How to Use Machine Learning to Improve Your Digital Marketing

Machine learning is on the verge of transforming the marketing sector. In many ways, it’s already started. According to Gartner, 30% of companies will use machine learning in one part of their sales process by 2020.

What’s more, these companies are using machine learning to get ahead of competitors by tackling some of marketing’s toughest challenges, such as personalization, instant customer support, and big data.

In other words, machine learning isn’t just for computer scientists. Marketers should sit up and take notice. Below, I’ve covered five ways you can use machine learning to supercharge your digital marketing efforts.

What Is Machine Learning?

Before we get into the marketing side of things, let’s take a second to establish what artificial intelligence and machine learning are.

Artificial intelligence is simply any form of intelligence demonstrated by a machine instead of the natural intelligence displayed in humans and animals. When most people think of artificial intelligence, they think specifically of computers that replicate some level of human intelligence, like a chess-playing computer I mentioned in the introduction.

Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence that enables systems to find new and better solutions automatically by learning from mistakes and experiences. The more data and experience a machine learning algorithm has access to, the better it becomes in the future.

Machine learning systems can largely be divided into two subsets: guided and unguided. Guided machine learning systems are supplied with data sets and solutions by humans in the first instance. They are taught which patterns to look for initially and will then get better at identifying those patterns going forward.

Unguided systems are given access to unsorted and disparate data sets and are left to decipher patterns independently without guidance from humans. Unguided systems will create an algorithm and then look for ways to improve it going forward.

Using Machine Learning to Improve Your Marketing

We know that marketing teams don’t want for lack of data. Marketers struggle with making sense of all the data they have at their fingertips and then putting that data to use. This analysis is where machine learning comes in.

The primary reason to add machine learning to your marketing stack is that it can make sense of vast amounts of data much faster and much more effectively than humans.

Machine learning can use data to identify patterns and make predictions almost instantly. Marketers can then use these insights to optimize a huge portion of their workflow, from running more tests and improving their website’s UX to personalizing the customer experience and automating consumer engagement.

The long and short of it is machine learning can be used to improve just about every part of your digital marketing efforts. Below we discuss five of the most important ways.

Analyze Data Sets

However you use machine learning in your marketing efforts, the process will probably begin by analyzing data sets.

For instance, machine learning can be used to analyze and find user activity patterns on your website. Rather than sifting through data in your Google Analytics profile yourself, a machine learning algorithm could do the job in seconds, predicting future user behavior and identifying patterns that you can use to optimize your site.

Sure, humans are perfectly capable of analyzing data themselves, but you can’t do it half as fast or accurately as AI-powered solutions.

Marketers can also use machine learning to gain a better understanding of their customer base.

Take customer segmentation, for instance. Dividing up your audience into different groups can make your marketing efforts much more effective, but it’s time-consuming to do so yourself. On the other hand, a machine learning algorithm could automatically segment your customer base based on actions and behavioral patterns that you couldn’t hope to identify.

Create and Optimize Content

You don’t need me to reiterate the importance of content in your digital marketing efforts. However, you may need clarification on how machine learning can improve what you write and publish and why using machine learning in your content marketing strategy is essential.

For starters, machine learning can help your articles rank higher in search engine results. It’s one thing to be a great writer; it’s another to write in a way that pleases Google, so it rewards you in the SERPs. You need to make sure you use all relevant keywords, discuss every relevant topic, and cover all of your bases in general.

That’s pretty hard to do without smart content creation tools like Frase.io, which uses machine learning to compare your content against Google’s top results and make sure you hit all of the relevant points.

Second, you can have machine learning algorithms write content for you. Phrasee is an AI-powered copywriting tool that uses machine learning to create email subject lines and push notifications that its algorithm believes will drive the highest ROI.

You can even use AI to help you curate content for your customers. Curata offers a machine learning content curation software that helps marketers find and publish the most relevant and engaging content for their audiences.

Increase Personalization

Personalization matters for consumers. Research by Accenture shows 91% of consumers prefer brands that remember who they are and provide relevant offers and recommendations as a result. What’s more, if they don’t get a personalized experience, over half of consumers are only too happy to switch to a competitor.

Here’s the good news: machine learning lets you deliver the most personalized customer experience possible. You can employ a machine learning algorithm that tracks user behavior on a granular level, learns what products they like, and creates a personalized homepage and recommendation list as a result.

Amazon, for instance, uses AI algorithms that take into account the purchase history of users, the items in their cart, and their viewing habits to offer the product recommendations that are most likely to convert.

The same algorithm could also generate personalized offers for every customer and email them to consumers when they are most likely to purchase.

Improve Marketing Automation

Better personalization is one way machine learning can transform how your brand engages customers, but it’s not the only way. AI and machine learning can also be used to better automate your marketing efforts and significantly improve customer engagement as a result.

Let’s say you automatically send an email to customers when they sign up for your newsletter or abandon their cart. While most brands will send a generic email, companies that adopt machine learning can tailor content and offers based on that consumer’s browsing history. If they looked at your brand’s range of dog toys before signing up for your newsletter, a relevant offer on chew toys would make them much more likely to re-engage with your brand.

For SaaS brands, AI-powered marketing automation tools can analyze much larger and disparate data sets to better segment leads. This allows sales reps to prioritize those leads that are much more likely to convert.

Marketing automation is incredibly powerful. According to Invesp, marketing automation leads to an over 14% increase in sales productivity and an over 12% reduction in marketing overhead.

It’s entirely possible to do this without machine learning, but AI makes your automation efforts much more personalized and much more powerful.

Utilize Chatbots

Chatbots are a powerful customer service tool. Eight out of ten consumers who have engaged with them report a positive experience. If you run an online business, they are all but essential.

With chatbots, you don’t have to have a human on-hand to respond to consumers. Instead, machine learning-powered chatbots can automatically answer consumer queries with a scarily-high rate of accuracy. That’s because your chatbot will learn from your website’s content and the conversations it has with consumers to constantly improve the answers it provides.

Because the chatbot is continuously learning and improving itself, it will deliver an even better customer experience with more conversations. You may want to have your chatbot pass an incredibly complicated query onto a human at first, but soon the bot will become so effective there’ll be no need for a human to interject. Eventually, you’ll have a smart enough chatbot to upsell the consumer, not just answer their questions.

Consumers probably won’t be able to tell they’re speaking to a robot, either. Some chatbots, like IntelliTicks, employ another branch of AI, Natural Language Processing (NLP), to have human-level conversations with customers.

What’s more, data gathered by AI-powered chatbots can be analyzed by another machine learning algorithm to generate insights that marketers can use to optimize their efforts going forward.

What is the Future of Machine Learning?

Things move fast in the world of machine learning. Expect advances in marketing AI to happen rapidly.

Improved unsupervised machine learning algorithms are in development right now, for instance. These algorithms don’t need input from humans at the start, making them much easier and faster for marketers to implement.

Personalization will become even more powerful, too. Machine learning algorithms will become better at discerning what consumers want for one, but the ways they can be integrated with online stores will improve, too. Soon, marketers will be able to customize every part of their sites for individual users, much like social media timelines are personalized for every user.

Finally, expect big advances in mobile machine learning. AI-powered digital assistants will become a more prominent part of our life, and marketers will have to develop strategies to contend with this. Mobile applications will also be able to integrate machine learning features in the same way websites can right now.

Don’t get overwhelmed, however. Before you start worrying about what the future holds, work your way through the suggestions I’ve made above first. You’ll then be ready for whatever occurs in the future.

