With all the focus on AI in advertising recently, it can be easy to fall into the trap of using all the exciting new things without tying the tactics back to your marketing goals. The latest industry trends are only good for your brand if you can work them into your campaign strategy to meet your goals. Let’s get back to marketing basics to see if the new focus on AI could work for your brand’s success.
Drive Awareness
If your brand is relatively new or breaking into a new market, the first thing you need to do is let as many people know about the problem you solve for them. Driving awareness and educating potential customers on who you are and why they need you is a good first step. So how can AI help with this?
One thing AI or machine learning can do is crawl your website and provide you with multiple copy options very quickly to use in your advertising. This copy won’t be perfect and you will need to read every line to be sure the copy lines up with the message you are actually trying to convey but it does provide a good starting point and could give you some options you might not have thought of on your own.
If you are a brand with consumer packaged goods, both Google and Meta are going to begin rolling out options to help you beef up your graphics for multiple options on your ads. This strategy of having many ad combinations with graphics and copy is something that most advertising platforms have been pushing for a while so the algorithm has a lot to pull from when showing ads to your target audience.
Targeting
Targeting your audience is something that all ad platforms are constantly changing and updating. While this can seem infuriating for marketers who finally figure out the perfect mix only to have the platform update or the laws change on us, it does make sure we are always paying attention to who we are talking to.
At the time this blog is being written, we are leaning into machine learning for targeting. Reps from multiple platforms have been pushing us to go broad with our personas and let the algorithm optimize and learn to show the ads to the best customers for your campaign goal. This means the setup of your campaign is now extremely crucial and aligning that setup with your marketing strategy is more important than ever. Meta did tease in their recent address that they may be working on a way to include multiple goals per campaign which is currently something that hasn’t been an option but could be a big help to brands with smaller budgets who could combine advertising dollars into a single campaign.
Conversions
Finally, the most important marketing objective is the actual conversion. Whether your conversion is a lead in the form of an email or phone number or someone physically purchasing your product, AI is being put into place to optimize your dollar. The newest product to help with shopping conversions right now is the Meta Advantage+ Shopping ads. These ads lean heavily on AI to create and serve up to 150 ads optimized to garner purchases on your site. These Advantage+ shopping campaigns are built to require fewer inputs from creators and simplifies audience options while streamlining the management of campaigns.
This feature won’t be available to everyone until this fall but if it works as well as they are hyping it up to, it could be a game changer for online store fronts.
While I can’t say AI is the future, as most of these ad platforms have been using some form of machine learning for decades, it is now showing up at the forefront of digital marketing, at least for now. If you’re looking for the best way your brand can use these new AI tools in your advertising, we’d love to have a conversation with your team to help you figure it out!