When it comes to engaging their audiences, brands have their work cut out. In an era characterized by content saturation, media fragmentation, and tightening data regulation, it often feels harder than ever to cut through the noise and make a genuine impact. Consumer trust is a fragile thing, and poorly calculated content has the capacity to even become detrimental to brand reputation.
So how can brands connect in a meaningful way?
An obvious place to start is in nurturing and developing audience trust. To do this, it is essential that messaging resonates, and so understanding consumers on a cultural level; the language that they speak, their passions and interests; can be an invaluable place to start.
Hundreds of millions of content interactions happen every day. By using AI to assess these interactions, it's possible to discover meaningful cultural communities in a way simply not possible with manual methods.
AI helps marketing and brand teams to scale by providing useful, statistically significant data. This information enables us to group audiences into cultural tribes, connected by shared interests and passions. These connections provide us with a powerful tool to generate content, messaging, and tone of voice recommendations, to enable brands to truly speak the language of their chosen tribes.
And this opens up exciting opportunities for marketers. Not only does it facilitate a stronger connection with existing audiences, but it can identify new growth audiences, too, and ways of reaching them.
With a greater understanding of their audiences, brands are empowered to be more creative. Working with as much data as possible is familiar ground for marketers. But the growth of AI unlocks greater, more meaningful insight into the audience. We can find new ways to communicate, enhancing and enriching what we already know.
Many people in marketing view AI as a risk. They're uncertain about the tech and concerned about the possible impact on jobs. But the next few years have the potential to reignite marketing as a creative force, both in terms of top of the funnel insight and content optimization through ads.
Instead of focusing on optimization and efficiency, like changing button placement on webpages or reallocating ad budgets, marketers will increasingly focus on strategic ideas. The value of marketing teams is to have brilliant people crafting strategy and leading execution. AI will help us make the right decisions and inform these strategic decisions, but remove the need for us to push all the buttons ourselves.
AI can never replace marketers. Instead, it will free them up to focus on big-picture decisions, rather than getting caught in the details. Instead of crunching data, they will have the space and freedom to apply what they've learned to craft impactful campaigns, recruit new audiences, and engage and grow existing audiences.
The advent of AI and machine learning presents a great opportunity for brands to blend the rationality of data with the emotionality of context. AI and machine learning can be used to listen to the signals from social media and contextualize them to better understand an audience’s emotional DNA.
Whoever you are marketing to, building a rounded profile of your audience based on how they interact with content online helps you produce more engaging content. And as it is anchored in emotional connection and insight into what the audience cares about, it will be content that resonates and triggers action, engagement and connection.
At Codec, we help brands grow by connecting with culture. We provide AI-powered audience intelligence through our platform and consultancy services, supporting brands in creating and activating messaging that resonates with audience passions and interests. Learn more.