Conclusion

It’s clear: machine learning can transform your digital marketing efforts.

Don’t rush into the world of machine learning, however. Adopting solutions without first understanding how the technology works and its role in your company will typically do more harm than good.

Machine learning is powerful, but it isn’t a silver bullet. Adopt one solution at a time, however, and you’ll be fine.

Continue your education by reading my articles on AI’s role in SEO and AI-powered digital assistants.

Which machine learning strategy are you going to implement first?

The post How to Use Machine Learning to Improve Your Digital Marketing appeared first on Neil Patel.

How Can iPaaS Help Your Digital Marketing?

If there’s one thing you need from your digital marketing toolbox, it’s efficiency. You need access to real-time data so you can quickly make the most effective decisions and convert those all-important leads into paying customers. You can start by deploying iPaaS, or “Integration Platform as a Service”. It’s a little tricky to understand at … Continue reading How Can iPaaS Help Your Digital Marketing?

How Can iPaaS Help Your Digital Marketing?

You can start by deploying iPaaS, or “Integration Platform as a Service”. It’s a little tricky to understand at first, but don’t worry. I’ll break it down for you. So, let’s go over how iPaaS works, starting with some fundamentals.

What Is iPaaS?

Let’s be clear on some terminology before we dive into what iPaaS is.

Chances are you’re already using various apps, or Software as a Service (SaaS), across your organization. Statistics show that small businesses use 40 apps on average, and larger businesses use many more.

SaaS examples include Monday, Trello, Salesforce, and Gmail. You usually need to switch between these SaaS applications to complete tasks, whether it’s assigning someone a project in Trello, or responding to a customer in Gmail.

The problem? It’s time-consuming and inefficient to constantly move between these different systems. Since over 82 percent of customers expect almost instant solutions to their problems, this is time you can’t afford to waste.

How does iPaaS help? It’s simple. iPaaS integrates your SaaS applications and cloud services. In other words, it brings all these different apps together so they’re accessible from one place.

With iPaaS, you can read an email from a prospective customer in Gmail, and immediately assign someone a follow-up task on Trello. You can track inbound and outbound marketing in real-time and quickly update a lead’s status on Salesforce.

From a marketing perspective, what’s most important is why iPaaS can work for you. Here’s what you need to know.

The Benefits of iPaaS

Whatever the size of your company, there are three key benefits of iPaaS:

Cost savings
Business efficiency
Security and compliance

Let’s go over these one at a time.

iPaaS Could Save You Money

If you’re looking to streamline your IT budget, iPaaS could be a great option for you. Here are three specific reasons why.

Flexibility of iPaaS

First, it’s flexible. It’s pretty easy to scale your services to suit your particular business needs at any given time without overstretching your IT budget.

For example, if you’re experiencing high seasonal demands, you can quickly scale up your iPaaS platform to handle the volume. You can ramp up marketing campaigns and manage high numbers of leads without sacrificing speed or efficiency.

How does this flexibility help you cut costs? Again, it’s simple. The more agile your company is, the quicker you can onboard new customers, and the fewer resources you waste in the meantime.

Autonomy of iPaaS

There’s no need to worry about scheduling software updates because iPaaS handles these updates for you. Automatic updates:

Helps minimize your maintenance costs
Enhances your system reliability

Put simply, automated updates indirectly reduce downtime. More than 17 percent of small businesses have lost customers through downtime, and 37 percent have lost revenue. The upshot? Automation helps protect your bottom line and your customer base.

Simplicity of iPaaS

Many businesses find the whole concept of rolling out an iPaaS platform daunting.

My advice? Don’t be. iPaaS solutions are user-friendly. They’re designed with the “novice” coder in mind, so you don’t need specialist IT skills to set up the integration.

Since there’s no need to hire an outside developer to help you deploy the service, you can save money in the short term.

All you’re doing is accessing a cloud-based service. There’s little technical installation required.
You can quickly install or delete app integrations without spending extra money.
You don’t need system permissions to make changes, either. It’s all designed with cost-effective efficiency in mind.

The best part? Since it’s easy to use, you’ll spend less money training employees on how to work the service.

Your Business Efficiency May Increase with iPaaS

Efficiency is a real selling point for these platforms. Here are the key reasons why.

First, did you know that 80 percent of customers expect consistent information when they speak with different members of your team? iPaaS makes this possible through:

Automatic data syncing across systems
On-the-go access to data
Centralized communications between departments
Streamlined campaigns
Improved access to real-time data for critical decision making

This means you’re improving your customers’ experience with your company and boosting operational efficiency, all at the same time.

This also makes it easier for you to see exactly what’s going on in your company at all times. Whether it’s tracking weekly targets or assessing customer behavior, you can access everything you need from one simple interface.

It usually takes far less time to deploy iPaaS than installing all your software tools separately.

iPaaS Can Help With Security and Compliance

Did you know that cyberattacks cost the average business $200,000? One of the best ways to avoid costly data breaches is by improving your cybersecurity. Here’s how iPaaS can help.

Automatic security updates keep your data and infrastructure safe.
It’s easier to protect data since it’s all stored in a central location.
iPaaS solutions generally include advanced security tools to find threats, like fraud detection and intruder alerts.
You can quickly cancel an employee’s user profile if they leave the business, meaning there’s less chance they’ll still have access to confidential data.
iPaaS security tools can offer the levels of protection you need to meet many compliance requirements across industries.

Essentially, iPaaS is great for cyber-safe functionality and connectivity because it makes it easier to perform day-to-day tasks, and it facilitates seamless communication across your company. Most of all, iPaaS helps you comply with various industry security standards.

Now that we’ve covered the benefits of iPaaS, you might think it’s the right option for your business. A key question remains: How do you pick the right iPaaS solution for your company?

Choosing Your Ideal iPaaS Solution

Choosing the right iPaaS integration comes down to these two things.

Understanding your company’s specific data needs. For example, some iPaaS tools are best suited to automating contact and lead management, while others work best for automating day-to-day workflows.
Finding a suitable iPaaS platform to meet these needs, at the right price point.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant is a good place to start your iPaaS provider research. But before you get started, here’s what you should do first.

Identify what you need from iPaaS, whether it’s customer analytics, employee management, enhanced security, or something else.
Set a realistic price point. How much can you afford to spend on iPaaS? Think carefully about your iPaaS budget, which we’ll cover later.

Once you’ve given those key issues some thought, it’s time to choose a suitable iPaaS integration for your specific marketing and commercial goals. Here’s my step-by-step guide.

Be Sure Your Favorite Apps Can Integrate With iPaaS

Let’s start with something simple: not all iPaaS platforms work with every app. With that in mind, the right solution for you should work with most (if not all) of your day-to-day apps.

First, just list all the apps you’re using right now, and decide which ones you need to integrate. This helps you narrow down your research so you’re only focusing on compatible tools.

To narrow your search even further, you need to think in the medium to long-term. Which apps do you plan on integrating as your business grows? What’s important for your marketing strategy?

Your iPaaS solution needs to work for you in the years to come, not just the short-term.

Decide What You Want to Do With Data in iPaaS

On its own, a piece of raw data doesn’t tell you much. Sure, you might have some customer analytics and a few employee reviews, but unless you translate this data into information, you can’t use it to improve your marketing efforts or grow your business.

Remember, that’s the whole point of iPaaS: integrating data from across your company so you’re turning it into useful information. Once you’ve confirmed which apps you’re using and which platforms are compatible, you need to think about where your data fits in.

