efficient and create more effective messages. The future of digital marketing is personal, and AI can get your business that much closer to your customers. 

Want to Learn More? Contact NetElixir.

Are you an AI-first CEO? Download our checklist, Illuminating the Path to Marketing Excellence, for eight recommendations that will jumpstart your company’s AI adoption.

Our NetElixir AI and experimentation experts are ready to help your company explore new avenues for digital marketing, and we can help you develop tools and frameworks that will set your team on the right path to experimentation. 

Leverage our proprietary AI-powered digital marketing platform, LXRInsights. We meticulously engineered our AI-powered digital marketing platform for one reason: to help e-commerce brands significantly boost paid media revenue at the same spend by precisely targeting, engaging, and winning high-value customers. Start today.

Additional Resources:

• How To Optimize SEO For Future AI-Driven Search Engines
• A NetElixir and ChatGPT Conversation: How Generative AI Is Disrupting Search
• Search Marketing Redefined

The post Creating A Culture Of Experimentation appeared first on NetElixir.

Move To A Conversational Search Engine

The theme throughout GML is the idea that AI initiatives and new innovations will supercharge the search experience. Google’s announcements show that the company is moving more toward directly integrating ads into the Search Generative Experience. The Search Generative Experience is Google’s new frontier in the AI-powered future that takes search to a whole new level as it integrates search and shopping ads.

Search will become increasingly more conversational, as Google unveiled its new concept to allow users to drill further down into their search query. The engine will remember previous search queries to supply context for subsequent queries to deliver a refined and curated result specifically for that user. Your content strategy should include multimedia assets, as the search results will showcase images and videos more seamlessly alongside text for a comprehensive experience delivered right to the user. People’s behavior will change as they ask different questions or prompts to get their answer, which will in turn continue to refine and reshape the search experience.

While AI will generate responses, it has to pull that information from somewhere. A robust content strategy is still important to delivering essential information to prospective customers. 

Creating Campaigns Using Conversational AI

Within Google’s new conversational experience, marketers will be able to build more effective search ads more quickly.

Google’s new chat experience can help you create Google Ads campaigns, including keywords, headlines, descriptions, and assets. All you have to do is respond to a prompt for a preferred landing page and describe the product or service you want to advertise. From there, Google AI will help create the necessary assets.

What’s great about this feature is that it’s completely optional. You can still rely on your in-house or agency team to write all necessary content and assets.

Performance Max Continues to Be AI-Driven

When Google first launched Performance Max (PMax) campaigns, they were designed for the AI-powered future. PMax campaigns rely on machine learning to continually showcase the right combination of assets to the right audience at the right moment along their journey. PMax will now leverage even more AI-driven tools, as generative AI will help marketers generate creatives for image and video campaigns for an even greater automated experience.

The refined asset creation process will allow brands to more easily scale their creative potential to maximize revenue and audience reach from PMax campaigns.

Throughout the 2023 holiday season, NetElixir saw that Performance Max campaigns accounted for 48% of paid search orders during Cyber 5. PMax campaigns are set to be the standard campaign structure moving forward, so having more offerings and creative options will allow for better, more personalized ads.

AI-Generated Images

Google’s new Product Studio tool allows marketers to edit, enhance, and sharpen product photos for higher-quality promotional images. Marketers can even add dynamic backgrounds — let’s say a beach or with a pet playing in the back — or remove unappealing backgrounds so the product itself pops more. 

When using AI-generated image tools, it is important to continually test image creation prompts to ensure brands are getting and using ownable imagery; as NetElixir’s Director of Marketing Keith Levitt reminds us that you don’t want the same generic backgrounds as your competition.

“Pay attention to consistency: once you find background imagery you like and that is on brand, try to capture these prompts and continue to use the same prompts so you get consistent images moving forward,” Keith continues.

To capture these brand-specific images, experiment with prompts that include your specific brand colors and use language from your brand guidelines document to align with your brand tone, look, and feel.

New Campaign Types

Google announced two new campaign types, video views and demand generation, to drive more results on YouTube.

Video view campaigns, as the name suggests, will drive the most views for your videos by combining skippable in-stream ads, in-feed ads, and Shorts ads. Video content is an increasingly vital component of your overall content marketing strategy, so more options to drive results across video campaigns is important.

