Marketers are continually seeking innovative ways to enhance their campaigns. Now, with the explosion of Artificial Intelligence (AI), there's never been a better time to dive head-first into this new trend. According to a Harvard Business Review, Marketing is one of the areas that could benefit the most from Artificial Intelligence.
AI technologies are revolutionizing the way Marketers perform tasks, create content, and connect with their audience. When used right, Artificial Intelligence can help Marketers drive higher engagement levels and ultimately, achieve better results. And as a HubSpot user, there are specific AI Marketing tools that are geared towards optimizing your HubSpot database, content, and campaigns.
But with so many new AI functionalities, it's difficult to know where to start. We're here to help! This article will discuss the benefits of Artificial Intelligence for Marketers, show AI tools that work well with HubSpot, and talk you through how to design an AI Marketing strategy.
What is AI Marketing?
According to HubSpot, AI Marketing involves the use of Artificial Intelligence to gain insights into customer behaviour and preferences, ultimately enabling the creation of more targeted and effective content.
The use of Artificial Intelligence in Marketing covers a wide range of functions that vary from generating reports and predictive analytics to refining or even replacing manual tasks (such as writing content). All of this allows Marketers to focus on more important things, like strategy and creativity, while AI takes care of the bulk of the manual, repetitive, and low-level tasks.
Within HubSpot, AI can help you maximize the performance, efficiency, and ROI of Marketing efforts, ensuring that each campaign yields the best possible results.
Top 5 Benefits of Artificial Intelligence for Marketers
There are so many advantages that AI has to offer to businesses. But let's focus on the main AI benefits that you can hope to unlock in your Marketing efforts:
- Save time: 67% of Marketers find the biggest benefit of AI is saving time when it comes to creating content. AI helps us speed up manual tasks—things that take the average Marketer hours to do can be done in a few minutes or hours with AI.
- Idea generation: 48% of Marketers say the biggest advantage of using AI is being able to generate new ideas. For example, AI can help a Marketer obtain key points, create outlines, or even generate a first draft of a blog post or landing page.
- Personalization: 49% of marketers value the ability to create personalized content with data-based information. This means that your content is highly tailored to specific audiences and more likely to be interesting to them.
- Avoid errors: Artificial Intelligence is constantly learning. Its algorithms and machine learning capabilities mean that they make less mistakes than humans.
- Analyze big data: AI is very useful when it comes to conducting research and analyzing large data files. Combining through data and making sense of it is one a Marketer's toughest tasks, and AI is able to do this—and more—very quickly.
Although using AI presents a lot of benefits, we must be careful to use these tools wisely, making sure the information is up-to-date and relevant. Human oversight is essential.
It’s also important to keep in mind that there are many AI tools that serve different purposes, therefore we must select the appropriate tool for each task to execute our Marketing strategy as smoothly as possible.
What are the 4 types of AI Technologies?
When debating which AI tools suit our Marketing strategy best, it’s important to know what tasks we want to refine. According to Persado, AI technologies typically fall into 4 different categories. Below find a description and example of each use case:
- Stand-alone machine-learning apps: These tools work independently and are designed to make decisions or predictions based on patterns that they identify through data analysis. An example of this type of tool is chat ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that is designed to generate human-like text based on the input it receives. It can do a large number of functions including answering questions, generating text or even writing code.
- Integrated machine-learning apps: These apps are also designed to make decisions and predictions, but they are integrated either into another platform, or they depend on an internet connection or synchronized data. thalox is a good example—it's an AI tool for HubSpot that makes predictions about your contact’s future email engagement based on historical data analysis and performs audience segmentation automatically.
- Stand-alone task-automation apps: These apps are designed to simplify repetitive tasks and they don’t require a connection to any other software. Clickup or Trello are good examples—they are project management and productivity tools that allow you to automate tasks like sending notifications and reminders, creating custom workflows, etc.
- Integrated task-automation apps: These tools are also designed to alleviate the work of repetitive tasks, but they need to integrate with other software. As a Marketer, you've probably used Zapier. This automation platform connects different web applications to each other in order to automate your work.
Depending on a company’s needs, they will use one type of technology or another, although it’s quite common for businesses to use a combination of both. Now let's take a deeper look into AI Marketing tools that you can use as a HubSpot Marketer.
What AI tools exist for HubSpot Marketers?
When considering how to design an AI marketing strategy for HubSpot, we need to ensure that the tools we choose not only help with the tasks we need but are also compatible with HubSpot. For this reason, we’ve created a list of different AI tools you can use in your Marketing strategy that will work with the HubSpot platform.
All of the following apps can be integrated with HubSpot. For the technical details or each, check out their descriptions on the HubSpot App Marketplace.
HubSpot AI Tools
HubSpot AI is obvious because it's directly from HubSpot! HubSpot's new AI functionalities make the platform more capable than ever to maximize your Marketing efforts. Its wide range of properties includes:
- Email generator: This tool will provide you with an appropriate first draft just by entering a prompt.
- Website Generator: It's a prompt-based AI that creates your website by asking you questions about your business, allowing you to further customize web pages with a drag-and-drop method.
- Content Generator: Like ChatGPT, this tool creating engaging content for email, blog, and web. It can change its tone of voice and writing style according to your preferences.
