How AI Marketing Assistants Transform Operations

You can hardly turn around in the modern world without facing some form of artificial intelligence. These days, AI runs moderation on social media, spellcheck, smart homes, banking, and even our customer service interactions for businesses of all sizes.

But while AI's impact is everywhere, one of its most intriguing advancements lies in marketing. In this article, we’ll explore how AI marketing assistants are reshaping this field, and why they are becoming essential tools for businesses.

What Defines As an AI Marketing Assistant Today?

According to Cognizant, an AI marketing assistant involves AI-driven techniques and tools like data models, algorithms, and machine learning to generate customer insights to help marketers optimize their budget, tailor content, and personalize the customer experience throughout their journey. These tools include anything from a customer-facing chatbot, image recognition, or recommendation engines, as well as operational enhancements such as ad targeting, data analysis, and dynamic pricing.

The lure of AI marketing assistants for multi-location businesses may appear obvious:

• improved efficiency for day-to-day tasks

• an efficient investment in the long-term operations

• AI-enhanced customer experiences

• capabilities to analyze the troves of data available

So AI marketing assistants are transforming the way businesses engage with customers, offering smarter, more personalized experiences that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

The Relationships Between AI-Driven Interactions and Customer Expectations

AI-driven interactions continue to proliferate across the customer lifecycle as consumers turn more demanding and more discerning.

“Utilizing emerging technologies like AI has broken new ground in providing personalized services to our customers,” writes Jean-Baptiste Hironde for Forbes. “This predictive power has revolutionized product recommendations and customer service interactions, providing a level of personalization that boosts customer satisfaction, influences purchasing decisions and enhances customer engagement.”

Current Examples of AI Marketing Assistants

Take your humble customer helpdesk for example. Today’s customer demands support 24/7/365, well beyond the scope of working hours. More and more businesses turned to chatbots and large language models (LLMs) to provide that round-the-clock support without adding larger pools of on-call human resources.

Then there’s the recommendation engines that drive upselling in retail, where AI plays a pivotal role in purchasing decisions throughout the online shopping experience. Marketers also need to consider the long-heralded arrival of AI search, no doubt on a course to impact your local SEO strategy.

Common Technologies of AI Marketing Assistants

AI technologies such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML) and predictive analytics enable businesses to go much deeper in learning about customer behavior. With these insights in hand, AI marketing assistants offer predictors of what customers want before they even know it themselves, bringing about more tailored customer experiences.

Large Language Models (LLMs) also afford chatbots a more human feel, with tailored responses that build upon large collections of previous interactions, so their automated process comes across more like a conversation than selecting from a menu of pre-programmed items.

Customers want to feel understood and valued, and that can take significant resources to achieve. Marketing team traditionally struggled to personalize the brand experience for every potential customer around the clock. AI marketing assistants proved so enticing because they enable that customer experience while increasing efficiency for marketing operations rather than overloading their teams.

Key Tools and AI Marketing Assistants For Multi-Location Businesses

Which AI marketing assistants make the most sense for multi-location businesses? With a myriad of AI tools available, what are the key AI tools revolutionizing marketing today, from automation to personalization? Let’s consider the headliners.

Automated Responses to Customer Reviews

Given that 98% of customers read online reviews before visiting a local business, it pays to attend not only to what your customers say online about their experience with your brand, but also what they read in your responses to those comments. Deploying AI-enabled review management tools grants you full control over your reputation, where you can read, analyze, and respond to local reviews across the web, all from a single, integrated platform.

Social Media Content Creation and Templates

The power of AI ushered in a new era of social media management, with content recommendations, personalized messaging, data-driven insights, and automated scheduling all coming to the fore. But AI marketing assistants for social media go beyond scheduling and insights; they can also optimize your tone of voice design process, influence audience engagement, and create tightly-controlled post templates for your local marketers to adapt.

