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How AI is transforming conversational marketing, ET BrandEquity

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<p>Representative image (source: iStock)</p> <p>“/><span>Representative image (source: iStock)</span><br />In a rapidly evolving digital marketing landscape, artificial intelligence has emerged as a transformative force, enabling marketers to unlock new levels of efficiency, personalisation, and performance. While automation is a key aspect, AI goes beyond that, making significant contributions to the creative process and overall marketing strategy. AI-based tools have wide-ranging applications in content creation and marketing, covering organic keyword optimisation, targeted ad design, engaging blog posts, persuasive product descriptions, captivating videos, and compelling social media updates. However, the impact of AI doesn’t stop there. </p> <p>Advancements in AI are making a profound impact in the realm of conversational marketing. From chatbots and virtual assistants to natural language processing and sentiment analysis, AI is transforming brands’ ability to communicate and build meaningful relationships with their audience.<br /><strong><br />AI in conversational marketing</strong></p> <p>With customer centricity at its core, conversational marketing enables businesses to have real-time one-to-one conversations with customers. This form of marketing caters to the demand of modern consumers, offering them an instant, interactive, and personalised experience. </p> <p>And it becomes even more significant in a demographic as diverse as India where rapid digitisation has fueled widespread smartphone adoption, bringing connectivity to remote corners of the country. The popularity of digital channels like WhatsApp, combined with inexpensive data rates, has opened new avenues for businesses to engage with underserved target audiences.</p> <p>Enabling these conversations at scale, however, was impossible until the advent of AI. With advancements like generative AI, delivering intelligent, human-like responses across millions of conversations has become a reality for brands. It has ushered in a new era of personalised and efficient customer interactions, helping businesses forge deeper connections and drive meaningful outcomes.<br /><strong><br />Real-world use cases</strong></p> <p>AI’s transformative potential in marketing is not new. For instance, in 2016, a popular brand leveraged our platform for a creative campaign where migrants could use AI-based voice recognition to connect with their family and friends back home. This innovative campaign allowed them to connect to any phone number they desired and get ten minutes of free talk time—a luxury in those days. Since their dial pads were often worn out, voice recognition allowed them to speak out the phone number into the IVR instead of typing, achieving about 95% accuracy. </p> <p>Today, artificial intelligence makes it possible to run more exciting and innovative campaigns that appeal to a wider audience. Brands can go beyond broadcasting to leverage channels like WhatsApp, Instagram, SMS and phone calls to connect with their audience interactively. We are working with healthcare and financial firms to find relevant ways to provoke large-scale personalised conversations around mental health and financial literacy.</p> <p>These campaigns offer effective brand outreach and high engagement in an efficient and cost-effective manner. Soon we envision AI helping us curate personalised content for every single customer segment. </p> <p>Apart from this kind of outreach, analytics is another area where AI has made a remarkable impact. We find that one of the most popular use cases for our ChatGPT integration is simplified summaries of contact centre recordings that accelerate “time-to-insight”. </p> <p>This also breaks across traditional silos, empowering marketing teams with automated access to valuable customer service insights. By leveraging AI-based analytics, they can synthesise data from telephonic market surveys and sales campaigns to fuel effective brand campaigns. These insights enable them to customise customer marketing and reactivation campaigns in innovative and targeted ways, ultimately enhancing overall campaign performance.