There’s something powerful about the act of planning, isn’t there? Things don’t always go according to plan, but they do turn out better for having done that work. For any business that wants to grow its online presence, creating a comprehensive digital marketing plan is crucial. The right plan will help ensure you can effectively reach your target audience, boost your brand’s awareness, and increase sales. 

But planning takes time, effort, and expertise. This is where AI comes in—it can help provide a bit of each of those. AI transforms marketing both by automating repetitive tasks, but also by providing data-driven insights into your strategy. If it’s an AI like Kindo, its models were trained on datasets rich with publicly available marketing plans and it can help you build a truly SEO-competitive digital strategy. Let’s see how.

Ask It to Define Your Goals

The first step in creating a plan is to establish your goals. What do you want to achieve through your online marketing efforts? Are you looking to boost brand awareness, increase website traffic, generate more leads, or increase sales? (Or let’s be real, all of those in order.) Defining clear goals and ranking them in order of priority will shape your overall strategy. For instance, if your goal is to grow website traffic above all else, your strategy should focus on SEO, content creation, and backlink building.

How would you rank these goals for yourself? 

1. Brand awareness

2. Website traffic

3. Website conversions

4. Leads

5. Sales 

An AI like Kindo can help with this. If you tell it about your product, your current sales strategy, and what your competitors are doing, it can suggest which goals to focus on.

Conduct Market Research With AI

Market research is the (usually quite cumbersome) process of uncovering insights into your target audience, competitors, and industry trends. Who’s buying, and where? Can they be grouped into segments? How are other companies serving them? 

Market research requires surveys, focus groups, and data analytics, and you will still need those to do the very best job. But AI can speed up the process somewhat with instant best-guesses based on all the information in its training set. It can give you a first pass on market research and conduct sentiment analysis on social posts or customer interview transcripts to reflect things back to you about your own product or buyer.

An AI-powered tool can analyze your current information to provide info about your target demographics, pain points, and buyer journeys. AI can take some of the guesswork out of market research so you can create faster persona profiles, choose competitive keywords you wouldn’t have thought of, and identify key messages that resonate.

Create Buyer Personas With AI Assistance

Developing detailed buyer personas is essential for your strategy. These are snapshots of your buyer founded in real research to help you think like them when crafting your marketing plan. Ask your AI tool to analyze your existing data like demographics, behavior, interests, purchase history, and needs (both stated and revealed) to create customized personas. This makes it easier to tailor your messaging, visuals, and campaigns to resonate with your audience, because you can glance at that persona and think, “Would they find this appealing?”

Choose the Right Marketing Channels With AI Recommendations

From social media to SEO to email marketing, today’s marketers have endless channels to choose from—which is freeing, but can leave you feeling paralyzed. AI like Kindo can remove some of the guesswork by analyzing your personas, competitors, past performance data, and industry benchmarks. It can recommend an ideal channel mix along with budget allocation advice. For instance, it may suggest investing 40% of your budget into SEO to rank for high-traffic keywords. This data-backed insight helps maximize your marketing ROI. (This is just an example, of course.)

Set Powerful KPIs With AI Support

Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are metrics that measure the success of your campaigns. Examples include the number of leads generated, how much traffic has grown month-over-month, or the revenue run rate. Setting the right KPIs requires an understanding of your business goals and data analysis. And if your analytics tool uses AI, which excels at crunching numbers, it can suggest those key performance indicators (KPIs) as well as identify anomalies in the data where you should focus your attention. This allows you to tweak campaigns that aren’t delivering results.

Create High-Converting Content

Content marketing is essential for attracting and engaging your target audience. But creating high-quality blog posts, videos, and other content requires significant time and human thought. AI content tools can help with pieces of that process. It can generate entire blog posts (though beware, this is the same generic content others can create, and so, without editing, may not rank well on Google). But AI is even better at short-form writing such as social media posts optimized for your brand and keywords. 

