Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing paid social advertising by introducing advanced features that improve targeting, optimization, and efficiency. With AI, advertisers can analyze vast amounts of data to gain insights into consumer behavior, preferences, and trends. This allows for more precise audience segmentation and personalized ad delivery, resulting in higher engagement and conversion rates.
How Can You Use AI in Your Paid Social Media Strategy?
How to Use AI Content Personalization in Social Media Marketing
AI algorithms analyze user data – including past interactions, likes, shares, and comments – to create content that resonates with your audience and boosts engagement.
For example, consider an e-commerce company using AI to review user interactions. The AI can identify patterns, such as a preference for yoga over high-intensity workouts.
With this insight, the company can tailor its content to focus on yoga-related products and tips, appealing directly to its target audience.
These recommendations may appear in a variety of ways, including:
- Product suggestions
- Suggested posts
- Ads
Wowcher is a large UK-based “deal of the day” e-commerce company. They used AI to enhance their Facebook ads with personalized copy. If a user frequently clicks on vacation deal ads, AI identifies this interest and highlights relevant deals. As a result, Wowcher achieved a 31% reduction in cost per lead and improved ad relevancy scores.
AI can continuously monitor user interactions and provide real-time content recommendations. For instance, if a new social media campaign for an accessory is underperforming, AI tools can identify issues with your captions or format that need adjustment.
For example, Olipop uses a variety of content formats such as carousel posts and user-generated content to enhance reach, engagement, and social shares.
This real-time customization ensures your content remains relevant and engaging as user interests and preferences evolve.
Chatbots Improving the Customer Experience
AI chatbots are available 24/7 to support your customers, providing instant answers and handling large volumes of requests, which improves the customer experience.
Through data analysis, they deliver personalized interactions and ensure consistent and accurate information. These technologies excel at automating routine tasks, such as scheduling appointments, responding to basic inquiries, and providing tailored product recommendations.
The makeup brand Sephora uses AI to improve the customer experience. After realizing that users were feeling overwhelmed by their vast product range, Sephora introduced an interactive quiz driven by chatbots. These chatbots guide customers through their purchases and offer personalized advice and recommendations based on their answers.
And with the ability to personalize interactions based on user data, they can engage users in a more meaningful and tailored way. They can suggest products, offer discounts, and provide interactive content, making the user experience more enjoyable and engaging.
Saving Time with AI
AI can perform time-wasting, repetitive tasks, like responding to simple questions, posting posts, and creating content, which frees up valuable time for you to focus on the strategy and creativity of your social media presence.
Visual Content Development
Generative AI tools such as Midjourney, DALL-E and Runway are revolutionizing the way marketers create personalized images for targeted campaigns.
By analyzing customer data, AI can suggest changes or generate images tailored to the preferences, past behavior, and demographics of specific segments, increasing engagement and conversion rates.
These tools can also generate unique images and graphics from text descriptions, enabling the rapid creation of customized imagery for campaigns, social media posts, and ads without the need for extensive graphic design resources.
By utilizing these AI applications, you can significantly improve your social media marketing efforts.
AI Optimizes Ad Budget Allocation By Adjusting Spending Based on Performance
Accurate forecasting is crucial for budgeting your campaigns. Understanding how changes in strategy could impact performance will help you better allocate your budget to maximize return.
Manual forecasting can be difficult, time-consuming, and quickly outdated. It requires continuously updating data with the latest statistics, which is often impractical. However, anomaly detection, a form of automation, can identify and address issues before they impact your campaign performance. This ensures that your budget is not wasted due to unforeseen issues.
AI Improves Paid Social Campaigns in Real-Time
AI improves paid social campaigns in real-time by dynamically optimizing content, adjusting bids, and refining audience targeting based on current data.
It continuously analyzes user interactions and engagement metrics to ensure the most effective ad versions are displayed, and it personalizes content to increase engagement rates.
How Can Data Be Utilized with AI in Paid Social Advertising?
Streamlining A/B Testing with AI: Faster Insights and Real-Time Optimization
AI streamlines the creation, deployment, optimization, and analysis of A/B tests and enables companies to achieve their goals faster and more effectively.
Tools such as Twilio Segment and Evolv AI collect and manage data from social media platforms. AI uses this data to identify patterns and insights to improve A/B testing strategies.
For example, if a successful combination of headlines and images increases order volume but decreases the number of items per order, AI can adjust the test so that more items are added to the cart without having to start a new experiment.
AI Enhances Audience Targeting By Analyzing Data to Reach Relevant Segments
Traditional market research methods, which rely on small samples and surveys, offer limited insight into your target audience. In contrast, AI processes data from millions of consumers, providing a much more detailed and accurate segmentation.
AI examines various types of consumer data, including:
- Demographic details such as age, gender, location and income
- Purchase history and transaction data
- Browsing and search history
- Social media activity
- Mobile app usage
- Loyalty program data
AI analyzes this behavioral and preference data from millions of customers to identify clusters with common attributes, define detailed audience segments, and create tailored individual profiles.
