artificial intelligence in marketing

HubSpot just announced another artificial intelligence acquisition, confirming our assessment that the company is making a major play in AI. Last time, HubSpot acquired Kemvi to augment sales reps with artificial intelligence. This time, the company has acquired Motion AI, a leading creator of chatbots. Reports HubSpot Chief Strategy Officer Bradford Coffey: “At HubSpot, we study human behavior and then build products to match the way modern buyers shop, learn, and communicate. Observing how people discovered content via search in Google was our first big insight and it formed the foundation what we’d eventually call ‘inbound marketing’. Later, having observed how people consumed content they’d subscribed to, we moved aggressively into marketing automation. In the last few years we’ve observed a new behavior: The rise of messaging and chat.” Motion AI helps customers build their own chatbots without technical skills, and manage those bots at scale. VentureBeat reports the company has more than 34,000 customers.

“Can we automate content creation using artificial intelligence? More specifically, can we use machines to write blog posts at scale?” These are the questions we sought to answer in spring 2015 when I launched an internal initiative named Project Copyscale at my content marketing agency, PR 20/20. I’d had a growing fascination with artificial intelligence since IBM Watson won on Jeopardy! in 2011. I didn’t understand the underlying technology at the time, but when I read Automate This by Christopher Steiner in late 2012 I became convinced that artificial intelligence would transform marketing as we know it. It was only a matter of time. “Some algorithms’ roots trace to the field of artificial intelligence. They may not be intelligent and self-aware like Hal 9000 (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer), the machine from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), but algorithms can evolve. They observe, experiment, and learn—all independently of their human creators. Using advanced computer science techniques such as machine learning and neural networking, algorithms can even create new and improved algorithms based on observed results.” — Christopher Steiner, Automated This (Penguin Group, 2012)

Marketers hear a lot about artificial intelligence (AI) these days. But how do you actually start using it? One big use case is lead generation and qualification. After all, the best AI systems excel at surfacing insights from large datasets. Some AI can use your marketing data to tell you more about your prospects and customers. Others use that data to find new prospects or recommend existing leads to pursue. In this post, we look at some useful AI marketing tools designed to find you more and better leads. We've organized the post by use cases, with individual tools described and linked.

Marketers need to prepare themselves for artificial intelligence. These technologies make machines smart, and they're going to change marketing forever. While the size of that change is uncertain, most commentators agree it'll be big.

Email marketing's death has been greatly exaggerated, especially if you're a B2B marketer. A full 77% of B2B marketers use email in their marketing mix says Content Marketing Institute. In fact, 91% rate email as a key piece of content marketing success. In that case, B2B marketers need to check out artificial intelligence (AI). Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines smart, to enhance human activities. AI powers everything from Amazon recommendations to self-driving cars. And forward-thinking marketers are using it to better create, optimize, and send emails.In this post, you'll learn why AI makes email marketing more effective. You'll also learn which tools exist that you can use starting today to boost performance.

We’ll be honest with you. We’re pumped the business world finds artificial intelligence as compelling as we do. (Google Trends shows interest in AI terms jumping up over the past five years.) We only wish there was a little less hype—and a little more substance and inquiry—when people talk about AI.