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Branding is the marketing practice a company uses to define how it wishes to be perceived. It is a common way to differentiate one’s company from its competitors using a personalized name, a logo, a website, etc.
These past few decades, African businesses have developed and expanded their brands. Companies use it now in every in-person and online interaction between them and their customers. To stay ahead of competitors, some businesses started to use Artificial intelligence in their branding. As we defined in our previous article, Artificial Intelligence is a technology that enables a computer to think or act in a more ‘human’ way. Big companies like Google, IBM or Amazon use the technology to interact with their clients or do marketing forecasts. But is using AI, a technology that just started to trend these recent years, a benefit for a company brand? how could AI have an impact on the way customers perceive a company? Is Artificial Intelligence the future of branding? We will answer those questions in this article.
AI in Customer Service
Customer experience is a sector where companies give a lot of regards since it is much simpler to retain your current clients happier than finding regularly new ones. It is also one of the areas where AI has progressed the most in Africa and in the world with the introduction of AI Chatbots.
An AI chatbot is a program that can simulate a conversation (or a chat) with a user in natural language through messaging applications, websites, mobile apps or through the telephone. A chatbot is programmed to work independently from a human operator. It can answer questions formulated to it in natural language and respond like a real person. It provides responses based on a combination of predefined scripts and machine learning applications.
Companies, using AI Chatbots, not only improve relationships with their target audience but also increase brand reputation, raise customer trust and much more.
Additionally, The use of AI Chatbots allows businesses to save costs. According to IBM, companies can save up to 30% of costs by using chatbots for customer service. In Africa, we can name several famous companies that created their own chatboxes:
- Leo – UBA Group: Launched in 2018 in South Africa, Leo is a program that allows bank customers to have access to a selection of banking services (account opening, loan applications, account balance checking, etc) through WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
- ChatBanking – Barclays Africa (Absa): Barclays Africa introduces ChatBanking to its customers to assist them in their banking procedures while answering their questions.
AI is not only used to communicate with an audience. It can be used to anticipate clients’needs and provide better customer experience with what we called Social Listening. Based on customer online interests and interactions, Social Listening creates for businesses detailed customer profiling. It helps businesses:
- to recommend personalized products/services to clients,
- to know where and when is the right time to create successful sales promotions,
- to Use Send Time Optimization to Deliver Emails
So, AI helps companies to expand their brand and improve customers’ journey with technologies like Chatbots and Social Listening. They are changing the way businesses interact with clients.
AI in Digital Marketing
Artificial Intelligence remodels digital marketing with businesses and marketers being able to collect data from their social media campaigns, analyze them, and then react to those data. Then, they can make key decisions about where they assign their budgets and who they target. As a result, brands can reduce digital advertising waste and ensure that their spend delivers the best possible results. A few cases of how AI changes the future of digital marketing.
Email Marketing
Email Marketing Campaigns generated via Artificial Intelligence helps business brands to send pertinent and customized emails according to user needs and behavior. This practice boosts campaign results with emails sent to inboxes with subjects, recommendations and messaging chosen carefully to fit customer demands. The AI helps the digital marketer to reach the right client at the right time with the relevant message boosting at the same time engagement in his platforms.
Advertising
The use of AI in advertising is already popular worldwide with companies like Facebook, eBay or Etsy using it to analyze their users’ information (Age, Interests, Demographics, etc). Marketers use that information to strategize and plan their advertising campaigns. Additionally, AI Technology can predict trends via machine learning. Using algorithms and a series of different factors (clicks, views, time-on-page), marketers can predict which trends have the most chances to be global. Google Ads is a good example.
Personalized Content
It is sometimes difficult for companies to engage their broad clientele with content that would satisfy all of them. Each is particular and requires personalized attention. Thanks to AI, you can detect what content is most useful, based on the habit of targeted customers, allowing you to recommend products and promote content marketing that gets results. Apps as Google Analytics, for example, allow you to have statistics and reports about how customers react to your campaign: the time spent on your pages, which keywords are recurrent in your search bar, etc.
AI in Voice-Search SEO and Web Development
Artificial intelligence has already started influencing web development with the recent rise of web designing apps. A platform like Grid uses AI to create attractive and resourceful websites without the need for developers. The application creates banners, call-to-action, galleries and many more features based on the settings entered by the creator. Grid and other AIs help businesses to save cost and time in their website development process.
Additionally, Artificial Intelligence makes it easy for people to make research on the internet by speaking into a mobile or tablet. With voice-search apps like Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple’s Siri, it becomes easier to find a restaurant or find the closest hospital, etc. But it is important to remember that voice search SEO and traditional website SEO are different. As more and more people use voice search apps to search online, investing in it would improve businesses’ brand awareness, get an advantage of the competition and increase revenue.
Therefore, with Artificial Intelligence in branding, businesses increase their profit values, generates new customers and creates trust within the marketplace. While it gets your brand recognize, AI helps companies to:
- be more efficient
- save time and money
- achieve epic breakthroughs
For all these reasons, AI is the future of branding. Big companies in the US and Europe have already started adopting Artificial Intelligence for their branding campaigns and with their incredible success percentage, more and more businesses will too in the future.