Establish what data you have, whether it is names, promotional tickets, emails, reviews, or something else.
Confirm what data you need to integrate to achieve your business goals, because again, not every iPaaS can integrate all types of data.
Identify which apps contain this data, because these apps must be compatible with the iPaaS.
Check which iPaaS tool makes it easiest to migrate this data.

Make Sure the iPaaS Is Easy to Use

This one’s important. Some iPaaS solutions are more user-friendly than others, so be sure to consider your employees’ IT skills.

The more training your team needs, the longer it’ll take to get the system up and running.
Without proper training, your employees might accidentally corrupt or delete important data. If there’s no contingency plan in place to handle the learning curve (such as cloud or hard copy backups), you could suffer permanent data loss.

The real problem? Steep learning curves can affect productivity, which impacts everything from customer service to daily workflows. So, factor in employee technical expertise before you choose a platform.

As an aside, if you’re looking for a user-friendly tool to assess your recent marketing efforts, check out my A/B Testing calculator.

Find Out About iPaaS Security and Updates

Sure, iPaaS is pretty safe overall. However, it’s not foolproof, so here’s what to bear in mind.

Check the service provider’s track record. Are customers happy with the service? Does the provider have the experience to manage your sector-specific compliance requirements?
You should also check the vendor’s record for downtime and data loss. If it’s an unreliable platform, your data may be compromised, and performance may suffer.
Confirm how often updates are installed, and ensure they’re applied automatically.

Security is extremely important, so don’t be afraid to ask questions.

Figure Out Your iPaaS Price Point

iPaaS is a business investment, so you must get it right.

Go back to your IT budget and confirm what you can afford to spend.
Research the options in your price bracket. List the pros and cons of each platform.
Decide if you’re better off paying a fixed monthly or annual fee, or if you’re looking for a more flexible pricing structure. The same provider can sometimes offer different programs for different prices, depending on your needs.

Many iPaaS platforms offer free trials, so it might be worth testing one for 30 days or so before you commit. That said, if it’s a complicated platform, installing and learning it for a free trial period might be more trouble than it’s worth from a financial perspective.

iPaaS Tools

Are you still wondering where to get started? Let me leave you with some examples of popular iPaaS tools to choose from.

Zapier

With Zapier, businesses of any size can design customized and streamlined workflows. You don’t need tech knowledge either, since there are plenty of premade templates to choose from and integrate as you wish.

For example, you can send notifications to Slack from other apps:

You can also quickly generate tasks without opening each app individually:

The best part? Zapier is wallet-friendly and there’s even a basic free version available.

Oracle Integration Cloud

If compliance is a priority for you, check out Oracle Integration. It has iPaaS templates for many industries, from financial services to healthcare:

It’s also simple to track leads at every stage of the process from the one platform:

You can pay-as-you-go or choose a custom pricing plan.

Jitterbit

Jitterbit is designed to unify your workflow so you can easily track everything, from marketing performance to subscriber engagement from one location. It’s also compatible with popular services like Salesforce and Microsoft:

You can request a free trial or contact Jitterbit for custom pricing plans.

Conclusion

iPaaS is a great way to streamline data flow within your company, monitor conversions in real-time, and improve your customer response speed. It’s a solid addition to any digital marketing toolbox.

Remember, though, that what’s right for one business may not work for yours. That’s why it’s so important to spend time researching vendors, and ask as many questions as you need before committing to a service contract.

One final thing: if you need help boosting traffic to your website and optimizing your content to improve conversion rates, don’t forget to check out my consulting services.

Have you deployed iPaaS across your business yet?

The post How Can iPaaS Help Your Digital Marketing? appeared first on Neil Patel.

3 Key Reasons to Use Augmented Intelligence Tools in Digital Marketing

Do terms like “AI” and “machine learning” make you think of robots and science fiction?

These technologies are being used everywhere, and the age of AI is already in full swing.

AI and technology offer a solution to inefficiency. Deloitte has shown that 83 percent of early adopters of AI and cognitive technologies achieved either “moderate” or “substantial” benefits.

AI is somewhat part of augmented intelligence tools’ technology, but how is it used in marketing right now?

What is Augmented Intelligence?

Gartner defines “augmented intelligence” as “a human-centric partnership model of people and artificial intelligence working together to enhance cognitive performance.”

What that means is that augmented intelligence isn’t just about creating super smart machines. It’s about creating technology that can help you and your brain do things better.

Augmented intelligence is sometimes also called intelligence automation (IA).

How is Augmented Intelligence Different From Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

Artificial intelligence is all about computers making decisions. But augmented intelligence is about you making better decisions, with the help of a computer.

Let’s dive into some specific examples so we can see how this works:

Artificial Intelligence Examples

Artificial intelligence operates on its own, without help from humans.

That might make you think of autonomous killer robots, but the reality is usually a little less exciting.

Ever used a grammar checker tool? Lots of those use AI to give you more sophisticated grammar recommendations.

Even Google Docs uses an AI grammar checker. Google’s engineers train the model using correct sentences. It’s then able to predict whether sentences are correct or incorrect on its own, without needing to be programmed with every single grammar rule.

Know where else Google uses AI? In its search engine algorithms.

Updates like RankBrain and BERT have brought AI to the search engine, and SEOs have needed to update their strategies accordingly with AI SEO.

Augmented Intelligence Examples

Now that we’ve seen how AI is used, how is augmented intelligence used? How are its applications different from AI?

Augmented intelligence is a pretty general term. You can use it to talk about basically any machine that helps humans enhance their capabilities and make better decisions, even something as simple as a compass or telescope.

But in practice, augmented intelligence is usually used to talk about automated systems that need direction or input from humans to function. Augmented reality tools, like Google Glass, are just one example.

Augmented intelligence can be used in a bunch of different fields. It can support financial professionals in making regulatory decisions, or help health care professionals make medical decisions.

The augmented intelligence tool gives recommendations, and then the human makes the final call. Feedback from humans helps the tool to learn and grow continuously.

Why would you want to use augmented intelligence when you could use “true AI?” Well, augmented intelligence allows us to do more with the technology we currently have, without needing to wait for AI to advance.

It also adds a human element to the decision-making process, which can be helpful for complying with regulation in some industries. Plus, with augmented intelligence, we can take advantage of new technologies while also continuing to use human talent.

But the best thing about augmented intelligence? When humans and machines work together, they can achieve better results than one or the other working alone.

For example, an experiment by a team from a Harvard Medical School hospital at the Camelyon Grand Challenge showed that an algorithm could accurately detect breast cancer 92% of the time, while a human pathologist accurately detected it 96% of the time. When the pathologist worked together with the algorithm, the results were accurate 99% of the time.

Overall, augmented intelligence is just a different philosophy that can help us get the most from AI, without needing really sophisticated capabilities.

How Can Augmented Intelligence Help Your Business?

The truth is, augmented intelligence can do huge things for your company.

There are tons of different ways to use augmented intelligence. There’s probably an IA application out there that can help you streamline and improve every single area of your business.

Here’s an example: Augmented intelligence can help you sell things online.

Think about the last time you thought about buying something online. What were some reasons you might have hesitated before making a purchase?

You might not want to lay out money for certain items before trying them out in person. Furniture, glasses, clothes are examples of products users want to see how they look up close before you buy.

Enter augmented intelligence. With augmented reality (AR) applications, your customers can “try on” things virtually. Even if they’d prefer to shop from home, they can still get a feel for your merchandise.

Want to know how this works in practice? Check out some of the companies using augmented reality to sell furniture (Wayfair), glasses (EyeBuyDirect), and makeup (MAC Cosmetics).