<br /><strong><br />Empowering the workforce</strong> </p> <p>Amidst the advancements in AI, the question of whether it will replace humans is a topic of hot debate across industries. I believe the answer is ‘no’. AI is creating new opportunities and opening avenues of unprecedented scale instead of replacing humans. For example, Shah Rukh Khan’s famous ad campaign with Cadbury, which allowed viewers to recreate Khan’s face and voice, would not have been possible without AI. No human was replaced, rather a new possibility emerged. </p> <p>AI possesses the ability to gather and analyse user data, resulting in valuable insights in significantly less time than a human would need to achieve the same outcome. This simplifies a marketer’s life by enabling them to focus on vision, strategy, and execution. However, with technological advancements, upskilling has also become an absolute necessity. To efficiently work with an AI model like ChatGPT, marketers need to invest time in understanding its capabilities, use appropriate prompts for content generation, develop virtual assistants, and gather market insights. These practices allow companies to seamlessly integrate AI into conversational marketing strategies and improve customer interactions. Interestingly, advertising & marketing have the highest percentage of workers incorporating AI into their day-to-day jobs.<br /><strong><br />Maximising ROI with AI</strong></p> <p>Today, marketers seek higher yields with tighter budgets. AI offers solutions to optimise campaigns and improve ROI in several ways. Social media platforms like Google and Bing have made advertising accessible to smaller companies. Reaching out to mass audiences in a hyper-personalised way is likely to become a reality. This will result in higher conversions, more effective brand penetration, better recall, and higher success ratios. </p> <p>Here are some examples of how AI can optimise campaigns to improve ROI: </p> <ul> <li>Conversational marketing optimisation: AI can study customer interactions to analyse and measure the response to specific marketing campaigns. Marketing teams can use these insights to measure the effectiveness of their messaging and fine-tune pricing strategies and ad placements, minimising wasteful expenses and improving campaign efficiency. </li> <li>Targeted messaging: Conversational marketing campaigns can offer targeted content and conversational styles for distinct customer segments after analysing customer demographics, language preferences, interests, and purchase history. Consequently, this leads to increased engagement and conversions.</li> <li>Improved decision-making: AI-based analytics help marketers make data-driven decisions based on historical data, market trends, and consumer behaviour. Marketers can use these insights to allocate budgets effectively, predict customer behaviour, and anticipate future outcomes to maximise ROI. </li> <li>Fraud detection and prevention: AI algorithms can help marketers identify suspicious patterns and detect fraudulent activities, such as ad fraud or unauthorised transactions, reducing financial losses and preserving business resources. <br /><strong><br /></strong></li> </ul> <p><strong>Tapping into the power of generative AI</strong></p> <p>The advent of generative AI has opened new horizons for marketers who can now harness its capabilities to create highly engaging and personalised content that resonates with their target audience. With its ability to learn from existing data, generative AI can help marketers uncover hidden patterns and deliver recommendations, helping them become more efficient.</p> <p>Back in 2014, when smartphones were yet to become popular & basic phones were widely prevalent, Osonetel partnered with a leading FMCG brand to run an on-demand entertainment channel on the mobile platform, targeting consumers in remote villages of northern India. The campaign became a massive success garnering 450 million ad impressions, effectively reaching and engaging hard-to-reach consumers through the integration of missed calls & using a radio format. </p> <p>If we launch this campaign today, we could leverage disruptive technology like generative AI to reach millions at scale. We can now segment users based on their listening behaviours, preferences, and other relevant attributes & curate personalised content to run campaigns with deeper penetration & bigger impact.<br /><strong><br />AI: the way forward for marketers</strong></p> <p>AI has become indispensable for marketers who strive for personalisation, enhanced customer experiences, and improved predictability of outcomes. While we are still in the early stages of the AI era, its true potential will be unlocked when businesses adopt a coordinated and strategy-focused approach, fostering an AI-friendly and data-first culture. Such an approach will propel marketing to new heights of efficiency and effectiveness.</p> <p>(The author is the senior vice president of sales at Ozonetel Communications)</p> <p><img decoding=

Whilst the dichotomy and divergence of opinions of what AI can do for us are louder than ever before, one thing we can all agree on is that AI is fascinating and will have a transformative impact on our lives. And whilst we all ponder about what the future holds for us, in my personal opinion, AI will only be what we want it to be – an assistant, a writer, a teacher, a leader or even a companion, says the author.

  • Published On Aug 8, 2023 at 07:32 AM IST

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