While most ad networks provide basic demographic data, AI can, for example, create a similarity score to improve targeting. For example, Strike identifies optimal interests and keywords and discovers relationships between seemingly unrelated targeting affinities.
For a company selling a widget that feeds cats, typical targeting might include pet lovers and frequent travelers. However, Strike can uncover deeper correlations, such as specific websites that pet owners visit or age-related trends that are often overlooked by manual methods. AI excels at recognizing these nuanced patterns at scale, allowing for highly effective and precise targeting.
Marketers are using these AI-driven insights to gain a deeper understanding of their customers and tailor their ads and messages for maximum relevance. AI has taken targeting to a new level of precision and effectiveness.
How Can Businesses Prepare for the Future of AI-Enhanced Advertising?
To successfully navigate the future of AI-powered social media advertising, companies should adopt the following strategies:
Leverage Comprehensive Data
AI thrives on data. Gather detailed insights into your customers’ behavior, preferences, and interactions by investing in tools and systems that can collect and analyze big data. This allows you to use AI for precise audience segmentation and personalized advertising delivery.
Adopt AI-Powered Platforms
Platforms that offer AI-powered features such as dynamic content creation, real-time bid adjustments, and predictive analytics will help you streamline your efforts and improve results.
Focus on Personalization
Use AI to deliver highly personalized advertising experiences. By analyzing user data and previous interactions, AI can help you create messages that are tailored to individual preferences, increasing engagement and conversion rates.
Explore Immersive Technologies
Integrate new technologies like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) into your social media campaigns. These technologies can create interactive and engaging experiences that pique consumer interest and set your brand apart.
Foster Authentic Influencer Partnerships
Use AI to identify influencers that align with your brand values and target audience. Ensure collaborations reflect authentic recommendations that build trust and credibility with your target audience.
Optimize Ad Spend
Manage your advertising budget efficiently. AI can adjust bids and budgets in real-time based on campaign performance. This ensures that your advertising spend is optimized for maximum return on investment.
AI Tools to Use in Paid Social Media
Meta’s AI-Powered Ad Suite
According to Meta, businesses are seeing improved performance with Meta Advantage.
Meta’s suite of AI-powered ad tools can get you the best results with fewer and more efficient campaigns, allowing you to reach more potential customers and save time and effort.
Generative AI: Text Generation
Meta’s AI text generation feature now creates variations for the ad headline and the primary text. It’s currently testing the ability to tailor the generated text to your brand’s voice and tone by emphasizing key selling points based on your previous campaigns and text input.
This feature will soon incorporate Meta Llama 3, the next generation of Meta’s language models, enhancing ad performance and introducing new capabilities.
Advantage+ Creative Optimizations
When you use Advantage+ creative in Meta Ads Manager, your images and videos are automatically optimized to versions that are more likely to engage your audience. Depending on the ad format or placements you choose, various creative enhancements may be available.
Enhancements for single image or video format:
- Standard enhancements such as image template, visual touch-ups, text improvements, and relevant comments
- Image brightness and contrast
- Music
- 3D animation
- Image expansion
Enhancements for carousel format:
- Profile end card
- Music
- Highlight carousel card
- Dynamic description
- Relevant comments
- Info labels
Certain enhancements are only accessible when you select “Manual Upload” in the ad setup. If you choose Catalog to dynamically create a carousel with your products, these optimizations may not be available.
Advantage+ Catalog Ads
If you have a catalog, you may see options like Advantage+ creative for catalog, which uses the catalog to display different formats and creatives based on what the audience is most likely to respond to, or Dynamic media, which shows either images or videos of your catalog items depending on what each viewer is likely to find engaging.
When using the Sales or Traffic objective with a single image or video, and the catalog option is not enabled, you may see “Add Catalog Items.” This feature displays items from your catalog alongside your selected media, directing viewers to your chosen URL when it’s likely to enhance performance.
For example, your selected media might appear with product cards underneath it, or it might be the first card in a carousel of popular products from your shop, with the second card shown first on the second viewing of the same ad.
Advantage+ Creative with Advantage+ Catalog Ads
You are now able to upload a “hero” image or video in the center of your catalog ad, and Meta’s AI will be used to dynamically show people the best products from your catalog to drive performance. You can use this tool by clicking “Add Catalog Items” under Advantage+ creative within Ads Manager.
AI-Powered Content Creation and Management
Flick
You know the importance of repurposing your best ideas to maintain consistency and engage followers. Flick’s Content Lab is your hub for brainstorming, storing, and producing content for all social media channels.
Click the “Brainstorm Ideas” button, enter your topic, and select promising ideas. Flick generates four post ideas with suggestions and tips. Save your favorites and generate more if needed.
Use the Content Assistant to refine your base post and repurpose it for all channels with AI-powered tools for rewrites, tone adjustments, and hashtag generation. Scheduling posts is quick and easy, filling your content calendar efficiently.
ChatGPT
While ChatGPT isn’t designed specifically as a marketing tool, it can be highly useful for various marketing tasks. Digital marketers use ChatGPT for keyword research, drafting meta descriptions, and creating product descriptions, and it can also assist with paid media efforts.