Glasses virtual try on screenshot augmented intelligence 1

To use the virtual try-on tools, you can upload a photo or open your webcam, and the tool will show you what the product looks like in real life.

But sales isn’t the only area where augmented intelligence can help your business.

Want to make your product safer? Car companies are already using augmented reality to help drivers spot dangers on the road and avoid looking down at their phones.

Want to thrill your customers with a cool new feature? Google did that when they introduced internet searchers to AR animals.

You can improve your customer service with augmented intelligence, too. Chatbots can help answer some more straightforward customer questions, freeing up more time for your human staff. IA can also help support your customer service reps when they need more information to help customers.

Finally, just like with sales, product, and customer service, augmented intelligence tools can take your marketing efforts to the next level.

Here are three crucial reasons why you should use augmented intelligence tools to supercharge your marketing.

Augmented Intelligence Creates Positive Customer Experiences

If you use augmented intelligence to create an extra cool or innovative product, your marketing will basically be halfway done for you. An awesome customer experience pretty much markets itself. Just look at all the videos people have made about Google’s AR animals:

video suggest augmented intelligence | 3 Key Reasons to Use Augmented Intelligence Tools in Digital Marketing

Check out all these articles people have written about Wayfair’s augmented reality feature for furniture:

SERP augmented intelligence | 3 Key Reasons to Use Augmented Intelligence Tools in Digital Marketing

If you make something interesting enough, you might end up getting lots of new backlinks and traffic without even trying.

Besides creating new product features, you can also improve your customer experience with augmented intelligence in other ways.

For instance, customers are more likely to be satisfied if they can get their questions answered faster with technology like automated chatbots, as mentioned above.

You can also use augmented intelligence to help personalize the customer experience. An example of this would be user recommendations. You’ve probably seen these on YouTube on the right-hand side:

youtube suggest augmented intelligence | 3 Key Reasons to Use Augmented Intelligence Tools in Digital Marketing

And on Amazon as suggested product examples:

amazon suggest augmented intelligence | 3 Key Reasons to Use Augmented Intelligence Tools in Digital Marketing

These websites use algorithms to make recommendations based on the videos you’ve already watched or products you’ve already shown interest in. When you click on a recommendation, you’re sending a signal to the algorithm that the recommendation was relevant.

Recommendations help you offer a better experience by helping your customers find things they might be interested in. They are also a way to convince customers to stay on your website for longer.

Augmented Intelligence Can Reduce Busywork

Another major reason why companies are interested in automation is that it saves time. According to WorkMarket’s 2020 In(Sight) Report, over half of employees think they could save 240 hours every year through automation.

IA can help your marketing department save time in lots of different ways. If you’re currently using data for strategic planning, augmented intelligence tools can help.

You can use these tools to help clean data sets, forecast future trends with predictive modeling, or even keep an eye on competitors, social trends, and customer feedback. This can help you create more effective marketing plans more quickly.

If you decide to use augmented intelligence in your marketing, you won’t be alone. According to a Forrester report, 46% of respondents say that marketing and sales teams are leading AI adoption.

It’s no wonder marketers are excited to adopt this technology. Hubspot found that using AI software cut the time one agency spent on reporting by 97 percent.

Augmented Intelligence Can Help Write Content

Here’s another way that augmented intelligence can help with your marketing: It can help you write better content, faster.

If you’re a marketer, you know that writing quality content takes serious time and effort.

A survey by Orbit Media Studios states that the average blog post takes almost four hours to write. That’s actually a 63% increase over 2014, when the average blog post took just under 2.5 hours.

If you’re wondering why the writing time has gone up so much, it’s because Google’s algorithm updates have started to favor long-form content.

Besides the actual writing, researching, adding photos, and publishing also take up lots of time, not to mention content planning and S EO.

Augmented intelligence can helpfully write text, but it can’t add much research, facts, or emotions to it.

AI’s writing style can be a little different from what we’re used to, so it needs human polishing.

AI text augmented intelligence | 3 Key Reasons to Use Augmented Intelligence Tools in Digital Marketing

That’s an excerpt from an article written by an AI, published in The Guardian.

As you can see, AI can write sentences, but you might need to edit or adjust them to fit your content needs.

Even if you don’t want a robot to write your articles, you can still use augmented intelligence tools to help you in your writing. Spelling and grammar checkers, like Grammarly, are a good example of this.

Augmented intelligence can also help you create better content by coming up with more relevant topics for your audience.

If you’re using augmented intelligence for data collection and analytics, you can use the knowledge you gain from that to help you write more data-driven, personalized content.

If you want to do a content audit to review the content that’s already on your website, augmented intelligence can help with that, too.

Augmented Intelligence is Becoming the Norm

It looks like AI, and automation in general, are here to stay. McKinsey predicts that “half of today’s work activities could be automated by 2055.”

With “AI’s adoption increasing year-on-year,” marketing departments are leading the charge.

Augmented intelligence offers the perfect approach to AI, because it’s all about pairing AI’s strengths with human strengths.

Conclusion

As a marketer, you’re all about staying ahead of the competition.

To do that, you’ll need to have the best tools, including artificial intelligence.

However, a lot of people are skeptical about AI. In fact, research by PwC shows that 67% of CEOs think AI and automation will have a negative impact on trust in their industry over the next five years.

With augmented intelligence tools, you don’t have to rely on AI alone. Instead, you can use AI’s strengths and human strengths together to get better results.

If you’ve already started using augmented intelligence in your marketing, or if you’re thinking about using it soon, tell us about your experience in the comments.

The post 3 Key Reasons to Use Augmented Intelligence Tools in Digital Marketing appeared first on Neil Patel.

How to Develop a Winning Digital Marketing Strategy in 4 Easy Steps

According to Smart Insights, 45 percent of companies don’t have a clearly defined digital marketing strategy; 17 percent of companies have a digital marketing strategy in place, but it’s separate from their marketing plan. This means 62 percent of companies are unprepared. They don’t have the strategy, tactics, or tools they need to market their …

The post How to Develop a Winning Digital Marketing Strategy in 4 Easy Steps first appeared on Online Web Store Site.

How to Develop a Winning Digital Marketing Strategy in 4 Easy Steps

This means 62 percent of companies are unprepared.

They don’t have the strategy, tactics, or tools they need to market their business well. The bad news is that marketers waste 37 to 95 percent of their marketing budget. This is really common, but it doesn’t have to be; if you have the right digital marketing strategy in place, growing your business is easier.

If you’re feeling unprepared, don’t worry.

Today we’re going to cover the important ins and outs of creating a winning digital marketing strategy.

Why You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy

Your digital marketing strategy gives your company direction. With a plan in place, you’ll have the details you need to help your company grow consistently. Your digital strategy document should:

Define your short and long term goals
Show you who your customers are
Show you where you can find them
Outline what you need to attract your customer’s attention
Offer a step-by-step plan to attract and hold customer attention
Show you how to analyze and improve marketing performance

Why go to all the trouble?

Is it worth the time to create a strategy document? CoSchedule’s State of Marketing Strategy Report found winning marketers:

Document their digital marketing strategy. Marketers who document are 538 percent more likely to achieve success than those who don’t.
Document their marketing processes. Those that do are 466 percent more likely to achieve success consistently over time than those who don’t.
Winning marketers set goals. Goal setters are 429 percent more likely to report success than those who don’t; 81 percent of these marketers achieve their goals; 10 percent of organized marketers always achieve their goals.
Winning marketers study their audience. These marketers are 242 percent more likely to conduct audience research four times a year. Almost 60 percent of the elite marketers featured in their study conduct audience research once or more per month.

