The new-age Digital Marketing challenges and role of AI

Digital marketing with the power of AI is influencing our decisions. You might have experienced, but never noticed. You searched for one product or service and started getting different ads, related to the same. This is done by collecting the data and then pushing relevant ads. AI has slowly become the backbone of digital marketing.

CiOL spoke to Sanjay Mehta, Joint CEO of Mirum India, to understand how digital marketing is utilising emerging technologies.

The role of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence greatly assists in digital marketing. Once upon a time, we used to create one brand story for a billion people. Now AI allows very thin slicing and dicing (basis past consumer behaviour and that too at scale), so we can actually create like a billion stories for a billion people, keeping the brand narrative intact.

Let’s understand this with one example, for instance, a new movie is about to release, based on the pre-release buzz, a person gets sense whether it will be a hit or not.

On the other hand, if you put together the analytics and AI to analyse the impact of the movie. AI can help you to predict its success or failure. The same can be implemented on a new product launch.

The future of digital marketing

Repetitive tasks that need to happen at scale, and in real-time…for these tasks, the industry will use AI technologies. AI will help in personalisation when it comes to digital marketing.

Normally what used to happen that we put a banner on the websites and whomsoever is visiting the website can see your advertisement. However, all the visitors may not be your desired audience. Suppose you are a company offering Gillette razors you don't want everybody to be your audience.

And when AI powers the programmatic advertising, which is also a part of digital advertising, it tracks different visitors on the web and shows the advertisement to the right audience.

The next big wave – Voice search

When the digital was not in the queue, the company would make brochures or material and that would last for many years without any changes but today the change is happing all over the place. But nowadays, a lot of changes are happening quite quickly. The website's content needs to be voice friendly.

Right now, websites are not optimised for voice search and we are okay with top rankings on search results. But in voice search if you search anything, it will not give 10 results, it will return with an appropriate page. From optimization point of view also, if somebody asked that they are searching for Chinese foods, it can’t be one out of 10, it would have to be first if you are expecting people to conclude the search.

A lot of scenes happening in terms of voice optimization. You need to be ready for voice commands and many things. The industry in India is expanding, the shift is happening from the first 200 and 300 billion internet users. Now in the affordable sets of users are now coming on the internet definitely people for whom English is not their own language.

A lot of people will be comfortable in their own languages like Hindi, Gujarati or Marathi, etc., so there are different types of users coming now. Brands and companies need make sure that their content is available in multiple languages. Now if the brand doesn’t adapt to the changing region then they would really have a problem.