For instance, if you’re having trouble with a caption for your next Facebook ad, ChatGPT can help. Provide it with the necessary details, and it will generate the caption for you. Let’s say you need a caption for an ad promoting a children’s board game like Candyland. You might prompt:
“Create a caption for a Facebook ad under 60 words that encourages parents to buy Candyland for their kids with a supportive and fun-loving tone.”
ChatGPT will generate the caption, saving you time. Just remember to give specific prompts and thoroughly edit the output to ensure accuracy.
AdCreative.ai
AdCreative.ai generates AI-powered ads for various platforms, including banner ads, social media, and display advertising channels. With just a few inputs from your marketing team, it produces professional-grade ads within minutes.
In addition to creating visually appealing ads, AdCreative.ai can generate compelling ad copy, including text, headlines, CTAs, and sales copy for product descriptions or email promotions. It also handles social media ad captions.
Moreover, AdCreative.ai tracks campaign performance, learning from audience engagement to refine future ads and suggest improvements, enhancing the efficiency of your campaigns.
Midjourney
The tool is particularly valuable for creative content generation, allowing users to input detailed text prompts and receive images that reflect those descriptions. This can be especially useful for producing visual content for social media, advertisements, and other marketing materials.
DALL-E
DALL-E is an AI model developed by OpenAI that generates images from textual descriptions. By interpreting detailed text prompts, DALL-E creates highly imaginative and diverse visuals that reflect the given instructions. This model is part of the broader trend in AI towards generative models, which produce new content based on learned patterns and data.
Runway
Runway is an advanced AI tool designed for creative professionals. It can help with video editing, image generation, and content creation.
Runway’s capabilities include real-time video editing, automatic background removal, and style transfer, which allows users to apply artistic effects to their visuals. One of its standout features is its ability to generate new content based on existing data, such as creating realistic and high-quality images or videos from textual descriptions or rough sketches.
AI-Enhanced Influencer and Social Media Management
Emplifi
With Emplifi (formerly Socialbakers), managing influencer partnerships is streamlined and efficient. The platform offers advanced reporting to help you better understand campaign performance.
Ideal for marketers running paid social media ads, Emplifi consolidates all posts into a single dashboard, eliminating the need to switch between accounts to track ad performance. You can also monitor follower engagement for each post directly through the platform.
Its AI-powered dashboard helps you find influencers that match your criteria, such as demographics and follower count, and allows you to sort them by categories like lifestyle or fitness.
AI-Driven Customer Data and Personalization
Twilio Segment
With Twilio Segment, companies can track user activity across various channels, segment their audience based on behavior and preferences, and deliver personalized marketing messages. The platform integrates with numerous third-party tools and services, allowing for seamless data flow and real-time insights. This integration capability helps businesses enhance their marketing strategies, improve customer experiences, and drive more effective decision-making based on a unified data set.
Evolv AI
Evolv AI uses machine learning algorithms to automatically run and analyze A/B tests, multivariate tests, and other forms of experimentation. This allows businesses to quickly identify which design elements, content variations, or user flows yield the best results. By continuously testing and refining digital experiences, Evolv AI ensures that users encounter the most effective and engaging versions of creative.
The platform also provides insights and recommendations based on real-time data, enabling businesses to make informed decisions about their digital strategies. This leads to improved user engagement, increased conversions, and a more personalized customer experience.
AI-Enabled Automation and Optimization
Trapica
With Trapica’s marketing automation, you can eliminate the need to manually define your marketing strategies. This fully autonomous AI handles everything, targeting the right audiences based on your conversion goals and real-time events for optimal performance across channels.
Additionally, you can gain insights into your competitors’ audiences to stay ahead. Its data-driven tools enable you to make informed decisions and achieve your marketing goals effectively.
Strike Social
Strike Social leverages artificial intelligence to enhance targeting by analyzing large datasets to identify and segment audiences more effectively. This capability enables the discovery of intricate connections between different targeting affinities, leading to more precise and impactful ad placements.
The platform also focuses on creative optimization, using AI to automatically refine ad visuals and text to better match audience preferences. This ensures that ads are engaging and relevant, improving overall performance. Additionally, Strike Social utilizes predictive analytics to provide insights into future campaign outcomes, allowing businesses to make informed decisions and adjust their strategies proactively.
Real-time adjustments are another key feature of Strike Social, with the platform continuously monitoring and optimizing campaigns. It dynamically adjusts bids, budgets, and content based on current data to maintain campaign effectiveness. The platform also offers detailed performance reporting, giving businesses comprehensive analytics to track and evaluate their advertising efforts.
Leveraging AI in Paid Social: Final Thoughts
By using AI tools, marketers can improve audience targeting, creative optimization, real-time adjustments, and budget allocation. AI can take on a lot of the time-consuming repetitive tasks while also providing helpful, actionable insights, which allows advertisers to focus on strategy and execution.
With tools like the ones we’ve mentioned in this post, businesses can adopt AI-powered support throughout the paid social ad campaign process to optimize and scale campaigns effectively.
