Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming our world. We interact with AI every day through voice assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon’s Alexa, or by watching personalized content suggestions on Netflix and Amazon Prime. It’s touched every sector, industry, and function, and marketing is no exception.

AI marketing statistics show the impact is huge and changing how marketers rely on technology. It’s reshaping everything from lead generation, conversion rates, customer engagement, customer experience, content optimization, and more. AI hasn’t just changed the way we market to customers. It’s also changed how people buy your products and services.

AI-powered chatbots, personalized content recommendations, and AI-generated content and data insights are a few AI innovations disrupting the industry. In this blog post, we’ve listed 31 artificial intelligence statistics that show just how much AI has impacted marketing.

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How AI impacts business

According to 26% of all respondents and 45% of seasoned AI adopters, artificial intelligence has enabled them to establish a significant competitive advantage over their competitors.
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Research by Deloitte shows that 73% of AI adopters believe AI is “very” or “critically” important to their business today, and 64% say AI technologies enable them to establish a lead over competitors.
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Just 19% of enterprises have adopted AI and machine learning for B2C personalization today. The IBM-commissioned Forrester study also found that 55% of enterprises believe that technology constraints limit their ability to implement personalization strategies.
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According to EY’s survey of 570 companies survey, accelerating AI to drive growth is one common practice that helps companies respond to disruption and improve their financial performance.
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Sources: Deloitte’s State of AI in the Enterprise, 3rd Edition, Salesforce Enterprise Technology Trends

AI impacts marketing as well

According to the Drift leadership report, 79 percent said AI is one of the technologies that will impact marketing in the future.
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McKinsey Global Institute estimates an impact of $1.4 Trillion to $2.6 Trillion in the Marketing and sales function across all industries.
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Marketers’ use of AI soared between 2018 and 2020, jumping from 29% in 2018 to 84% in 2020, according to Salesforce Research’s most recent State of Marketing Study.
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70 percent high performing marketers claimed they have a fully defined AI strategy.
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Marketing teams with high performance are averaging seven different uses of AI and machine learning today and 52% are planning to increase their adoption this year.
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Sources: Drift leadership report, Dispelling five myths about cognitive technology, visualizing the uses and potential impact of AI and other analytics, Salesforce, State of marketing, Sixth edition

How marketers priorities prioritize and understand AI

46 percent of 400 marketers surveyed by Drift and Marketing Artificial Intelligence said their marketing team is trying to both increase revenue and cut costs. 43 percent said they’re focused on accelerating revenue. Eight percent said they’re exclusively focused on cutting costs.
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17 percent of marketers reported they are in the Scaling phase of marketing AI adoption, which means wide adoption of AI that consistently delivers results. 19 percent have entered the Humanizing phase, where AI and humans are merged and resources are redirected towards listening, relationship building, creativity, culture, and communities.
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50 percent of marketers identify as beginners when it comes to AI terminology and capabilities, while another 37 percent consider themselves intermediate.
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40 percent of respondents ranked their confidence in evaluating marketing AI technologies as medium, 24 percent as low, and 5 percent as none.
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Barriers to AI adoption

40 percent of respondents ranked their confidence in evaluating marketing AI technologies as medium, 24 percent as low, and 5 percent as none. The two other most common barriers are lack of awareness (46 percent) and lack of resources (46 percent).
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The number one barrier to AI adoption, according to 70 percent of respondents, is the lack of education and training. Only 14 percent feel their organization offers any AI-based education or training. Interestingly, only 16 percent of respondents chose fear of AI as a barrier to marketing AI adoption.
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Most marketers (56 percent) believe AI will create more jobs in the next decade than it will eliminate.
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Sources: Drift State of Marketing AI Report

Benefits of using AI for marketing

Personalization

According to Gartner, 63% of Digital Marketing leaders are struggling with personalization, yet only 17% implement AI or machine learning across their departments.

47% of B2C consumers say brands could better align their engagement activities with their preferences, and 56% of consumers expect each interaction with a brand or vendor to be tailored.

71% of customers expect companies to communicate in real time, which explains the increasing popularity of using AI conversational marketing solutions to engage with customers and prospects.

Source: Gartner, IBM, How AI is changing advertising

Increased revenue

Results of the McKinsey & Company 2020 Global Survey on artificial intelligence (AI) indicate that organizations are using AI to generate value. Increasingly, that value comes in the form of revenue. Some respondents ascribe 20 percent or more of their organizations’ earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) to artificial intelligence.

Ten percent said their revenue increased by more than ten percent, 26 percent said it increased by six to ten percent, and 43 percent said it increased by less than five percent.

Decreased cost

Cost decreases are less common in most functions. According to 19 percent of respondents, AI adoption decreased costs in their function by less than 10 percent, 13 percent said costs declined by between 10 and 19 percent, and two percent said costs decreased by more than 20 percent.

Source: McKinsey & Company, The state of AI in 2020

Make sense of customer data

In the coming years, marketers anticipate using 50% more customer data sources than they did in 2019, which makes it even more challenging to make sense of all that information. Artificial intelligence (AI) can help make sense of the increasing amount of customer data.