- Customer service software: a key AI tool to help you grow your customer base by allowing you to offer a customized service, and it also provides a clear view of your customer’s interaction which can be very valuable feedback.
- ChatSpot: HubSpot calls this its “Swiss army knife” because it does so much! It's a chatbot that you can connect to your CRM records and is designed to help businesses with their Sales and Marketing goals. But goes further, writing blog posts, looking up keywords, generating images, etc.
As you can see, HubSpot’s main AI services revolve around content creation and task automation, so there are still quite a few gaps that need to be filled. For this reason, let's explore other interesting AI tools that could help you in your Marketing strategy:
AI Tools for Scoring
Thalox: We already mentioned thalox above, but it fills a necessary gap in the HubSpot ecosystem by improving upon predictive lead scoring. Thalox does predictive engagement scoring based on contacts past data and activities, providing you with 3 segmented HubSpot lists. This type of tool can be used to tailor email campaigns, increase your conversion rate, make decisions on whether to clean or re-engage contacts, and more!
Other AI tools that are useful for lead scoring are DRIFT & Zoominfo.
AI Tools for Conversation Intelligence
Gong: Gong is an AI-powered sales conversation analytics platform designed to help sales teams improve their communication and close deals more effectively. It uses machine learning algorithms to analyze sales calls, meetings, and emails to provide insights and recommendations.
Another interesting Conversation Intelligence platform to look at is Chorus.
AI Tools for Analytics
FullStory: FullStory is a comprehensive customer experience analytics tool that allows businesses to capture, analyze, and visualize user interactions on their digital platforms. It records user sessions, providing insights into how visitors navigate and engage with websites and applications.
- It provides detailed insights into how users interact with a website or app.
- It allows marketers to watch recorded user sessions, providing a first-hand view of how visitors interact with the site.
- It analyses the conversion funnel allowing marketers to pinpoint drop-off points in the funnel.
Other AI tools for Marketing Analytics include Tableau, Funnel.io & Crayon.
Once we have combed through all the options and chosen the AI tools that best fit our needs, it’s time to implement them in our Marketing Strategy. Don't go about this in an unorganized way—you need a roadmap to success.
5 steps for how to design an AI Marketing Strategy
When thinking about how to design an AI marketing strategy successfully, it’s important to put together a plan and follow a series of steps.
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Have clear KPI’s in mind
Define specific objectives for incorporating AI, whether it's increasing lead generation, improving customer engagement, or boosting conversion rates. Clear goals serve as a compass, guiding your AI Marketing strategy.
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Identify AI use cases
Once you have set clear goals for your Marketing strategy, the next step is identifying the AI tools that help with these objectives and which ones you are going to use on which tasks.
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Map out the workflow for each tool’s use
Understand the intricacies of each AI tool's process flow. Determine where AI takes the reins and where human intervention is required. This may involve configuring models, setting up automation, and defining triggers for human involvement.
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Review the work generated by AI
Human oversight is essential, especially during the initial stages of AI implementation. Regularly review and validate the outputs generated by AI to ensure they align with your expectations and objectives.
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Measure impact and ROI
Continuously monitor and evaluate the performance of your AI-powered initiatives. In this step, it’s particularly interesting to create HubSpot reports and dashboards to have an overall view of your outcome. This will allow you to visualize what parts of your Marketing strategy were the most and the least effective. You will also be able to compare results against previous benchmarks to assess the effectiveness and return on investment of your AI marketing strategy.
3 Use Cases for AI in Marketing
To visualize the benefits and uses of AI in Marketing, we've taken 3 common examples of how AI can cover the needs of Marketers. This will help you better understand how others are using AI and reflect back on your own areas for improvement. Take a look:
- Chatbots for Personalized Customer Interaction: AI Chatbots can handle customer inquiries in real time on websites or messaging platforms. For example, ChatSpot is a conversational AI tool that will help you with prospecting, writing content, analyzing your website’s SEO and much more. Additionally, if you connect ChatSpot to HubSpot, you will be able to create reports and complete record actions based on the data in your CRM.
- Content Creation and Curation for Targeted Messaging: When we talk about any content creation AI, whether it’s HubSpot’s own or an external tool, it’s undeniable how much it speeds up Marketers writing process. Input your title idea or outline and it will generate a basic first draft for you to work off. With HubSpot’s AI Assistant, you can generate targeted messaging through social captions and emails or engaging content for blog posts, social media, landing pages, etc.
- Automated Database Segmentation: The thalox tool integrates seamlessly with HubSpot and generates rapid predictions about customer engagement, automatically segmenting your contacts into 3 HubSpot lists. This allows you to have instant information about your audience and saves you time doing manual database analysis and email list building. Increased segmentation means you can make your Marketing campaigns more personalized, tailored, and engaging.
By leveraging AI-powered tools and strategies within HubSpot, Marketers can not only streamline their processes, but also unlock new levels of personalization and effectiveness in their campaigns.
As Artificial Intelligence continues to evolve, it will undoubtedly play an even more pivotal role in the future of Marketing, reshaping how brands connect with their audience. So, take the plunge, explore the world of AI-driven Marketing, and watch your campaigns soar to new heights. We've given you the roadmap, now it's up to you to take the first step.