Excelling during an era of frugality and high expectations requires digital marketers to be accountable for every dollar -- without compromising a campaign's performance. This ROI focus will force agencies to reevaluate how campaigns are handled internally. To improve effectiveness, we will see an increased dependence on automation. These advancements in automation technologies and recent shifts in users' privacy perceptions have created a window for marketers to use artificial intelligence to run efficient campaigns.
Automation and efficiency
Tracking user behavior and striving for contextually relevant placements is not new to digital marketers. Behavioral and contextual targeting tactics are used to serve pertinent messages to users. With the help of automation, these techniques provide media teams the chance to focus on the campaign at large instead of worrying about individual placements. From an ROI perspective, these types of targeting tactics encourage marketers to reach qualified users and secure placements relating to on-page content -- all of which help marketers stretch clients' budgets, ensure every advertisement counts, and elicit higher conversion rates. Everyone is happy.
Especially when dealing with highly targeted and large-scale implementations, agencies need to streamline internal processes using automation so teams can be most effective. Time spent on the front end is well worth it. When campaigns are correctly set up from the beginning, analytics data are comprehensive and complete, thereby driving proactive and effective improvements. Overall, campaigns are more efficient because key performance indicators are reconciled against accurate, timely campaign results.
Outside of media campaigns, there are additional opportunities for marketers to automate their efforts, minimize hands-on resources, and maximizing output. One example is the automation of analytics dashboards. By establishing thresholds for key performance indicators, analytics professionals are notified of peaks or low points, which enables them to make timely optimization tweaks -- without 24-hour monitoring.
Artificial intelligence
Thanks to the success of behavioral and contextual targeting, companies are now going a step further to explore the use of artificial intelligence. According to Wikipedia, artificial intelligence is the "study and design of intelligent agents where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximize its chances of success." In terms of advertising, artificial intelligence extrapolates established user behavior to predict likely future online behavior. The main difference between artificial intelligence and behavioral targeting is that behavioral targeting takes past patterns and applies it to the future. Behavioral targeting is like a review mirror, where as artificial intelligence constantly evolves and prioritizes behavior to make better recommendations over time.
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