AI Applications

An AI application is a tool or platform that completely or partially uses artificial intelligence (AI) to carry out tasks.

Artificial intelligence is when machines (like computers) perform tasks by thinking like humans would. These machines learn by reading and processing large datasets, using this information to make decisions.

Take ChatGPT, a tool that uses AI technology to respond to users’ prompts and questions.

ChatGPT read and digested a wide range of data, including books, newspapers, and content scraped from the world wide web.

Next, human trainers showed ChatGPT how text works alongside other different types of text. This meant ChatGPT could quickly determine patterns and relationships, including which words and sentences would follow each other in a response.

As AI apps gather and learn from more data, they become smarter. This means AI tools can perform more complicated tasks with more accuracy over time.

How Are AI Applications Changing Digital Marketing?
Did you know 51 percent of marketers use AI, with 22 percent planning to use it soon?

AI and digital marketing go together like hot dogs and mustard. AI applications can help you:

Make decisions faster
Brainstorm ideas
Improve your content
Identify patterns and trends
Provide better customer service

AI applications can also free up your time so you can focus on more strategic work. According to Salesforce, digital marketers estimate that AI helps them save over five hours a week.

Finding the Right AI Application for Your Needs
AI technology has evolved at a rapid pace over the last few years. For example, ChatGPT was only launched in November 2022; by January 2023, it had already reached over 100 million monthly users!

As a result, there are now thousands of AI applications for digital marketing teams to take advantage of.

While it can be tempting to sign up for them all, I recommend focusing on a handful of applications that best suit your needs. Here’s what to consider:

Budget. Some applications are low-cost and no-cost, while others are more expensive.
Purpose. Not all AI apps have the same functionality. We’ll look at the different ways you can use AI in a moment.
Location. Some countries disallow specific AI tools. For example, ChatGPT is currently unavailable in Russia, China, Italy, Syria, Iran, Cuba, and North Korea.
Scalability. Will your AI application grow and change as your business does?

Integration. Some AI tools seamlessly integrate with your other applications. Take Zapier, for example, which uses AI to connect apps and services together, automating repetitive tasks.
Here are some of my favorites and how you can use them to drive your digital marketing forward.

SEO Optimization
SEO can be tough, especially if you work in a highly competitive industry like insurance or real estate. AI can help by automating repetitive tasks like optimizing meta titles and descriptions, as well as providing valuable insight as to how to improve your search engine rankings.

You can use ChatGPT for SEO, but here are some other tools that will help you:

Surfer SEO uses AI to help you write SEO-optimized articles as quickly as possible. Just answer a few simple questions, and the app will generate the best headings and keywords to use.
Semrush is one of the best SEO tools on the market. Many of the tools it offers, for example, the SEO Writing Assistant and meta description creator, use AI.
AlliAI uses AI to optimize pages for SEO, from the content to the code. You can optimize individual pages, or set rules to optimize your entire website.
Google PageSpeed Insights uses AI to recommend how you can improve your website’s performance. By analyzing existing data sets, as well as your own web pages, it can suggest which tweaks you should make to best optimize your website for technical SEO.

Digital Assistants
As digital marketers, we often dream of having our own personal assistant who can do all our paperwork, manage our time, and help us be more productive. The great thing is, with artificial intelligence, you have your very own digital assistant at your fingertips!

There are AI applications you can use to carry out the dull tasks you do every day. For example, Otter.ai automatically transcribes your meetings for you, sending an email summary to participants so they can jump to a specific point.
A solid CRM is indispensable to the modern digital marketer, and HubSpot uses a suite of AI tools to make the day run more smoothly. It can draft emails, create new contacts, and automatically enrich company information in your database.

If you want to enhance your cold outreach emails, Drift uses AI to develop high-quality, personalized emails to make prospective customers want to know more. 78 percent of customers are more likely to make repeat purchases from brands that personalize their marketing efforts.

And, of course, honorable mentions go to AI assistants like Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana, which create to-do lists, set alarms, and manage our calendars.

Content Creation and Copywriting
AI for content creation has been around longer than you might think. The spellcheck tools in Google Docs and Microsoft Word have long used AI to identify how words are used in a specific context and suggest alternatives.

Modern AI applications are great for writing web copy and blogs, as well as creating other media like images, videos, and even audio—this content is often referred to as generative AI.

Sir Paul McCartney recently used AI technology to create a new Beatles song using John Lennon’s voice—how cool is that?

As well as ChatGPT, there are lots of other awesome AI tools for copywriting:

Bard is Google’s equivalent of ChatGPT, which has the benefit of being integrated with tools like Google Workspace and Gmail.
Perplexity.ai can search the web, unlike ChatGPT, and can provide more up-to-date responses to prompts. ChatGPT-3 has a knowledge cutoff of September 2021, meaning it can’t process data created past this date.

Paragraph Rewriter can give your existing copy a tune-up. Copy and paste your text into the box, and you’ll get an alternatively worded paragraph in just a few seconds. It’s great if you want to revive and refresh existing content or carry out A/B testing to see which wording customers engage with more.
Live Chat and Chatbots

If you operate a website, live chat opens an entirely new channel for customers to contact you. With chatbot functionality, you can make managing customer queries even easier.