AI-Driven Ad Targeting and Audience Segmentation

Estimates of the global AI market came in at over $196 billion in 2023, projected to grow at a CAGR of 36.6% from 2024 to 2030, with profound and far-reaching impacts on advertising, says Ten26 Media. Many marketers embraced AI-driven advertising years ago, with tools like programmatic that automate the buying and selling of ad space in real time, optimizing ad placements based on data-driven insights. Now the advertising world seems most excited about the targeting and personalization delivered by AI marketing assistants.

Advertising, after all, functions best when we understand our audiences. NLP in turn enables machines to understand, interpret, and generate human writing. NLP-based LLMs provide for scaling sentiment analysis, digesting consumer feedback, and optimizing ad copy. AI even allows local marketers to dive deeper in their audience understanding, as the future of location marketing moves beyond demographic segmentation and towards more accurate targeting that reflects real-time changes in buyer behavior.

Chatbots and Customer Service Assistants

Enhancements led to chatbot quality improving in leaps and bounds. AI agents now process complex conversations, no longer resigned to serving up help center indexes alone. Using chatbots can reduce wait times, improve response accuracy, and distribute conversations more effectively. Zendesk says that, depending on your business’s automation needs, generative AI chatbots can resolve more than 80% of customer issues independently.

Consider the Ethical and Legal Challenges Before Deploying an AI Marketing Assistant

Despite all the potential of AI marketing assistants, you should head into this brave new world with your eyes wide open. AI brings its own challenges, both ethical and legal, especially if you operate in the European Union, with the EU AI Act on the horizon and new regulations expected no later than 2026.

Consumers increasingly feel they ought to look at the privacy implications of these tailored customer experiences and the amount of personal data they leave behind in their digital footprint. Many consumers simply refuse to trade data privacy for convenience and personalization, so relying solely on AI marketing assistants will likely prove an overly risky strategy in the long run.

The essential point: make your data privacy policies clear to consumers. One McKinsey survey found 85% of consumers want to know a company’s data policies and 72% want to know its AI policies before buying its products or services. More than that, almost half will consider switching brands when a company fails to clarify their data practices, with many exclusively willing to buy from companies known to protect consumer data. Leaning on multiple external vendors for your AI marketing assistants opens you up to all of their reputations in the eyes of your customers.

There’s also the matter of bias in AI. Humans train these models, after all, so human error can introduce inadvertent human biases. These tools also learn from their interactions with the public, so without proper maintenance, they risk contamination from inappropriate language. In order to mitigate the risks of bias in AI for customer experience (CX), make sure you hire diverse and sensitive teams while prioritizing privacy and security. Trying to eliminate human interactions can introduce serious difficulties, as can discounting minority viewpoints. The model’s biases reflect the ways everyone interacts with it, from your staff to your customers.

Beyond these tech-based challenges, consider this: deploying AI marketing bots and automation without proper support can result in the loss of that human touch people crave. Even before the advent of ChatGPT, plenty of consumers expressed their frustration when they could not speak to another human being. While chatbots have come a long way, they remain a good way off from replicating that touch. Make sure not to rely solely on an AI marketing assistant for CX: design a back-up plan for customer service, and make sure a human carefully guides the process, with someone ready to step in when a customer needs an actual hand.

AI Marketing Assistants Can Help Businesses Engage With Customers More Effectively

With all that said, AI marketing assistants not only streamline your marketing operations for improved efficiency, they also free your local marketers to focus on strategic work with greater impacts.

AI-powered customer experience amplifies the capabilities and limitations of AI, leading to fundamental transformations in customer behavior. Yet on the customer experience side of operations, those capabilities allow you to build stronger connections with customers through tailored experiences that more readily meet individual needs.

Uberall’s AI marketing assistants, partnered with an unmatched user experience, round out an expanding all-in-one platform for managing local marketing. Multi-location marketing leaders looking for a competitive edge should consider all of these capabilities—if you want to excel in your market, wherever your market is.

With intelligent workflow automation, creative engagement on demand, and AI-powered analytics, Uberall’s AI marketing assistants can transform marketing operations. Get in touch and request a demo to see how Uberall can help your local marketing team to elevate productivity and seamlessly achieve unparalleled performance.