Demand gen campaigns will be available across YouTube Shorts, YouTube in-stream, YouTube in-feed, Discover, and GMail to drive more conversations and expand the brand’s reach. 

Key Takeaway: The Role Of AI Continues To Expand

A crucial takeaway from GML 2023 is that the role of AI will only continue to expand. AI innovations will help digital marketers scale and grow more effectively by reaching audiences with personalized and curated content.

However, AI is only as good as the foundation of data on which it’s built — better data means more optimized assets and insights. Continue to test and experiment with AI generation and prompts to train the algorithm as well as learn for yourself what works and what doesn’t.

Use Google’s AI Essentials checklist to supercharge your Google Ads strategy. Talk with a NetElixir expert today on how to redefine your AI-first strategy.

Further Reading

• How To Optimize SEO For Future AI-Driven Search Engines
• Benefits of Google Analytics 4
• The Future of Digital Marketing

The post Google Marketing Live Recap: A Digital Marketer’s Perspective appeared first on NetElixir.

As the world of search continues to evolve with Google’s AI-driven algorithms, Search Engine Optimization is faced with fresh challenges and opportunities. The key to success in SEO is no longer just about keywords, backlinks, and mastering algorithms; instead, it’s about understanding the trend towards more sophisticated, contextualized search experiences tailored to individual users. In order to stay ahead of the competition and reach wider audiences, it is essential for businesses to keep up with these emerging trends.

Adaptability is an essential tool for today’s SEO practitioners. Staying open to new concepts and embracing change is vital if one wishes to stay ahead in the AI-driven search landscape. With the right attitude and willingness to grow, individuals in this industry will not just survive, but thrive.

It’s necessary to start contemplating how to optimize your website with new trends and searcher expectations to remain at the top of SERP.

Three Key SEO Areas To Focus On

Use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to Optimize your Content

NLP is a form of Artificial Intelligence that helps machines comprehend human language. To make sure your content is well optimized, you can use NLP to incorporate keywords and phrases that are typically used by people in search queries.

Create High-Quality Content

To secure a high ranking in Google, content creation is essential. AI can detect the intent of queries and determine which websites are able to provide relevant and engaging answers that meet consumer needs. In order to ensure the best outcome for your SEO efforts, it’s important to create quality content that is pertinent to your target audience.

Stay Updated On the Latest Trends

AI is constantly evolving so it’s essential to keep up with the current developments in the field. Staying aware of the latest trends will help ensure that your website is using the most efficient and effective algorithms available. Keeping track of these changes is an important part of staying successful in this ever-changing tech landscape.

4 Tips To Elevate Your Website Experience Further

Google’s Bard and Bing’s ChatGPT-powered search are the future of AI-driven search engines. It is important to stay ahead of trends and new innovations in the landscape to optimize your SEO strategy.

Structure Your Content for The New Search Experience

Bard uses a variety of factors to determine the ranking of websites, including the structure of your content. This means that you need to structure your content in a way that makes it easy for search engines to understand. Use headings and subheadings, and also include images and videos with alt text to give search engines as much context to work with as possible.

Create Multimedia Content

Multimedia content like images, videos, and infographics can be of huge help in improving your website’s ranking on Google. This is because Google’s algorithms are competent enough to recognize and understand such content, which can significantly boost your search result rankings. Users connect with different materials when conducting their search so having a wide variety can help you maximize your reach.

Improve the User Experience on Your Website

You can improve the user experience on your website in a number of ways, including providing personalized recommendations, suggesting related content, and answering user questions. Consider conducting a survey of your current customers to get their feedback on what works or could be improved on your site and analyze where prospects are dropping off to improve those pages.

Understand User Intent

Grasping the intent behind search queries can be beneficial in creating relevant content that exceeds users’ expectations and results in a better website experience.

Utilizing these tricks and techniques, you can optimize your website for AI-optimized search engines, ensuring that you stay on top of the rankings. Doing so will help your website attract more attention and reach more people.

Further Reading

• Benefits of Google Analytics 4
• Benefits of International SEO
• Optimize Your SEO Strategy for Valentine’s Day

The post How To Optimize SEO For Future AI-Driven Search Engines appeared first on NetElixir.