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.

Although virtual meetings don’t hold the same resonance and contact as in person meetings, we were no longer bound by the constraints of location and timing; we could chat with someone across the globe, pop in to webinars on a myriad of topics, and connect with people we may not have ever ran into. At NetElixir, we used the new virtual medium to bring together retail and academic thought-leaders in a greater capacity than ever in our 16 years. We got to hear from marketing legends Jerry Wind and George Day, business innovators Anindya Ghose and Sheena Iyengar, global strategists Matt Guffey and Bob Dillon, and retail executives Al Bessin, Carlo Savino, Parag Shah, and Ajit Sivadasan.

As Steve Jobs said, you can only connect the dots looking backward. So, NetElixir has compiled our top twelve ‘dots’ of inspiration from our speakers throughout the year to bring you the Gift of Knowledge in our new initiative 12 Days of Empathy. Insights. Innovation. These gifts are in the form of short, digestible video clips that will be delivered straight to your inbox starting on December 25th. 

As we consider what the future will bring in terms of digital marketing and eCommerce, we need to reflect on what we have learned and endured throughout 2020. 

Some tenets that will most likely carry into the new year and beyond:

• Nimbleness and agility is crucial in order to seize opportunities as they arise in order to meet customers where they are. Continual innovation and experimentation is key to maintaining this agility and trying something new. 
• Data is the backbone of decision making. Having the latest real-time data will help guide your brand so you won’t rely on assumptions. Gather as much customer intelligence as you can and learn about industry trends and benchmarks in order to stay ahead.
• The new online shopping experience is mobile first, immersive, and responsive. The future is digital.

Keeping up with the digital future requires empathy, insights, and innovation. Inspiration comes in many forms – or in many gifts. One idea can change the future.

The post The Gift of Knowledge appeared first on NetElixir.

Three Benefits Of Using PWAs vs. Native Apps

There are many advantages of using PWAs over native apps including:

• Ease of Development: Unlike native apps, PWAs are built on a single codebase (Javascript, HTML) that is completely web-based. This means there is only one version to write code for and resolve bugs on, as opposed to developing and solving for both mobile and desktop. You can also save time and money from less time coding and not having to pay app store hosting fees.
• Better User Experience: PWAs run smoothly and are extremely fast. It’s also simple to launch them with the click of a link and re-engage users with push notifications. Fast page loading times are a major factor in keeping visitors on the site. According to NetElixir tests, lightweight PWA pages load 1 to 2 seconds faster than non-PWA pages, while heavy PWA pages load 2-3 seconds faster than heavy native apps. 
• SEO Friendly: Because it’s a website at the core, search engines can crawl progressive web apps. This makes it important to focus on optimization efforts. Since PWAs cannot be found in popular application stores, good search result rankings are crucial. There’s also progress in creating a place for these apps like Appscope, but it still is not as well-trafficked as Apple’s App Store and Google Play.

Quick Tips For Optimizing PWAs

If you decide to go with a PWA over a native app, there are some steps you can take to make sure it follows SEO best practices. Check out some tips below:

• Make Your Content Crawlable: Be sure to use real URLs and not hash fragments. Follow SEO URL best practices by including related keywords in the URL and keeping them short.
• Be Secure: Make visitors feel safe by securing your PWA. In fact, 80% of the web uses HTTPS today. If your site doesn’t support HTTPS yet, it’s a good idea to migrate.
• Measure Page Speed: Page speed is a direct ranking factor in Google. It also indirectly affects SEO by impacting bounce rates and dwell time. Use WebPageTest and Lighthouse to determine your First CPU Idle, originally called the Time to First Interactive, the key page speed metric Google measures.
• Provide a Sitemap: Add a sitemap to your site and make sure you register it in the Google Search Console. This is the first thing Google uses to know what pages are on your site.

