We often detach elements of the marketing process to our disadvantage.  Here’s an example of AI integration through the whole marketing process.

Regardless of the product or service being offered, you should start with an AI software search of the web for competitive products/services.  Gather data about competitive features and benefits and pricing.  With that information you can fit your product/service into a  marketing mix and determine who your customer is likely to be.

Now you’re ready to employ AI content creation tools to align your messages to reach the defined audience through your website, social media and advertising.  AI informed messaging fine tunes the communication and will yield a better result both for brand building and advertsing results. Equities.com

Basic to all good communication is knowing your intended audience.  That’s where it all starts. Yet, too much of what we produce is driven by what we want potential customers to hear rather than customer needs.  Once created, we often make our content difficult to access where customers are.

But the greatest sin may be to create content without a solid, data-oriented strategy and performance metrics for measuring results.  This leads to content that’s disconnected from business strategies, content that’s doomed to fail in its communication and doomed to waste money as well.

Another mistake is to flood the zone with content rather than delivering a more focused, deliberate message.  Randy Frisch: Co-Founder, CMO, and President of Uberflip observes, “Many organizations believed if they simply created content, people would come. You know like Kevin Costner in ‘Field of Dreams’”.  All of which goes back to the first point: know your audience and then target them with your message.  Source: MarTech Advisor

There’s a conflict between the needs of search optimization and the needs of other content marketing.  One of the principles of search engine optimization comes from Google’s algorithm, which favors long articles.  The rule of thumb is that 1,200 word articles tend to land on the first page of results more than shorter articles.

Therefore, building content for the best search result is in conflict with the content needed for most other written content marketing: blogs, social media and influencer content.  They need short heat, short attention span stuff, to be most effective.  Source: Bidwin analysis

It’s time for content marketing to add a level of sophistication that the initial stages have lacked. Just doing a blog or social media is a good start, but only a start.  The next level requires a plan, a content marketing strategy that aligns with your businesses goals, one that applies audience data to the content’s creation.  Both of these strategies lead to better targeting and better results.

To broaden your audience you’ll need to create content both horizontally and vertically.   Creating a blog that’s then used on social media is the horizontal approach, the one most used     A more dynamic content marketing scheme can be created by adding a vertical dimension to the written: video content, podcast content, influencer content and interactive content add the needed verticality.  Working both the horizontal and vertical planes generates modern marketing dynamism.

Then there’s the need to optimize for the growing voice search category.  Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri are becoming a real factor.  Projections forecast that half of all searches will be entered vocally by next year.  The key to optimizing for voice is the “featured snippet,” a short blurb that summarizes the searched content.  It’s tough, it’s like writing a good headline.   Source: Forbes

1. More often people at home have their heads down gazing into their phones as opposed to other activities i.e. watching TV. And the more marketers translate that into their buying patterns, the more they will be shifting budgets from e-mail, out-of-home advertising and direct mail to mobile.
2. Many marketers have gotten buried and distracted by the sheer volume of available data.  2019 will see automation applied to the data, which will release marketers to apply themselves to clearer marketing messages.
3. The trend that has seen technology brought in-house will abate.  The emphasis for 2019 will be on developing internal know-how.
4. Fraud will continue to be an issue.  As we develop technologies and approaches to limit fraud, we are always working on last month’s problem. Fraudsters will find a new way to take advantage of the evolving system.  There will be a never-ending struggle between good and evil in the digital wars.
5. Retargeting existing audiences will continue its expansion given that new audiences are harder to find.  Known, reachable audiences are an easier mark.

Source: martechadvisor.com

One hears much about the use of AI as a tool for more precise audience targeting, as a tool for parsing data down to its narrowest sliver.  But marketers told Blushift in a recent survey that the more dominant use of AI is for audience expansion.  Key to broadening an audience is appealing content, which provides a reason for new people to engage.   And it appears that AI is becoming central to content development as more marketers are finding ways to use it for that purpose.  Source:Business2community.com

• A clue for marketers using mobile advertising in their mix comes from a recent survey that examined bedtime receptivity to mobile ads by demographic.  The simple take away is that older folks are significantly less likely to engage prior to sleep than younger folks.  Rarely, is such a swing seenfrom one generation to another – like the 33% swing from Gen Zers to Boomers.  This insight gives marketers clear audience targeting guidance.  Source: MarketLand

Staying relevant to customers is a marketer’s responsibility. It requires staying on a ball that’s always rolling.  Here are five areas that require attention.

• Voice search is more and more part of standard practice in households with voice assistants like Alexa and for all of us with mobile phones.  It requires your website to be structured with easy-to-read content that a voice assistant or voice searches can easily pick up.
• Many users lean on customer reviews when considering a purchase, make sure you are mindful of what consumers are saying and fix any issues they are identifying.                                                                                                   
• Remember the influence of mobile phones when using video in content or marketing.  They tend to be used vertically making landscape videos less appealing.  Since we tend to develop content on our landscape oriented desktop an adjustment to the increasingly mobile world of portrait video is required.
• Keep your social media activity fresh.  Both content and advertising need to go beyond repetitive if they are to retain consumer interest.
• Chatbots are being successfully used in the sales cycle to walk people through a buying process, as a consumer service platform to get standard questions answered quickly and, in the process, as a means to gather customer information. 

Source: Entrepreneur

• Make sure your recommended content is taxonomy linked, that it expands your native content in a way that’s relevant to your audience.  It’s a key to user engagement.
• Use an outside content recommendation service.  You can do it in-house if you have an editorial staff or the development capability to automate the process.  Both impact the budget.
• Page design counts.  More native is better, less crowded is better too.
• The more connected to your content, the more connection you will make to your audience.
• High quality images are important.  Content without images or with poor quality images send people away.
• A/B Test elements such as position on the page – right panel, left panel, bottom, relative size, number of recommended slots per page, etc.
• Make the distinction between “More from the Web” that just connects the user to an ad and quality recommended content that carries an ad.  The latter is best for engagement and revenue.
• Use content recommendation as a sales tool, either by adding meat to your own site’s information or by recommending relevant, related products.
• Beware of assumptions about your audience if you’re doing content recommendation in-house.  Taxonomy algorithms are best for psyching out the user.
• Just as page design is best when less crowded, pages with to many ad carriers on will have a negative effect on page loading time and drive users away – diminishing returns.

Source: Publishing Executive

If you ask why in-app advertising is today’s sweetheart, this simple graph will provide the answer. All data show that people are more engaged with their mobile devices, and that for many functions, phones are replacing desktops. And when they get to their phones, they are living in their apps and not their browsers.

Advertisers are realizing not merely that the numbers are moving in the mobile direction, but that because apps are narrowly defined, single function programs, they specify the user better than almost any other medium.  The singularity of apps is built for targeted marketers.    Source: Technavio