Obtaining useful and accurate data is the core of any good marketer's job. Then being able to effectively analyze and monitor the performance of a campaign throughout its life is vital to determining what works and what doesn't. 

While traditional methods like reviewing click-through and buy rates are still the cornerstones of data analysis, many organizations are realizing the need to get creative and are turning increasingly to AI solutions to add that little something extra.

Today we'll walk you through why this is needed and how AI could revolutionize the way we make marketing decisions in 2021.

Customers Are Getting Savvier

There's no question that the average customer today is bombarded by ads and commercials, whether it's online, on TV, or through targeted email campaigns. The public is getting better at cutting through the noise and traditional campaigns seem to become less effective year on year.

Good marketing should be about connecting with the customer and offering them something that they personally value. Many organizations have been left scratching their heads, wondering why people aren't clicking or why no conversions are coming through.

Why Is AI Important?

AI not only helps quickly segment your customers by age, taste, income, region, and spending habits, but it also makes it easier to get insights from this information. It allows marketers to pull together data from multiple sources like social media, emails, and review sites and start to look for key trends. AI can then go deeper than this, predicting customer behavior and sending out automated follow-up content that engages users. 

Ways That AI Can Help

Organizations need to look at advertising campaigns as a whole using not only media metrics but also creative assets performance analysis. AI platforms allow us to look at every aspect of the exercise including separate performance monitoring of banner ads, videos, images, emails, and social media clicks. The analysis is done in real-time too so you can immediately see what's working and what isn't.

AI tech can go even further, analyzing details like what types of text is getting engagement, how color affects your ad success, and what sort of sounds customers are responding to.

Once you've collected all this data, it can be difficult to know where to start building a new campaign, but there are a whole host of practical uses you can put it to. We've outlined just a few of them below.

It Can Streamline Creative Production

Once you've pinned down the successful elements of each campaign, you can easily replicate something similar for your next one. Say, for example, you found the perfect style of animation that did really well with the 18-35 demographic, you can easily use it as the basis of a new email marketing exercise. 

What's more, AI can help you detect 'creative fatigue' and let you know where you might be overusing a specific idea and need to mix things up again. This in turn allows you to create living, breathing, and reactive campaigns.

Decisions Start to Become Automated

Once your AI tool really gets going and has built up a large data set of your customers, you can start to trust it to make some of the decisions for you. Marketers shouldn't be worried about losing their jobs to the machines quite yet, though, as this new technology largely takes out the repetitive element of analysis that used to take us humans a long time to complete. This leaves you with even more time to get creative on your campaigns that really resonate.

It Can Help With Sales Forecasting

Building up an accurate picture of effective campaigns lets you build a much more accurate picture of future potential sales. By analyzing email responses, clicks, and engagement over the course of months, and even years, your AI will build up a clear understanding of what to expect going forward. 

What the Future Holds

We're still only really at the early stages of what AI's capable of. With a glut of marketing companies out there and the public subject to a daily bombardment of ads, AI's going to give organizations the edge needed to beat the competition. 

Technology is evolving at a lightning-fast pace, and the earlier people adopt it, the further ahead they'll be. However, one important thing to remember before you get started is that you need to gain the trust of your customer. Be honest and transparent in relation to how you handle their data and always make sure to educate them on the benefits to them of AI.