Regardless of format, you provide Kindo the overall topic and key points, it generates the outline (or completed text), and you can edit to ensure the insights are fresh and unique. In this way, it can help you create a steady stream of fresh, SEO-friendly content that resonates with your audience and boosts lead generation without draining your team’s resources.

More ideas for writing with AI:

• Brainstorm ideas

• Develop counterintuitive topics

• Challenge your own thinking—“What am I missing here?”

• Develop short-form writing like headlines, email subject lines, and social posts

• Develop long-form outlines

• Develop campaign plans

• Develop long-form writing

Optimize Paid Campaigns With AI Insights

Paid platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads are often your quickest means of getting your message before your target buyer. But, you pay for it. Running profitable paid ad campaigns requires you to be constantly testing, refining, and ensuring that you’re actually seeing a return on your ad spend (known as ROAS). AI can of course help with this too. 

AI can crunch large volumes of performance data to give you a second opinion on which ads to run more frequently, or what to change about them. It’ll provide recommendations for increasing their relevance, lowering your cost per click, adjusting the bids, and more. (Though the advice will be general and not specific to any one ad platform.) Some AI can also provide predictive analytics to model the outcomes of your proposed ad variations.

Refine Your SEO Strategy

If you want to rank high in search engines, two motions are necessary: technical SEO optimization and to produce an ongoing stream of high-quality content. And wouldn’t you know, AI can assist with both. It can generate what are known as “on-page” and “off-page” recommendations—things to change about your site architecture like sitemap, enriched meta descriptions, page speed, and copy and imagery recommendations. AI can also suggest high-performing, low-competition keywords based on your existing content, to suggest ones to invest more in, and suggest gaps. This SEO assistance may increase your search visibility and website traffic from organic searches.

Create an Editorial Calendar

An editorial calendar outlines your content creation strategy over weeks or months, and it’s a good reminder that in marketing, it plans to think ahead. Most digital marketers never escape “fire drill” marketing where everything’s an emergency, they’re always behind, and they can’t plan. If you establish a calendar, you can set some guidelines with your organization that gives you more room to breathe and teaches everyone to think on longer timelines. Having that calendar can ensure you have a consistent drumbeat of content tailored to your goals. Kindo’s AI can suggest what should go on that editorial calendar, including blog topics optimized for your personas and keywords.

Devise a Plan to Use AI Chatbots

Chatbots are those “let’s chat” bubbles on companies’ websites that typically put people in touch with a bot and then a person. Chatbots weren’t that great in the past, but now, AI-powered ones are extremely effective at answering your prospects’ questions, and even qualifying them as leads. It helps prospects learn more about your products without having to navigate the website, and helps you understand what questions they have. 

Chatbots also never sleep, so they can engage visitors around the globe 24/7 while you and your team are sleeping.

Evaluate and Refine Your Efforts

Once your plan is in place, use AI analytics to monitor performance and fine-tune your approach. AI-assisted reporting can provide a holistic picture across channels to identify high-performing campaigns as well as those needing improvement. You can then adjust the messaging, format, cadence, and more. 

In this way, AI enables you to continually optimize your marketing strategy, and continue to improve upon your plan.

How Do You leverage AI in digital marketing? Have it Build the Plan

AI is revolutionizing digital marketing in myriad ways, and it now has the marketing chops to help you build your digital marketing plan. To recap, here are a few of the key ways to apply it:

• Conducting market research faster through data analysis and predictive modeling.

• Creating detailed buyer personas using demographic and behavioral data.

• Identifying the optimal marketing channels and budget allocations for campaigns.

• Generating high-converting content tailored to your brand and audience interests.

• Optimizing paid campaigns through testing and analytics.

• Improving SEO rankings with keyword and website analysis.

• Developing an editorial calendar to map out content promotion.

• Implementing chatbots to engage customers 24/7.

• Evaluating performance across channels and fine-tune strategies accordingly.

By leveraging AI, you can create data-driven digital marketing plans that connect with audiences and drive real results. The power of AI allows you to optimize every aspect of your digital marketing approach. And free you to do more of the human aspects of marketing—like editing this article.