AI (artificial intelligence)is fast becoming an integral part of healthcare as a management, marketing, and diagnostic tool. AI-enabled devices and software detect glaucoma, recommend hospital staffing levels, and help robots deliver medication to patients. On the consumer side, AI analyzes 100's of data points and makes product recommendations on sites like Amazon, Netflix, Pandora, and many others. So, what does AI have to do with marketing? As it turns out, quite a lot.

Sixty-three percent of people prefer to message a chatbot vs. talk with a human when communicating with a business. (Source: G2 Crowd)

But first, let's get square on the definition of AI. At the basic level, it's the emulation of human intelligence by machine. AI is fed by data, or training sets, that find patterns and correlations and make decisions and forecasts at a speed that would set our brains on fire. SUBHEAD: Many of the tools you already use, like marketing automation and Google search ads, already employ the technology.

Here are some common and bleeding edge ways that marketers are making themselves smarter with artificial intelligence.

Personalize websites to improve conversions

Personalization used to mean inserting a customer's name on a web page or email. That's still effective, but now we can use behavioral data to customize a web page based on the customer's demographics, stage in a sales cycle, browsing history, geography, and other data sources. For example, a customer who visits a product detail page might receive information about a dealer in their neighborhood, or a push notification on their Smartphone.

Using a tool, like the Slackbot that analyzes your Google Analytics data, you can keep tabs on site performance, and data patterns that enable the site to show the most relevant blog and page content.

Make pay-per-click search ads more cost-effective

The secret to optimizing banner and search campaigns is their ability to test variations with hard work on the lines of cleaning the stables. AI can generate hundreds of copy, image, and design combinations, and quickly declare a winner. On search ads, AI can write a plethora of ads and pair them with the most effective bidding.

AI embedded in analytics will free up more than 30% of marketing data analysts by 2022, which allows them to focus on other priorities, like personalization, lead scoring, performance management, and reporting.

Content creation

Do you run a blog, curate, and share content or report news about healthcare and specialties? Then AI, now that it's more proficient at talking like a human, is your friend in feeding the content monster. Using a writing style that you define, AI can write blogs, email content, and text messages on the fly.

Get it straight from a chatbot

Chatbots are rivaling humans in their ability to field service and product inquiries than humans. Send a question to a chatbot via a social media platform or direct text input on your site. Based on a user's behavior, like clicking back to the same page over and over, a chatbot can be activated to ask how it can help. A chatbot can dispatch common questions and spot worrisome service trends. That frees up us bipeds to handle more complicated problems, and the time, of course, to program the chatbot.

Curated content for email

What if you could scour hundreds of newsfeeds from around the world to pull the juiciest content for every customer? Well, AI has the answer, and it can even write a breezy synopsis of every story. A study by Demand Metric found that 80% of marketers say personalized content is more effective than the impersonal alternative.

Identify wayward customers before you lose them

Machine-learning algorithms use data, like time spent during a visit, and actions on social media to red-flag customers losing interest in your brand. The AI can then intervene with incentives, content that reinforces brand loyalty, and even get a salesperson involved. AI will also whip up a predictive model to forecast churn and better match customers to services and keep them out of the churn cycle.

Summary

AI is making the marketer's dream to deliver messaging tailored to each customer come true. The technology can analyze large amounts of customer data and web analytics to personalize content on the fly. AI can also be used to curate content to personalize emails and websites. And AI-chatbots can reduce the strain on in-house teams by answering common questions and directing web users to the most appropriate information and people.