How startups can formulate data-driven marketing strategies using AI

You have successfully launched your startup. Great. But don’t make the mistake of thinking there is nothing left for you to do. There are many things still needed to run and grow your startup.

Regardless of how good your product is, you have to create an audience and awareness about it. This is where the role of digital marketing comes into play. And Artificial Intelligence (AI) is creating new possibilities in the digital marketing space.

In today’s competitive business landscape, you cannot underestimate the power of AI in shaping your marketing strategy to stay ahead of your competitors.

What is a Data-Driven Digital Marketing Strategy?

Adopt a practical approach while formulating your digital marketing strategy. Take into account the realistic factors, and refrain from developing your strategy solely on assumptions. If you base your strategy on assumptions about your product or audience, it can lead to a faulty strategy that will entail no result.

So, adopt a data-driven approach. Gather data as much as possible and derive insights from the data. Subsequently, make decisions based on the quantitative insights.

Any formulation of digital marketing strategy involves four steps, which are:

Market Research

Carry out thorough market research, examining your target customers, competitors, and preferences of your target audience. Also, study your competitors carefully. Find out the consumers they target, marketing strategies they implement, and messages that go well with consumers.

Optimize Buyer Journey

You cannot expect your target customers to buy your product as soon as they see it. No consumer will instantly buy your product, regardless of the best marketing strategy you put into action. 

By and large, buyers go through the following phases in their buying journey:

  1. They know about your products.
  2. They understand its benefits.
  3. They figure out what problems it could solve and compare alternative products.
  4. They decide whether to buy it or not.

During your digital marketing formulation, find out ways to optimize the buyer journey.

Choose the Right Digital Marketing Channels

Select the digital marketing channels carefully to implement. You can include email, content, SEO, and social media marketing.

Set Your Strategy in Motion

Finally, set your digital marketing strategy in motion after having a try-out phase. Subsequently, track its performance and make the necessary adjustments.

Role of AI

AI has taken digital marketing to the next level. With substantial data-driven capability, AI can quickly gather and process vast amounts of data. It helps to derive deep insights into complex data.

What is more, is that AI can automate processes. There is no need for your marketing team to research content as smart algorithms can accomplish the task faster, saving time.

You have now come to know that AI has unleashed a revolutionary trend in the digital marketing space. Here is a comprehensive guide on leveraging the power of AI in creating a robust digital marketing strategy:

Know Your Customers

The first step in crafting an impactful digital marketing strategy is to know who can be your customers and their preferences. With smart algorithms, AI can recognize patterns in the market research data that can elicit macro-scales patterns to provide actionable insights.

Additionally, you can run AI-based algorithms to extract massive amounts of customer-centric data from social media or discussion forums. The algorithms can crawl through numerous posts, reviews, and articles to draw out the hidden sentiments.

With such sentiment analysis, you can identify the major questions, trends, and gaps corresponding to your product or service. Moreover, you can also get the demographic details of your target audience.

Say you are running a survey to elicit an in-depth understanding of your target customers’ tastes and preferences, then AI can help you attain your objective better. With the voice recognition capability, AI can even transcribe and analyze oral discussions.

Competitor Research

You cannot formulate any digital marketing strategy without your competitors’ adequate knowledge. AI-based tools can give you unique advantages in your competitor research. With AI tools, you can track competitors on social media, know the posting frequencies, types of posts, and identify high-performing content. In this way, you can figure out the strategies your competitors are implementing.

Furthermore, you can also get deep insights into the demographics of your competitors’ followers and their interactions with brands, shares, and likes.

After you launch your website, you have to monitor the page traffic and bounce rates. It will help if you study your competitors’ websites to determine what you should do to enhance traffic to your website and lower bounce rates. AI-based tools can help you reverse-engineer your competitors’ website analytics.

Moreover, AI-based tools can extract your competitors’ link profiles to enable you to know which page links your competitors put on their websites. As such, you can draw up a page linking strategy for your website to stay competitive.

You need to have links to your website on other web pages, and it is a critical factor for high rankings in search engines, which see links as proof of trustworthiness and authority.

Buyer Journey Optimization

You can use AI-based tools to get a good idea about your customers’ buying journey and improve their experience.

Today, AI has become the main factor behind excellent user experience (UX). And with Machine Learning algorithms, AI tools can give your target customers a personalized experience. The tools can keep a tab on your target customers from the first time they come in touch with your brand to eventually purchase your product.

You will get to know at which stages of the buyer journey your customers are and what features they are looking for in your products. Besides, you will also get to know the problems they are trying to solve.

With the valuable insights, you can curate your website’s content, adjust paid advertisements or send personalized messages.

You can also use AI for personalization, which is crucial for attracting consumers to your brand. Statistics show that there is a probability that 91 percent of consumers are likely to purchase products of companies that send personalized content, conforming to their interests.

AI tools also can improve your customer service to keep your customers happy. It is also an essential part of the buyer journey, especially during comparing and deciding whether to buy the product. With good customer service, you can get customers quickly.

Chatbots are AI-based tools that can answer website visitors’ questions about products and services. It can free your employees from customer handling to essential tasks.

Content Marketing

It is often said that in digital marketing, content is the king. Creating the right content is crucial to its success in any digital marketing strategy.

When it comes to SEO, search engines favor websites with high-quality content. With AI implementation, you can create high-quality content that will drive more traffic to your website.

AI tools mainly consider your target audience’s interests and your competitor’s performance to generate content that resonates with potential customers.

AI tools also can relieve you of researching to write content. The tools scan through all content on the given topic and provide you with valuable insights to structure your content. Moreover, the tools can also improve your content’s quality by polishing the grammar and helping you with the right vocabulary.

Social Media

AI-based tools improve your social media performance by analyzing your past social media performance and suggesting the right content to post. You also get cross-platform social media insights through the tools.

Conclusion

Digital marketing and AI nowadays go hand in hand. With AI, you can craft a more impactful strategy to promote your products better online and stay ahead in the grueling competition.

Peter Davidson works as a senior business associate helping brands and start ups to make efficient business decisions and plan proper business strategies. He is a big gadget freak who loves to share his views on latest technologies and applications.