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Artificial Intelligence (AI) Impact on Digital Marketing Research

Conference Paper · May 2019

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-12453-3_143

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) Impact on Digital Marketing
Research
Dimitris C Gkikas1 and Prokopis K Theodoridis1
1University of Patras, Seferistr. 2, 30100 Agrinio, Greece
dgkikas@upatras.gr

Abstract. This paper maps and describes the current and potential relationship
between two different scientific branches of marketing science and computer
science. It examines the interaction of digital marketing and artificial intelligence
(AI) in academia, proposing, at the same time a machine learning model that
could fit in several aspects of digital marketing scientific area. There are
numerous scientific publications regarding artificial intelligence (AI) across the
disciplines. However, referring to digital marketing aspects, this number remains
small. Scientific research on artificial intelligence (AI) could benefit marketing
science in numerous ways. Nowadays, only a small amount of scientific research
referring to digital marketing and artificial intelligence (AI) is related to specific
digital marketing methods. Most of the scientific research examines generic
aspects such as e-business, consumer behavior, e-commerce strategies, social
media advertisement, search engines and consumer predictive modeling avoid
being more related to specific marketing issues in which business world is more
aware of, like consumer behavior on social media, targeted advertisements, social
media marketing, conversion optimization, predictive models in online
purchases, chatbots etc. Despite the vast research area and a certain number of
publications, it seems that there is a lack of scientific publications regarding
specifically digital marketing and artificial intelligence (AI). Nevertheless, there
are some very extensive research attempts on specific digital marketing matters
and artificial intelligence (AI) that are promising. This paper through the
mapping of the current state of artificial intelligence (AI) applications on digital
marketing scientific area, highlights the corner stone publications, comes up with
areas of absence or lack of its presence, mentioning at the same possible reasons
why that occurs and provides a machine learning model that could fit in several
digital marketing occasions.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Digital Marketing, Big Data, Customer

Behavior, Decision Making, Predictive Modeling.
1 Introduction

Nowadays, the technology progress has given the opportunity to industries to provide
people with huge amounts of products. Digital marketing uses channels like internet to
open new avenues for industries to advertise and sell their products to customers.
Digital marketing includes all the methods that can create a massive impact on people
at certain time, at certain place and through certain channel [1]. Digital marketing
industrial progress is an outcome of combining big data and academic scientific
research on intelligent systems. In this article digital marketing methods are thoroughly
analyzed and explained through an artificial intelligence (AI) research perspective.
However, the number of scientific publications remain in intermediate level when at
the same time business sector seems having moved forward. This paper highlights the
technical components of digital marketing techniques in scientific research to optimize
the performance of them through artificial intelligence (AI) methods. Despite the vast
research area and a certain number of publications, it seems that there is a lack of
scientific publications regarding specifically digital marketing and artificial
intelligence (AI). Never the less, there are some very extensive research attempts on
specific digital marketing fields like search engine optimization, search engines ranking
factors, consumer behavior, web development and targeted ads that gives hope for the
future of artificial intelligence (AI) impact on digital marketing research [2].

2 Digital Marketing

Digital marketing includes all marketing tactics and ways that use an electronic device
or the internet to show, promote, sell products or services and industries use internet
channels that will help them succeed that. Websites, social media pages, targeted
advertisements and email tend to keep current and increase prospective customers.
Customers, resellers, competitors, suppliers, promoters, the overall economy,
positioning, segmentation, expansion, growth, products, brands, advertising, market
share, price, advertising expenditures, number of resellers, churn, customer value, etc.
are some of the main variables that affect decision making. It is certain that decision
making is a matter of multiple variables based on analysis, experience and judgment
[3, 4].
In order to define the key role of artificial intelligence (AI) on digital marketing
research we must map the current situation of digital marketing scientific research and
compare it to the business sector. Then we will know in what scale digital marketing in
academia falls short of the development in business sector.