PWAs continue to be a great web solution for those who want an app-like feel for less effort and cost. Plus, there’s the benefit of high engagement if done right. If you’re interested in the magic of highly optimized PWAs or having one created from scratch, please reach out to us to learn more!

The post Get Results With Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) appeared first on NetElixir.

Innovation is the key to driving success forward. How can we achieve something new if we don’t try a new solution, a new approach, or have a new perspective? Innovation creates opportunities for something new and without innovation, we become stagnant.

Sheena Iyengar, the keynote speaker from NetElixir’s Connecting the Dots virtual summit in August, spoke on the principles and methodology of innovation. Currently an S.T. Lee Professor of Business at Columbia University, Sheena Iyengar is a two-time TED mainstage speaker, 2011 Thinkers50 recipient, and a leading expert on choice and the art of choosing.  

To get us thinking about innovation, Iyengar began her presentation with an anecdote on the creation of the Statue of Liberty.

 Lady Liberty, designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, is an amalgamation of various elements Bartholdi came across in his travels. He was fascinated by the Nubian statues that guarded Egyptian tombs – giving Lady Liberty her size; Jules Joseph Lefebvre’s painting of La Verite – note his subject is the truth, not liberty, but the woman is in a pose similar to Lady Liberty’s; the resurfacing in France of Roman coins that feature the face of the goddess Libertas – these coins inspired Bartholdi to depict liberty as the subject; and Bartholdi used his own mother – his mother’s face became the statue’s face.

Professor Iyengar deconstructed the elements of the Statue of Liberty to track the train of innovating thought Bartholdi had in creating the statue; however, Lady Liberty is more than the sum of her parts. She is an evolution of inspiration and innovation, coming together in pieces to be the masterpiece we know today.

Think Bigger is about how we come up with some of the greatest ideas of all time. It is about exposing the principles of innovation, in that creators steal pieces from all over to combine them together to create something new – to create a whole that is far greater than the sum of its pieces. 

“Innovation is new combinations of old ideas.” -Joseph Schumpeter

The Process of Innovating to Think Bigger

Think Bigger is not randomly lightning on the next big idea. Think Bigger is about deliberately going beyond the box of one’s specific job or industry to see what else is out there and bringing those elements together in a new perspective and combination to tackle the problem at hand. Innovations are made up of past successful and useful pieces. 

The core technique to think bigger is through a process Professor Iyengar coined as choice mapping. Choice mapping consists of the following three steps:

1. Breaking down the problem
2. Prioritizing past success(es)
3. Searching in and out of domain

One of the most important aspects of innovating is spending the time to break down the problem. By spending the energy to simplify one big problem into multiple subproblems, one can more easily look for solutions to those subproblems and then work their way up to tackling the bigger problem. Phrase your problem into a positive question so that you are excited to solve it. 

While we can learn from failures, we learn more from successes. One can fail in multiple ways, but success often takes one form. Analyzing the route to that success can reveal multiple, useful pieces that can be applied to problems down the road. Innovation does rely on trial and error in order to gain expertise through repetition and continued exposure. 

Searching in and out of domain is key to innovation, as just drawing from past success in one field will lead to copycats and no real difference. Drawing on prior successes across industries and domains – and across successes big and small – will lead to creative inspiration for the best solution moving forward.

Choice mapping is not brainstorming. Brainstorming, as Professor Iyengar explains, is just throwing up ideas, hoping one will stick. Brainstorming is usually down in groups, as well, which leads more to group thought than productive ideas from individuals. Choice mapping is about deliberate thought, about consciously thinking about the problem, about analyzing pieces and materials to use for new choices, and about creating something useful. Our brains are already wired to connect things, so choice mapping is a more transparent and cautious way to deliberately combine different elements to create something inspirational and novel.

“Invention consists in avoiding the constructing of useless combinations and in constructing the useful combinations which are in infinite minority.” -Henri Poincaré

The post Innovation Workshop on Think Bigger appeared first on NetElixir.