It seems too good to be true, but it’s actually the reality.

The more time you spend thinking about your goals, getting to know your audience and planning how you’ll approach your digital marketing, the more likely you are to achieve success.

What Should Be Included In Your Digital Marketing Strategy

I’ve already given you a sneak peek, did you catch it?

To be successful, your digital marketing strategy should focus on four specific areas.

Setting goals, objectives, and key performance indicators (KPIs)
Understanding and defining your audience
Creating and implementing your digital marketing strategy
Auditing and improving your marketing campaigns

You’ll want to break each of these areas down in enough detail so you (and your team) can work with each of these areas properly. With each of these areas, you should have a pretty clear idea about:

The information, tools, and resources you’ll need to create a plan
Who will be responsible for creating your plan
Who will be responsible for implementing your plan
The KPIs and metrics you’ll use to measure the success (or failure) of your plan
The tools and resources you’ll need to implement and improve campaign performance

Each of these points needs to be defined clearly for the four steps areas above.

Let’s take a closer look at these four areas and break things down a bit more clearly.

1. Setting Goals, Objectives, and KPIs

This step is all about deciding what you want..

Planning your marketing strategy begins with setting quantitative and qualitative goals; you’ll also want to set KPIs. These goals are sort of like the railroad tracks that keep your digital marketing strategy on the right track.

What’s the difference between qualitative and quantitative goals?

G2 has a really helpful way of defining these, so I’m going to paraphrase their definition here.

Quantitative goals can be counted, measured, or displayed using numbers. Goals like increasing monthly recurring revenue by 15 percent or boosting your conversion rate by 3 percent are good examples of quantitative goals. Qualitative goals are abstract, descriptive, or conceptual — these goals are usually tied to the question “why.” Goals like increasing customer trust or improving brand reputation are examples of qualitative goals. They’re difficult to measure but just as important.

You’ll want to make sure that your goals are:

Challenging, realistic, and attainable
Tied to your company’s mission, vision, and values
Concise — 2-3 main goals 3-5 supporting goals
Specific, clear, and timely
Broken down into smaller, step-by-step milestones

Your goals are important, but they’re difficult to achieve if you don’t have a step-by-step plan to follow. That’s where milestones come in; milestones are tactical. They’re great because you can use them to move towards your goals quickly.

What about KPIs?

Scoro has a list of 136 KPIs you can use to jumpstart your planning. I’ve listed a few of the more common examples you can use below.

Unique visitors per day/month
Pages per visit
New leads per day/month
Marketing qualified leads (MQLs)
Conversion rates
Churn/attrition rate
Cost per conversion
Conversion rate per keyword
ROI per content
Click-through-rate on paid advertising

Focus is really important.

It’ll be tough to focus on lots of metrics at once. Instead, you’ll want to focus your attention on a small number of really meaningful KPIs and metrics.

Which ones are meaningful?

They’re the KPIs that have the biggest impact on your company, the ones that generate consistent returns or a large amount of cash for your company. You’re looking for the 20 percent of KPIs and metrics that produce 80 percent of your results.

That’s a pretty easy place to start.

If you’re not sure which KPIs you should focus on, start with the common KPIs and metrics that have a direct impact on your business. These are typically metrics that focus on traffic, conversions, and optimization.

2. Understanding and Defining Your Audience

You know what your goals and objectives are. Now you need to figure the same things out for your customer. This step requires some upfront research, but the success (or failure) of your digital marketing strategy starts here.

Think about it.

If you find the right customers, the people are excited to buy your product, then selling is a whole lot easier. It’s especially easier if you can understand what they want and how you can go about selling to them. So to do that, you’ll need information on your customer’s demographics and psychographics.

What are you trying to figure out?

The size of your market: You’ll want to figure out some important details about your market —is it new or established, niche or mainstream, broad or specialized. You’ll want to figure out who the major and minor players are, market expectations, areas you can disrupt, and the financial upside in your specific market.
Who your customers are: Are you targeting new moms, weekend warriors who are active on the weekends? You should have a basic idea of the customer you’re targeting. Are you focusing your attention on a specific niche, i.e., affluent travelers, price-conscious fashion aficionados? Use previous sales, competitor research, and market research sources like Ubersuggest and Google Trends to find the answer.
Where they spend their time: Your customers have specific hangouts. Web developers spend their time on sites like ArsTechnica, Reddit, SitePoint, etc. New moms spend their time on sites like Babble, CafeMom, or Bundoo. If you know where your customers like to spend their time, you have a pretty good idea of the channels to target and the content to use.
What they consume: This overlaps a little bit with where they spend their time. When there is an overlap, you’ll want to break the differences down even further. For example, your customers may spend a lot of time on Reddit, but this doesn’t tell you what they’re consuming on Reddit. Reddit is where they spend their time; the subreddit r/RobinHood is what they consume. See the difference? One tells you about their specific interests and desires; the other focuses on location.
Why they buy: Your customers don’t buy for the same reasons. Sources like online reviews are a great way to get really helpful, in-depth feedback on why customers buy from customers themselves. You can also use tools like surveys or polls to attract responses. You’re not looking for an individual answer; you’re looking for trends.
Where and how they buy: Do customers price shop offline, in your store, then order online from Amazon? Maybe your customers prefer a one-time purchase over recurring payment options? If you understand when and how your customers buy, you’ll be able to adjust your marketing around their expectations. Maybe that means persuading customers to do something different or stick with market expectations.
What they need to buy: Online reviews are a helpful tool here as well. If you’re a new business, you can start with competitor reviews. Go through your competitor reviews, then make a list of the concerns brought up in each review. Look for customer objections, technology issues, complaints, reputation issues, any problem that customers felt were deal breakers. If you have reviews of your own, you can do the same thing there.

Remember the research I shared earlier?

Elite marketers study their audience, conducting audience research once or more per month. This step is important because it gives you the instructions you need to create a winning digital marketing strategy. Audience research shows you how to persuade your customers.

This isn’t rocket science.

But it requires more effort than most companies are willing to give.

Here’s why.

Most companies assume they already know their customers. They believe they know what their customers want and the best ways to approach them.

They may be right.

But the data they have on their customers changes often. Consistent research is the only way to stay on top of what your customers actually want. At this point, you’re ready for step three.

3. Creating and implementing your digital marketing strategy

If you’ve done your homework, you should have the building blocks you need to create a well defined digital marketing strategy. You should be able to identify the marketing channels that will work best for your business. There are lots of digital marketing channels you can choose from.

You can focus on:

Content marketing
SEO
PPC
Display advertising
Email
Online video
TV commercials
Mobile ads
Channel partnerships
Events
Social media advertising
Podcasts and radio advertising
Print advertising

In fact, there are more than 51 different marketing channels you can use to promote your business. Which one are you supposed to use?

There are a few ways you can approach this.

Investing in the channels your customers use (e.g., search, social media)
Investing in the channels that give you independence and control (e.g., email, partnerships)
Investing in the channels that are most common/popular (e.g., SEO, PPC, Social media)

Start by testing the channels where there’s more overlap.

If your customers use popular channels like Google search or Facebook, those are great places to start. If you’re looking for a channel that gives you maximum control and works well with other channels (i.e., email), you can start there.

Don’t forget to test.

Testing shows you what works. The tools you use for testing tend to be consistent with the channel (e.g., email comes with analytics. Google offers Google Analytics, etc.). Typically, you can branch out once you’ve identified the marketing channels that perform best for your business.

You’re looking for stability.