2.1 Digital Marketing Methods

We briefly analyze the most important digital marketing methods for commercial use.
Search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing (SMM), content marketing,
pay-per-click (PPC), affiliate marketing, native advertising, email marketing, chatbots,
semantic search, ad targeting, predictive marketing, voice search, A/B testing, lead
scoring and web development are presented [3,5].
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): It refers to optimization procedures that will
increase the organic traffic of a website, blogs or infographic to rank highly in search
engine results [3].
Social Media Marketing: It refers to practices that optimize and promote brands
social media pages to increase organic traffic, brand awareness and generate leads for
a business [3].
Content Marketing: It refers to the strategic and human-centric content creation of a
blog post, e-book, infographic or online brochures to generate brand awareness, traffic
increase, lead generation, and customers [3].
Pay-Per-Click (PPC): It is a method of driving traffic to a website by paying a
publishing internet service every time an ad is clicked, or an action took place [3].
Affiliate Marketing: This is a referral tactic of promoting a business through an
individual or a network of promoters who receive commission on their website either
having the form of a video either a hosted link [3].
Native Advertising: It refers to advertisements that are displayed on a web platform
alongside with non-paid content and follows the natural form of user experience [3].
Marketing Automation: It refers to software that automates basic business daily needs
such as email newsletters, social media post scheduling etc. [3].
Email Marketing: It refers to methods of creating promotional email campaigns to
keep contact with the clientele, inform it for discounts, new stuff and events [3].
Chatbots: Refer to non-stop programmed and automated interactive applications for
chatting and completing orders with the visitors of a website or social media page when
the last pay a visit [5].
Semantic search: It refers to a smart data searching method that helps users find the
result they search for, faster. Based on machine learning, interprets the search query
and through data correlations among the words understands the meaning of the search
phrase. It predicts what information users might need based on their search history [5].
Content Creation: It refers to a content creation method based on an artificial
intelligence (AI) technique called natural language generation that gathers, organizes,
transforms raw data relevant to the search query into readable sport, financial etc.
reports or suggests similar products to customers based on their purchase history [5].
Ad targeting: It refers to sophisticated online advertisement generation techniques
essential for branding. It generates or optimizes advertisements based on user’s history
and behavior importing factors such as geographic location, gender, age etc. for better
user targeting aiming to improve the return of investment to the advertisers [5].
Predictive marketing: It refers to an artificial intelligence (AI) technique that gathers
users’ behavioral data, analyzes them through data mining finding any possible data
correlations including preferences and needs. With these data feeds the machine
learning model and produces better predictions that help company’s decision makers
[5].
Voice search: It refers to artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for voice searches.
Voice searching will reestablish the perception of results speed and relevancy and it is
based on natural language processing and text mining techniques will make information
retrieval an extremely easy procedure [5].
A/B testing: It refers to an online marketing tactic that test which version of the same
website would make better conversions or leads. Based on artificial intelligence (AI)
conducts conversion optimizations to variations of different versions of the same
website and decides which is the most probable to increase user engagement [5].
Lead scoring: It refers to a method for assessing customers leads and rank them based
on user’s behavior, interest and purchase history to avoid losing time and money [5].
Web development: It refers to sophisticated tools based on artificial intelligence (AI)
that can build a search engine, user experience and conversion optimized human centric
web site easy and fast [5].

3 Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Since the variables, that affect the outcome can be quantified and measured a new
question is arising “In what scale artificial intelligence (AI) can contribute to digital
marketing research?”. Marketing decision makers are constantly using their experience
and instinct to make decisions based on huge amount of data, statistic charts, opinions
and taste. Inevitably that makes the decision hard to make cause of the complexity and
multifactor circumstances. Artificial intelligence (AI) seems capable to solve the riddle
of how can so much information be processed and produce a low risk decision in short
time period. Artificial intelligence (AI) applications vary from business to business.
However, business predictive models have their roots on scientific research. But there
is a slowdown in artificial intelligence (AI) research and an increase in business [4].

3.1 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research on Digital Marketing Methods

In order to understand how artificial intelligence (AI) contributes to digital marketing