Source: Salesforce, State of Marketing Report

Increased sales and customer retention

Gartner forecasts that 30% of all B2B companies will use AI for at least one of their primary sales processes by 2020.

A study found that AI enables marketers to increase sales (52%), increase customer retention (51%), and succeed at new product launches (49%).

21% of sales leaders rely on AI-powered applications, and most of them share these applications with their marketing departments.

Over the next two years, sales leaders anticipate their use of AI to increase by 155%.
Sales leaders predicted AI to become mainstream by 2020 and 54% saw themselves adopting these technologies.

Source: Gartner, Forbes, Salesforce, State of sales, third edition

Email marketing

The average order value (AOV) for senders using AI was $145.08, compared to $138.00 for those not using AI. Email marketing revenue was up 41 percent in organizations using AI.

Marketers who use AI generate more revenue per subscriber. AI users generate their results from 35 million emails sent per month, compared to 36 million that are sent without AI solutions.

With the use of AI, email marketers are reporting better subscriber engagement. Open, and click-through rates averaged about two points higher with AI senders as opposed to those who rely on humans exclusively.

Solutions that leverage AI can lead to improved deliverability. Mailbox providers frequently use engagement signals to filter spam, and survey results indicate AI senders have a higher delivery rate than human-curated senders.

Source: Business Wire

Marketing automation

As AI and marketing automation rise, it’s only natural that they’ll be combined to produce better results.

The least commonly used marketing automation techniques were lead scoring, advanced segmentation, and AI (artificial intelligence to improve message relevance). According to the Email Marketing and Marketing Automation Excellence 2018 report prepared by Smart Insights and Get response, this could be the result of digital skills in this area.

Marketing automation is used by 53% of B2B organizations today, and 37% plan to implement it, according to the eConsultancy report.

According to Forrester, 70% of enterprises expect to implement artificial intelligence in the next 12 months.

Source: Smart Insights and Get response, Econsultancy, Forrester

AI for chatbots

56% of companies say conversational bots are driving disruption in their industry, and 43% say their competitors are already using the technology.

It is projected that 75-90% of queries will be handled by bots by 2022.

According to Allegis 2017 survey, 58% of candidates expressed comfort with interacting with AI and recruitment chatbots during the early stages of the application process. 60 % were comfortable with chatbots or AI being used to schedule interviews.

In retail, 34% of customers would be comfortable interacting with a chatbot instead of contacting live support.

When business executives were asked what AI-powered solutions they saw having the most impact on their business, virtual assistants (31%), analytics (29%), and automated communications like emails and chatbots (28%) topped the list.

Chatbots are used in 53% of companies’ IT departments, 23% in their administrative departments, and 20% in their customer service departments. AI chatbots and assistants are used in sales and marketing departments in 16% of organizations.

Juniper Research reports that the adoption of chatbots in the retail, banking, and healthcare sectors will result in business cost savings of $11 billion annually by 2023, up from an estimated $6 billion in 2018.

Source: Accenture, CNBC, Gartner, Allegis Global Solutions, Statista, PWC, Spiceworks, Juniper research

AI in social media

AI has many applications in social media, such as personalized social feeds, animated lenses and filters that change the appearance of users with facial recognition, sentiment analysis that finds positive and negative words in posts and comments on social media, and much more.

According to MarketsandMarkets, the global use of AI in the social media market is projected to grow from USD 0.6 billion in 2018 to USD 2.2 billion by 2023 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 28.3% during the forecast period.

Source: Markets and Markets

AI for content marketing

Leading marketers are 56% more likely to strongly agree that decisions based on data are superior to those based on intuition and experience.

Technologies such as machine learning, deep learning, neural networks, natural language processing (NLP), and natural language generation (NLG) allow us to process an enormous amount of unstructured data and decipher the natural language. It can be used to gather insights and recommend ways to improve the performance of your content. There are several AI-powered search engine optimization tools that use these technologies.

Content marketers can use it to discover keywords, plan blog post topics, optimize and personalize content, test landing pages, schedule social shares, and review analytics.

Conclusion

It’s time to stop thinking of AI as some futuristic technology and start using it in your marketing! AI-powered solutions are being used to automate tasks within business departments such as customer service or healthcare administration, saving companies millions of dollars every year. There is a bright future for AI in marketing because it offers many benefits – all with less work for marketers!

Advancements in AI technology have changed how we market to customers and how they interact with brands.

Whether you’re a B2B marketer or a B2C marketer, AI can help automate tasks like lead scoring, segmentation, analytics, and automated communications to save time, increase revenue per subscriber, or reduce costs associated with hiring customer service staff.

AI and machine learning will likely become more prevalent over the next few years. People prefer a conversational user experience and are increasingly becoming comfortable interacting with bots when buying products online. This shift can reduce your cost while simultaneously improving ROI metrics. Advanced data analysis and customer segmentation capabilities will help you understand and tailor messages for your customers better.

As a marketer, if you don’t embrace and take advantage of AI, your competitors will. Smart marketers will embrace the new technology and take advantage of it to stay competitive.