You want to get two to three channels working well before you decide to add more. Once you’ve identified your channels, use the data you’ve collected in step two to create the kind of marketing content that fits well with the customers you’ve identified.

Your content should:

Attract their attention
Be fascinating
Discuss a problem or challenge
Offer a solution to the problem or challenge you’ve just identified

Here’s another important detail. The research you’ve done should help you create a strong value proposition that answers the “why me?” question. Your value proposition is basically a promise. It’s the most important part of your marketing copy.

It gives your customers a persuasive reason to do business with you.

Your value proposition sets you apart from the competition. It gives your business an unfair advantage, and it gives you the opening you need to attract more customers, increase customer loyalty, command higher prices, and beat your competitors.

Here’s a detailed breakdown if you need help creating your own value proposition.

If you’ve followed the steps I’ve mentioned above, you should have the information you need to create amazing content that draws customers in.

4. Auditing and improving your marketing campaigns

If you can’t measure your marketing, you can’t improve them. Part of the reason marketers waste 37 to 95 percent of their marketing budget is the lack of measurement. Forrester’s research stated that between 60 – 73 percent of a company’s analytics data goes unused.

Companies don’t know how to work with their data.

They don’t know which problems to fix
They don’t know what they have
They can’t see the value of their data
They don’t know how to evaluate or analyze their data
Their data isn’t available to analysts who can use it
There’s too much data to go through and not enough people or time to use it

The other three steps aren’t all that helpful if you can’t see your marketing results. If you’re going to create a successful digital marketing strategy, you’ll need a plan that helps you to capture, report, and analyze the data.

You’ll need analysts who can use your data to solve problems.

That’s part of the problem.

Most companies don’t have the people or processes in place to handle this. This is why it’s so important for businesses to get help. It’s too much for most companies to handle on their own — small, medium, and large companies all struggle with these issues.

If this is the case for your organization, it may be a good idea to get help from an agency.

You should be able to plan, implement, and optimize your digital marketing strategy. If you can’t, it’s a good idea to get help with all or part of the process.

Conclusion

Almost half of companies don’t have a clearly defined digital marketing strategy in place. A smaller segment of respondents haven’t connected their strategy and their marketing. Most companies are unprepared; they’re not ready to handle the requirements that come with creating their digital marketing strategy.

If you’re feeling unprepared, don’t worry; use the information we’ve discussed as a guide. If you’re aware of the ins and outs of planning, you can create a winning digital marketing strategy in four easy steps.

The post How to Develop a Winning Digital Marketing Strategy in 4 Easy Steps appeared first on Neil Patel.

Working With a Digital Marketing Agency Vs. Hiring In House

If you are looking to scale up your marketing, you will need talented people that can take charge of and execute your strategy. But should you build your own in-house marketing team or hire an agency partner? There are compelling reasons for both, and it mostly depends on your situation. Read on to find out … Continue reading Working With a Digital Marketing Agency Vs. Hiring In House

A Complete Guide to AI Digital Assistants for Marketers

If you aren’t willing to embrace AI digital assistants as a marketer, you’re going to have a tough time competing with everyone else. While you’re drowning in the tsunami of daily, weekly, and monthly tasks, your competition will swim laps around you. What if you could: Spend more time in your zone of genius. Stop …

The post A Complete Guide to AI Digital Assistants for Marketers first appeared on Online Web Store Site.

A Complete Guide to AI Digital Assistants for Marketers

If you aren’t willing to embrace AI digital assistants as a marketer, you’re going to have a tough time competing with everyone else.

While you’re drowning in the tsunami of daily, weekly, and monthly tasks, your competition will swim laps around you.

What if you could:

Spend more time in your zone of genius.
Stop feeling overwhelmed by your workload.
Boost your productivity by 80%.
Create a personalized experience for your audience.
Increase your ROI with only a few clicks of your mouse.

Just like Alexa brings you the best jams on-demand and Siri helps you find the nearest Starbucks, AI digital assistants can help you become a better marketer.

In this guide, we’ll discuss the benefits of AI digital assistants and the tools you can use to put your marketing tasks on autopilot.

But, to do that, we need to first look at what AI personal assistants really are.

What Are AI Digital Assistants?

You’ve probably already come into contact with Siri and Alexa, two of the world’s most famous AI personal assistants.

Maybe you’ve dabbled with a few more on your laptop, smartphone, or wearables without even realizing it.

AI digital assistants are software programs that help you complete and automate tasks with a tap, click, or voice command.

How do these programs understand and complete such complex tasks?

By using artificial intelligence like voice recognition and natural language processing (NLP) to understand requests and machine learning to collect data, identify patterns, and “learn” user preferences.

With the right digital assistant in your back pocket, you’ll have a secret marketing weapon tailored to your brand’s needs. You’re going to make better marketing decisions for your audience in seconds.

How AI Digital Assistants Are Shaping The Future of Work

Remember when millennials disrupted the way we work with remote work and telecommuting?

Well, artificial intelligence is doing the same thing.

The Salesforce State of Marketing Report noted that AI adoption with marketers is up by a whopping 186% from 2018, with 84% using AI technology.

And late adopters? You’re getting left behind.

“But what about our jobs?!” you cry.

“Won’t AI make us obsolete?” you ponder.

I’m here to tell you the truth — no.

A report published by ManpowerGroup found that 87% of employers anticipate increasing or maintaining their human workforce due to AI automation.

So what does it all mean?

Robots are creating MORE jobs, and AI digital assistants are not here to replace you.

If you no longer have to spend time finding relevant content to share with your audience or scrolling through countless Instagram profiles to find the “perfect” influencer for your next campaign, you get to focus on what you do best:

Creating, implementing, and fine-tuning your marketing strategy.

Plus, you’re going to have mountains of data to back up your decisions, which will get you better results, a higher ROI, and more sales.

The Benefits of Using AI Digital Assistants in Marketing

With 75% of marketers planning to implement AI in their businesses within the next three years, the big question is:

What’s all the fuss about?

Why should you care about using AI in your job as a marketer?

Here are just some of the benefits you can reap with an AI digital assistant:

Boost Your Productivity

What do you hate most about your job?

Is it those dull, repetitive tasks?

Or the hours spent hunched over data trying to make sense of it?

Delegate your most soul-draining, eye-roll-inducing tasks to your AI personal assistant and take back your time.

The best part? No complaining, recruiting, or training required.

With your repetitive tasks no longer on your calendar, you’ll have more time to focus on the bigger picture and tap into your creativity.

Automate Your Workflow and Growth with a Digital Assistant

The secret sauce to growing and running a successful business is automation.

Nearly 80% of executives agree that automation can save you 360 hours a year.

The more you can automate your business, the more you can focus on moving the needle forward.

The same goes for marketers.

When you can automate much of your workflow, you can refocus your attention on tweaking your marketing strategy and getting the results you want.

AI digital assistants help you stay in your zone of genius and put growth on autopilot.

Personalize Your AI Marketing Strategy

How vague is the targeting for your marketing campaigns?

Does it look like this?

Women
Age 25-35
Who like exercise

You’re not alone.

60% of content marketers struggle with personalization.

The good news? An AI digital assistant can get you off the struggle bus.

Artificial intelligence gets rid of the fluff and helps you target individuals rather than generic groups.

Don’t stop at “exercise” for your yoga mat brand. Drill down to women between the ages of 25-35 who prefer pilates over CrossFit.

Personalizing your marketing strategy allows you to take advantage of the 79% of consumers who are more likely to engage with brand promotions if tailored to their past interactions.

