Artificial Intelligence is changing every aspect of business nowadays. AI-based solutions are being used to make internal processes more efficient, to increase sales, reduce costs, and gain useful business insights for the company. Natural Language Processing is becoming a vital tool for modern marketing. If you are a marketing systems provider, you should certainly consider implementing NLP-based solutions in your software to make your offer more competitive.
Google has introduced BERT, an NLP-based algorithm that processes queries so the search results fit to the original query, Washington Post uses Heliograf, an AI-powered journalism bot that delivers news, and these are only examples which are right off the top of our heads. Even Netflix uses recommendation engines to provide their customers with better and more specialized content.
The capability to understand, analyze and manipulate language makes business applications not only cool but – most importantly – significantly more efficient. In our article, you’ll learn why Artificial Intelligence is so important for marketing and how NLP technology can be used in marketing software in order to improve:
- customer service efficiency
- lead qualification processes
- comment sentiment analyses
- optimization of SEO tools
- planning content strategy
How does AI help digital marketing?
According to a McKinsey report, AI adoption is highest within product- and service-development (24% – new AI-based product enhancements, 21% existing feature optimization) as well as service-operation functions (24% – service-operation optimizations, 19% – predictive service and intervention). Artificial Intelligence is also used in management, finances, marketing, HR and many other departments in order to make more data-driven decisions and automate various processes.
MartTech is an industry that combines marketing and technology to ensure the marketing success of its customers by using powerful marketing tools and methods to improve the efficiency of their marketing campaigns. It is all about leveraging data and the newest technologies to increase brand visibility.
According to the Martech: 2020 and Beyond report, more than 75% of brands use MarTech solutions to deal with their email and social media marketing. Business tools of this type are also used for CRM, content management, and analytics by more than 50% of companies listed. As a matter of fact, companies invest in MarTech solutions not only to make marketing campaigns more efficient but also to ensure the best possible user experience.
What is NLP?
Natural language processing is a subset of Artificial Intelligence widely used in marketing and customer service. It makes computers capable of reading and understanding natural human language. NLP has multiple applications. Need an example? Think of how Google gives users relevant search results when their input is grammatically incorrect or misspelled. That’s how NLP works for users and affects UX.
Natural language processing can improve marketing solutions. Modern business tools are usually designed following the headless architecture model (the front-end presentation layer of a solution is decoupled from its back-end functionality) where it is possible to improve them by implementing ML components.
In 2021 the majority of surveyed marketers (52%) claim that AI solutions are very important for marketing success. According to the 2021 State of Marketing AI Report the most important outcomes of implementing AI in marketing systems are in improving performance (41%), getting better data-based insights (40%), the capability to personalize user experience (38%), saving time on repetitive tasks (35%) and generating better ROI on campaigns (34%).
How can natural language processing level up your digital marketing strategies?
So, what are the actual applications of natural language processing in marketing software? Here are some examples of how NLP can be leveraged to make your marketing tool better than the rest.
Customer Service
By using data analytics empowered by Natural Language Processing, marketing systems are capable of collecting useful data more efficiently. With extra business information, marketing software gives users a better chance to reach customers with new content and ads. Access to specific data makes it possible to build more accurate buyer personas, thereby improving the accuracy of ad targeting.
NLP supports analytics by providing crucial information. It helps companies measure customer experience and improve recommendation systems. This technology has proven to be very useful in customer service because it can be used for analyzing incoming support tickets so they can be prioritized and sent to the right specialists, thus resolving issues faster.
Lead Qualification
Advancements in NLP have transformed businesses by improving chatbot capabilities. Chatbots attend to millions of customer service queries every day in various industries – according to a Hubspot survey, 47% of customers are interested in buying products through bots. They are able to quickly respond to customers’ questions and engage them throughout the process of buying a product or service. How is that? Thanks to NLP, bots are capable not only of handling queries, but also of collecting important information about visitors and analyzing customers’ mood and needs.
NLP chatbots ensure that customers receive immediate attention and qualify leads so sales experts can step in only when the sales effort is most likely to be successful.
Sentiment Analysis
Measuring brand awareness is crucial when it comes to planning your content and communication strategy. Human language is complex. It is hard for solutions based on older technologies to learn what exactly customers think about a company and its products or services without NLP.
Marketing tools used for social listening and social tracking can help marketers determine what people write in social media and how they feel about brands – but it is NLP that makes it possible for the software to analyze written opinions and understand the users’ intentions, often hidden within the words of the comments themselves.
SEO Optimization Tools
With the right SEO tools, marketers, content creators, and SEO specialists can learn if a website is well-optimized and visible in the browser to potential customers. There are multiple ways to send the same message. NLP technology can be implemented to identify alternative or related keywords that can be used to optimize content based on actual Internet users’ searches.
There are SEO optimization tools that not only help users find out which phrases have the biggest potential, but also provide them with extra tips on competitors and ways to outpace them.
Planning Content Strategy
SEO optimization is only one part of content marketing. Being visible to Internet users is one thing and actually being able to engage them is another. Besides spotting the most popular keywords connected to each industry, NLP can be used to identify the hottest topics that a given brand should write about to best interest customers in its products and services.
The most advanced marketing tools use Natural Language Processing to provide business users with tips on what to write and speak about to attract the most attention.
Where do you start with NLP-based solutions?
Natural Language Processing is still evolving. Today, marketing tools using NLP are very important, especially for huge companies, but small and medium-sized businesses are also starting to find them useful. If you want to be able to call your marketing tools advanced, you should implement NLP.
Fortunately, as multiple marketing systems are designed with microservices or decentralized architecture models, implementing NLP as an additional component is not so hard to do. Do you want your tool to answer the actual problems of your business’ customers? Let us know if you would like to improve your marketing solutions by adding some ML-based features. We’ll be happy to assist you.
