Advertising & AI: The Smart Way To Boost Engagement & Drive Sales In CPG & Retail
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It’s no secret that the retail and CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) industries are some of the most competitive in the world. The retail market alone is expected to be worth more than $47.24 trillion by 2029. Plus, the number of competitors worldwide is increasing, thanks to emerging trends in the ecommerce and mobile shopping sectors.
The right advertising strategies are critical to boosting brand awareness, conversions, and retention rates for any organization. Unfortunately, creating cost-effective and powerful marketing strategies isn’t easy. The good news? Combining advertising and AI could be the answer.
Cutting-edge AI tools can help you to leverage data, insights, and automation strategies that improve customer experiences, increase conversion rates, and reduce marketing costs.
Combining AI and Advertising: The Benefits for Retail & CPG
Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing countless processes in the retail and CPG space. It helps companies to optimize supply chains and inventory management, deliver consistent customer service, and even conduct market research. However, connecting advertising and AI could deliver some of the biggest benefits for today’s growing companies.
Already, over 60% of marketers are using AI to automate, enhance, and personalize advertising campaigns. Used correctly, intelligent algorithms can
- Provide valuable insights into customers: AI is incredible at analyzing huge volumes of customer data, helping you to create more specific segments for your advertising campaigns. AI tools can help you tailor marketing strategies to different groups, and determine which strategies will increase conversion rates.
- Improve customer experiences: With AI to help you create more personalized journeys for your target audience, you can improve the experience buyers have with your brand. Some AI tools can even automatically suggest relevant products to customers based on their buying history. Happier customers leads to higher retention rates and conversions.
- Optimize advertising spend: AI solutions can help you to determine where you should be spending your advertising budget, based on analysis of previous campaigns and results. It can even help you automatically place bids for PPC campaigns, or predict potential ad performance before you launch campaigns.
- Save retailers time and effort: Advanced AI solutions can now automate various aspects of the advertising process. They can create content (from text to images) for PPC and SEO strategies, or social media campaigns. They can even automatically optimize your marketing messages based on insights into your target audience.
6 Effective Ways to Combine Advertising and AI
Today’s retailers and CPG brands are still uncovering new ways to use advertising and AI solutions together. As new algorithms and platforms emerge, the opportunities for AI in advertising will only continue to increase. Here are some of the best ways to get started with AI in advertising.
- Use AI for Advanced Insights
The right data is the key to building powerful advertising campaigns. In fact, more than 40% of companies plan to increase their spend on data-driven marketing in the years ahead. However, without a team of data scientists on your team, it can be difficult to determine how to collect and use the data you need effectively.
AI solutions are incredibly useful here. Intelligent analytical platforms help you to develop more comprehensive customer profiles, and segment your audience into smaller groups based on their pain points, goals, preferences, and demographics. The right systems can even analyze data from various touchpoints, to give you an end-to-end view of the customer journey.
Beyond helping you to better understand your customers, AI solutions can give you a behind-the-scenes look at your competitors too. They can gather data on competitor performance benchmarks, and even what customers say about other businesses. This gives you a chance to find ways to differentiate yourself in a cluttered market, and target under-served customer groups.
- Use AI for Personalized Advertising
71% of customers now expect personalized experiences from every brand they interact with. However, even with access to robust customer segments and profiles, making sure your customers get a unique experience every time they interact with your company isn’t easy.
Once again, artificial intelligence can help with this. With AI, you can create dynamic content campaigns and send messages to customers based on specific factors, such as their location, age range, or previous purchasing behaviors.
For instance, Starbucks leveraged the GENESISX platform with integrated AI to create highly personalized mobile journeys for a specific group of customers. The platform used advanced algorithms to identify customers based on their proximity to certain stores, and leveraged quizzes to direct customers towards the right purchase options, increasing sales by 15%.
- Streamline Content Creation with AI for Advertising
Although it’s important to be cautious about relying solely on AI for content development, AI tools are excellent at scaling the production of engaging marketing messages. Today’s generative AI tools, from ChatGPT and Jasper, to MidJourney, can help retailers and CPG companies to create everything from PPC ad copy to email marketing campaigns and social media posts.
Though most solutions can’t generate exceptional content alone, they can give you access to additional resources you need to optimize your advertising content. AI tools can create briefs for content writers, images for social posts, and even simple videos.
With the right tools, you can significantly reduce the time and money involved in creating comprehensive advertising campaigns. You can even use AI to generate variations of different ad strategies for specific audiences, allowing you to A/B test campaigns more efficiently.
- Use AI to Improve SEO
Increasing visibility in the digital world with Search Engine Optimization techniques is far from simple. The algorithms companies like Google use to determine how content is displayed to consumers are constantly changing. Plus, there are various factors that can contribute to your SEO results, from your use of keywords, to the way you leverage backlinks.
Although AI can’t manage your entire SEO strategy for you, it can give you more of the resources you need to improve your visibility. AI-powered tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs can help you identify which terms to target based on the information customers are looking for.
AI-powered technical SEO solutions can examine your current retail website, looking for issues that might harm your rankings, such as broken links. Plus, AI can help you monitor the results of your SEO strategies, helping you make intelligent decisions about future campaigns.
- Augment your Advertising Team with AI
As mentioned above, AI still can’t replace the entire advertising team for a retail or CPG company. However, AI tools can augment and support your human resources. In the retail landscape, AI solutions can offer marketing teams insights into trends, and forecast potential purchasing patterns, to help them determine which products and services to promote.
AI solutions can assist teams with discovering the best times to publish content or purchase ads, based on buyer preferences and historical data. They can even automate the process of proactively connecting with customers. For instance, intelligent bots can reach out to previous buyers through your website, social media, or messaging apps with information on new products and deals.
This can significantly increase your conversion rates, and boosts your ability to maintain the engagement of your target audience over time.
- Use AI to Optimize PPC Advertising
Finally, paid advertising campaigns across channels like Google, Facebook, and Instagram are still crucial for retail companies looking to increase sales and customer engagement. Most digital advertising exchanges and platforms already use artificial intelligence to determine how ads should be shown to specific customers based on their digital journey.
With that in mind, it makes sense to leverage AI yourself when you’re investing in a paid advertising campaign. With artificial intelligence, you can identify exactly how much you should be spending on certain ad campaigns, where you should place your advertisements, and even how long you should be running promotions for.
AI can help you make the most of your marketing spend, ensuring you get the best return on investment from every PPC campaign you implement. That means lower customer acquisition costs, and higher profits for retail brands.
Unlock the Power of Advertising and AI
The relationship between advertising and AI solutions for retail and CPG companies will only continue toe volve in the years ahead. As AI and machine learning solutions become more advanced, they’re introducing new ways for companies to reduce customer acquisition costs, increase conversions, and deliver personalized experiences to buyers.
At GENESISX, our intuitive customer engagement platform leverages the latest cutting-edge artificial intelligence solutions to help businesses create dynamic, engaging mobile journeys for customers. With our platform, leading businesses can create highly targeted campaigns that deliver a massive increase in conversion rates, customer engagement, and loyalty.
Learn more about how you can implement the power of AI into your advertising strategies by contacting the GENESISX team today.
Feature image from Pexels