Create Better Content, Faster

Content creation is incredible for attracting new leads and building trust with your audience.

But it’s also time and resource-intensive.

The right AI digital assistant can help you speed up, scale, and optimize your content marketing workflow — something 47% of marketers say is their biggest challenge.

Using AI for content creation isn’t a new idea. Some of the world’s biggest brands are already using it as part of their content marketing strategy:

The Washington Post uses Heliograf (an in-house reporting AI) to write social media posts and basic news stories.
Forbes is using AI to create content alongside humans.

Boost Your SEO with Less Time

Are you spending hours creating content and getting zero traffic in search?

AI digital assistants can identify where you’re going wrong and streamline your SEO strategy.

With a few clicks, you can see what content you should create for your niche and what keywords the top-ranking sites are using to get to Google’s front page.

AI can also optimize your existing blog posts and improve your rankings in search. You’ll get suggestions on how to improve your content and what keywords to add to rank for queries.

The Best AI Digital Assistant Tools for Marketers

Want 59% better close rates? What about a 58% increased revenue? Or 54% more traffic and engagement?

Start using these AI digital assistants to automate your marketing workflow.

Email Marketing:

Automizy: Emails not getting opened? Automizy can help you test and optimize your email subject lines and improve your open rate by 34%.
Cortex by Retention Science: Cortex uses machine learning to continually optimize its automation for better results. Over time, the tool will refine your subject lines, discover the best time to send emails, and use engagement data to create better email campaigns.
customer.io: Send targeted emails, push notifications, and SMSs to your audience based on how they interact with your business. The tool can lower your churn rate, create stronger relationships, and drive more sales.
Drift: Drift is an email marketing tool that automates your inbox and delivers targeted messages to specific users. It’s the ultimate personal assistant for managing your marketing and sales inbox.

Ad Campaigns:

Pathmatics: Curious about why your competitor’s ad campaigns are outperforming yours? Pathmatics is a marketing intelligence platform that dissects how brands advertise online.
Pattern89: Pattern89 is an AI marketing tool that can improve almost every aspect of your ads. You’ll get personalized recommendations for adjusting your ad spend and actionable insights on the type of ads to use, including placement, format, and image attributes like orientation or the number of faces.
Phrasee: Stop writing dull copy for Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns. Phrasee specializes in language generation for marketing copy by pulling data from your online posts. Add in your draft copy, and Phrasee will test its effectiveness before you spend a single cent.

Personalization:

Emarsys: Emarsys is an AI omnichannel platform helping you personalize your B2C marketing across the board. Using artificial intelligence, it learns customer behavior to predict their next move, segment users, and select using artificial intelligence content automatically.
Uberflip: Uberflip is an advanced content personalization platform. The AI figures out what content your audience craves, optimizes your campaigns, and improves your conversion rate. Shellman used Uberflip to increase their win rate by 40% by delivering one-to-one content experiences.

Social Media:

HubSpot: Inside HubSpot’s robust CRM, you’ll find social media software powered by AI, which automatically creates posts based on the metadata of the link.
Meet Cortex: Meet Cortex creates social media content your audience wants. Analyzing your data and competitors provides insights on taste preferences, the best time to post, and shows you how to stay ahead of the competition.
NetBase: NetBase uses machine learning to take social listening to the next level. The tool gives real-time insights about reactions and sentiments towards your brand. You’ll also get access to insights on audience behavior, drivers, influencers, and location-specific analysis.
Lately: Turns your blog URL into dozens of social media posts of varying character lengths.
Zoomph: Zoomph measures audience behavior and ROI on social media platforms. Use it to automatically track the latest trends to boost engagement and increase brand awareness.

Creating Content:

Acrolinx: Acrolinx is a software platform that can “read” your content. It captures how you communicate, aligns your content with your guidelines, and analyzes performance to improve your content.
AI-Writer: AI-Writer can create an entire SEO friendly blog post using only a headline. While the text output isn’t perfect, it can save quite a bit of time.
Atomic Reach: At a loss for the right words for an ad? Atomic Reach is your new best friend. It analyzes your content and takes out the guesswork by rewriting it in the style your audience prefers.

Content Ideas:

Curata: Any successful marketer knows providing value to your audience is critical. One of the easiest ways to do this is with content curation. Curate uses AI to save you time by finding the most useful and relevant content in any niche.
Stackla: User-generated content (UGC) is powerful social proof. Stackla helps you discover, manage, and show off UGC content your audience is creating (and engaging with), so you can build trust.
Unmetric: Unmetric analyzes your content and competitors to discover new ideas and opportunities. Find out what’s working and what’s not, then craft a content strategy backed by data.

SEO:

Text Optimizer: Text Optimizer is a content marketer’s holy grail. It uses AI to analyze web pages and texts to see how well optimized it is for a specific keyword. The result? You can quickly identify the keywords used on pages ranking in search or analyze your published blog posts to find additional keywords.
MarketMuse: MarketMuse streamlines content creation for any niche. The AI lets you know about search terms you haven’t used (but should), so you can fill in your content gaps. It’s so effective that some users see a 30% growth in leads from organic search.
WordLift: WordLift is an AI-powered SEO tool for WordPress. It automates internal linking, helps search engines understand your pages, and keeps visitors on your site longer with relevant content recommendations.

Landing Pages:

Personyze: Are you still using standard landing pages for your campaigns? If so, you’re leaving money on the table. Personyze uses AI to collect data about visitors’ demographics and past behavior to create a unique landing page that boosts conversion rates.

Conclusion

AI digital assistants are not here to replace you.

Instead, these tools are the perfect sidekick to help you get rid of a heavy task load, so you can focus on strategy, tap into your creativity, and innovate.

Automating your workflow instantly makes you more productive, and AI helps you predict the buyer’s journey far more accurately.

You can analyze mass sets of data in seconds. Dig deep into insights, personalize marketing campaigns, and take user experiences to a whole new level.

In short, AI digital assistants are a game-changer for marketers who want to use tech to outwit, outlast, and outplay their competition.

Are you using AI digital assistants to streamline your marketing workflow?

The post A Complete Guide to AI Digital Assistants for Marketers appeared first on Neil Patel.

Digital Marketing Consulting

66% of Americans check their phone 160 times a day. That’s a lot.

When we’re not on our phones, we might be browsing the web on a laptop, playing a multiplayer game online, watching Netflix on a Smart TV and so on… The point is, we’re bound to a digital world which means that every business needs some form of online presence these days.

The trouble is digital marketing trends change all the time. How are you supposed to keep up?

Furthermore, you can give digital marketing your best attempt but who’s to say that your competitors won’t one-up you? Because people are always coming up with new, more effective marketing tactics.

But, don’t fret. A digital marketing consultant can help you upgrade your online strategy.

5 Ways a Digital Marketing Consultant Can Help Grow Your Business

A digital marketing consultant will help you grow your business through strategy and planning. This is important as marketers who make the effort to plan campaigns and projects are 356% more likely to report success.

Here’s what a digital marketing consultant can do for you:

1. Develop an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy

A consultant can put together a detailed, actionable digital marketing strategy based on your business objectives. They’ll do this by conducting in-depth analyses of your current position and target audience.

This will likely begin with a SWOT analysis which assesses Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. It will provide great insight into how you run your business, the efficacy of your marketing, your position in the competitive market and more.

Audience research will likely result in creating buyer personas. The consultant will figure out how best to reach your audience through digital marketing, including their preferred marketing channels.

With all of this information a consultant can determine the best overarching strategies, platforms to target and define a set list of tasks that will help you grow your business.