techniques we should first mention the artificial intelligence (AI) sub-fields.
Afterwards, we examine one by one which of those fields apply to the digital marketing
techniques. This will reveal what impact artificial intelligence (AI) has on digital
marketing research. Artificial intelligence (AI) sub-fields are presented.
Neural Networks refer to brain modelling, time series prediction, classification
procedures etc. Evolutionary Computation refers to genetic algorithms, genetic
programming procedures etc. Vision refers to object recognition, image understanding
procedures etc. Robotics refer to intelligent control, autonomous exploration
procedures etc. Expert Systems refer to decision support systems, teaching systems etc.
Speech Processing refer to speech recognition, production procedures etc. Natural
Language Processing refers to machine translation. Planning refers to scheduling, game
playing procedures etc. Machine Learning refers to data mining, decision tree learning
etc. [6].
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Scientific research on SEO seems to have one
the biggest volume of scientific research publications. Referring to search engine
optimization or SEO’s, most related scientific published works concern evolutionary
computations, fuzzy intelligent systems, machine learning algorithms and web-
crawlers for reading, gathering and analyzing websites’ data, trying to improve
webpages ranking positions in search engines results combining ranking factors
through an intelligent learning model [7, 8, 9].
Social Media Marketing: The number of scientific publications referring to social
media marketing mostly exam customer behavior, customer intension, image
understanding procedures, analyzing data from social media through machine learning
models and data mining techniques, reveals the small progress on that field [10, 11].
Content Marketing, Content Creation and Predictive marketing: Scientific research
using data extracted from blogs, websites, e-shops and social media examines, using
data mining, image understanding procedures, text mining and machine learning
techniques, like keyword extraction, expert systems, customers decision support
system, text analysis, predictive analysis in order to produce optimized content [12, 13,
14].
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and Ad Targeting: Machine learning plays a major role in
scientific research for bidding and advertisements targeting through optimized
advertising models. It examines criteria which allow to assess the significance of
different factors on probabilities of clicks and conversions. Machine Learning is used
to build regression models out of available data creating regressions models that offer
new information and hidden trends [15, 16, 17].
Chatbots: Chatbots research has made a serious progress in comparison to other digital
marketing methods. From health care and education to the digital counseling and
insurances sector there is a very important ongoing research to automated robotic
simulators that interact with humans engaging AI subfields like decision support
systems, neural networks, autonomous exploration procedures etc. [18, 19, 20].
Semantic search: There is an extensive research referring to semantic research
involving multiple marketing stages and its foundations. The scientific research by far
exceed similar attempts from business sector and includes a high volume of scientific
publications referring to search engines, information retrieval, world wide web, natural
language processing systems, websites, data mining, social networking, internet,
learning algorithms, machine learning, information analysis, query processing,
information management, decision support systems, user interfaces, web searches etc.
[21, 22].
Voice search: Most research refers to voice search and digital marketing is
infrequent and limited. However, in other scientific fields makes an impressive
progress. Most important research referring to marketing includes personal voice
assistant technologies and speech recognition providing flexible interaction technique
where the user and the system act as equal participants having the ability to facilitate
precise and unambiguous answers in web queries [23, 24].
Web development: It seems that the biggest amount of scientific research which has
been conducted refers to web development. More than 2000 publications have been
describing web technologies and optimized versions of them. From web design and
web development to web application, web services, mobile friendly websites and data
representation, artificial intelligence (AI) is involved in an effort of optimizing
procedures in web development [25, 26, 27, 28].
 Despite the technological advance or academia in some marketing fields there are
no substantial evidences which prove any remarkable scientific research specifically on
affiliate marketing, native advertising, marketing automation, lead scoring, e-mail
marketing and A/B testing which could considered measurable at this stage.

3.2 Lack of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on Digital Marketing Research

Since businesses have expanded over the last years, the need of hiring expert staff
emerged, academic researchers chose being hired by companies instead of remaining
at universities or research centers. Inevitably, the maturity of AI research in business
sector is much higher and explains the diffusion of AI outside of universities, and in
technology product. Another main reason is that scientists lack of data when business
sector manages to gather and store billions of bytes of data daily which makes them
sufficient to conduct their own research when artificial intelligence (AI) scientists have
nothing but less amount of data to evolve their models [29]. According to
eMarketer.com marketing experts struggle to define artificial intelligence (AI). Instead
of using the words ‘machine learning’, ‘data mining’, ‘predictive modeling’ they
constantly use the word ‘artificial intelligence’ to describe data analysis, smart systems,
user profiling or keyword searches. On the contrary computer scientists and IT
engineers lack of marketing knowledge [30].

4 Research Proposition

Due to the big amount of data which are daily generated, the complexity of decision
making, and the need of fast results lead to a point where we must invent a model that
can be applied in as many different digital marketing methods as possible. To do that
we must find the facts and decide what outcome we need. The facts we have and are
used in most of digital marketing methods are big data with multiple attributes and
numerous instances, sophisticated decision and optimization algorithms. The outcome
could be a statistically correct result which could help decision makers. We would
probably need a model that classifies data upon request and optimizes them in order to
be more accurate. The existence of a generic optimization model that produce classified
data would give decision makers the ability to reconsider their choices based on low
risk decisions. Digital marketing methods vary from bidding optimization to keyword
selection, targeted audiences etc. If we statistically prove that specific data interact and
correlate with each other, we could built the foundation of a smart decision agent [31].

5 Conclusion

Our research reveals that the amount of scientific research that took place and refer to
the involvement of artificial intelligence (AI) in digital marketing techniques is still in
its prime with few exceptions. Nowadays, personalization, targeting, high conversion
rates, high ROIs etc. are some of what we are about to witness from the excessive
technological evolution of marketing and computer science. Now it is the perfect time
for marketers, companies, decision makers to grab the chance and produce excellent
results. Artificial intelligence (AI) will clearly bring new standards in digital marketing
both in academia and businesses. Industrial sector is few steps ahead from the point
where academic world stands today. Despite companies’ artificial intelligence (AI)
model’s evolution, academia will manage eventually to close the gap in between.
Marketing science does evolve, not only in business sector but also in universities
where the new knowledge is born, and businesses depend on the latter [32, 33].

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