2. Create a High-Converting Sales Strategy

Want to increase sales or generate more leads? A digital marketing consultant can also help you with your advertising strategy.

Paid ads drive traffic and increase sales. For every $1 spent on Google ads you get $2 in revenue.

Google isn’t the only advertising channel available to you, however. A consultant will determine which advertising channel will get you the best ROI, whether that’s Google, native advertising, paid social media ads, video ads or other placements.

They will also determine the other aspects that contribute to a successful campaign, such as audience segmentation, keywords, duration and budget.

A consultant can plan impactful ad campaigns for you from start to finish.

3. Establish Useful KPIs

You may already have an idea of what your marketing goals are. But how will you know if you’re making progress towards those goals?

A digital marketing consultant will guide you on which key performance indicators and metrics you should track according to your specific objectives and strategies.

They’ll help you create a system by which you can measure and report on the performance of your projects. They can also direct you to the right analytics tools and software.

This will help you keep track of business growth and make changes where necessary.

4. Suggest Innovative Ideas

Another awesome thing about working with a digital marketing consultant is that they have a fresh, unbiased perspective on your strategy.

As experts in the field of digital marketing, they’re up-to-date on the latest trends. So, they’re able to come up with cutting-edge ideas that’ll drive growth for your business.

For example, some of the latest digital marketing trends are:

The rise of programmatic advertising
The introduction of visual search
The shift towards interactive content

If you’re looking to do something unique as in the above examples to gain a competitive edge then a digital marketing consultant could be a massive help.

5. Drive Growth on Multiple Channels

An omnichannel approach to digital marketing is necessary these days. One reason is that people come into contact with your brand at multiple touchpoints before making a purchase. Furthermore, you can reach more people that prefer or use different channels.

The best digital marketing consultants are experienced in a range of platforms and marketing activities from SEO to email marketing to social media.

Therefore, they can help you create consistent campaigns that get results across multiple marketing channels, with particular emphasis on the channels that make most sense for your target audience.

How to Get Started with Digital Marketing Consulting

If you want to get the most value from working with a digital marketing consultant, there are a couple of things you need to do to prepare:

1. Set Clear Expectations

Any digital marketing consultant worth their salt will do their best to make you happy. But, that can only happen if you set clear expectations from the beginning.

After an initial consultation, you’ll work with a consultant over one or more sessions per month or order their time by the hour. Discuss what you expect to achieve and in what number of sessions. Then the consultant can do their best to make that happen.

To give you an example, you might say that by session six you hope to have increased blog traffic by 10%. If you need it, a consultant can help you set realistic expectations.

Other expectations you may want to share:

Which tasks you want them to prioritize
Your preferred method of communication
How often you wish to receive updates

2. Share Access

There are certain assets and accounts a digital marketing consultant will need access to in order to do their job. This is why it’s important to work with a consultant that you can trust.

Firstly, they’ll want to view any existing reports and data. You’ll need to provide access to your Google Analytics, social media accounts (to view social analytics) and other relevant accounts.

Furthermore, you’ll need to share relevant documentation related to your business. For example, this might be existing audience research, market analysis, branding guidelines, your mission statement and the like.

Naturally, you should only divulge what you’re comfortable with and what you feel is relevant. The purpose of sharing these things is simply so that the consultant can learn as much about your operations as possible to make informed, strategic decisions.

Measuring the ROI of Digital Marketing Consulting Services

ROI refers to the profit you gain in relation to the cost of your investment. To calculate ROI, you might use a formula, such as this one from HubSpot:

Let’s break down what each of these terms means:

Number of leads – how many leads did the campaign produce?
Lead-to-customer rate – how many of those leads became customers?
Average sales price – what is the average product price?
Cost or ad spend – what were your costs? This includes ad spend or the cost of creating content, as well as the digital marketing consultant fee.

When calculating ROI, bear in mind that there are variables to consider. Let’s say for example that a campaign generates a lot of leads, but an ineffective sales team or lead nurturing strategy could fail to turn those leads into customers. This will, of course, impact ROI. There may even be other, wider variables, such as the state of the economy.

Furthermore, what you gain from digital marketing campaigns depends on your objectives. In some cases, it’s better to think of what you’ve gained or achieved in relation to your goals rather than placing the emphasis on monetary values.

Sometimes, you should measure the ROI of digital marketing consulting services according to key performance indicators. Have they helped you succeed in generating brand awareness, increasing rankings, improving click-through-rates of emails etc?

All in all, just remember that ROI doesn’t necessarily mean dollar amounts. You may make huge gains in other areas of your business that will result in sales later, help you retain customers, gain authority for your brand and so on.

5 Point Checklist for Finding the Right Digital Marketing Consultant

Hiring a digital marketing consultant is an investment in the future of your business. This one act has the potential to skyrocket your marketing performance.

Thus, it’s vital you find the right one. Here are the qualities you need to look out for:

1. The Right Expertise

Choose a digital marketing consultant with the expertise that matches your needs. If you’re looking for something specific e.g. content marketing make sure it’s one of their main specialities.

It’d also be beneficial to find a consultant with experience and expertise in your industry. Research what kind of clients they’ve worked with in the past. Let’s say you run an e-commerce store, you’ll need to look for consultants with a great track record of driving growth for online stores.

Also, check out the size and type of business they usually work with. It’s another indicator as to whether they can help you specifically.

2. Able to Deliver

Do their strategies get results? Are they able to deliver on your KPIs and help you reach your milestones?

There are a few ways you can work this out. You can look for case studies when researching a consultancy online. Or ask for relevant examples of successful campaigns when you interview a consultant.

You can also look at their ability to market themselves as a consultant or firm. If they have a strong online presence and a great client roster, then they’re able to produce the same results for your biz.

3. Credible

Did you know that I’m an excellent figure skater…

Just kidding.

The point I’m making here is that anybody can make any claim they like. You have to find proof that a digital marketing consultant is actually credible.

Can anybody vouch for them? Find reviews, testimonials and write-ups from trustworthy third parties online.

Accreditations also prove that a consultant is capable of doing what they say they can. Examples include Google and HubSpot certifications.

4. Knowledgeable

One key responsibility of a digital marketing consultant is to educate and prepare you for continued success. Furthermore, they need to be able to answer your questions and give you solid advice while you work together.

This means they need an in-depth knowledge of digital marketing best practices. So, it pays to work with a consultant that has lots of hands-on experience.

Furthermore, they need to be up-to-date on the latest trends and be confident in their knowledge of where digital marketing is headed in the years to come. That’s why I set up Neil Patel Digital with a group of highly-knowledgeable industry thought leaders:

5. On Your Wavelength

Do you and the digital marketing consultant share the same vision when it comes to growing your business?

When researching consultants try to gain an understanding of their values and their approach. Get to know them and ask the right questions, such as:

How have you helped clients like me in the past?
How familiar are you with my industry?
Do you have any preliminary ideas for my strategy?
How much will you involve us in the process?
What happens when a strategy doesn’t work?

Their answers should help you assess whether they’re the right choice for you.

Conclusion

There are many reasons you may want to hire a digital marketing consultant. For instance, if you struggle to keep up with advancements in digital marketing. Or you just can’t seem to edge past your competitors.

A digital marketing expert can help you come up with marketing and sales strategies that drive growth. They’ll bring fresh ideas and help you dominate multiple channels.

As long as you find a good one that is.

When it comes to choosing a consultant to work with, find somebody that’s a good fit for you specifically, i.e. they get what you’re trying to do and have the relevant experience and expertise to meet your needs.

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