How does AI influence marketing in the motorcycle industry?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) will play an increasingly significant role in marketing in the motorcycle industry in years to come. In this article we consider how AI can currently assist marketers in our work, how NOT to use it and how to best use AI to your advantage as a marketer in the near to distant future.
In their excellent overview of the topic, Hubspot states, ‘AI marketing is when marketers use artificial intelligence to gather insights into their customers and produce better content. Marketing assets guided by AI are personalised and optimised for the customer journey. This can look like chatbots, targeted advertising and content generation.’
AI Marketing in action in 2024
AI-powered tools can already be used to generate, personalise and translate content for use in marketing campaigns. Tools such as copy.ai and Open AI’s well known ChatGPT can assist with creating basic website content, social media captions and product descriptions, amongst other things.
These tools are still relatively new and the quality of the content they produce is not bad, but in the experience of the Motorcycle Marketing team, this AI generated copy always needs checking, refining and editing by a specialist copywriter to be genuinely usable.
ChatGPT's capabilities extend beyond basic copywriting; it can also be used effectively with tasks such as basic research (provided you ask it to cite sources for facts), programming support and knowledge exploration.
Ask it ‘What are the best channels on YouTube for motorcycle content’ and it impressively lists some of our favourite channels, including FortNine, RevZilla, Yammie Noob, Motorcyclist Magazine and 44Teeth, also providing a neat and fairly accurate description for each. This begs the question, however, if I’m new to the motorcycle marketing game how do I know if ChatGPT’s suggestions are really right or helpful?
Ask ChatGPT, ‘What happened in the motorcycle industry in 2023?’ and the answer is ‘As of my last update in January 2022, I can't provide real-time information on specific events or developments in the motorcycle industry in 2023.’
AI can often help – and smart marketers always double-check its work
AI driven tools such as Google Translate, Microsoft Translator and Localize can help with some of the legwork on translation, though there are usually significant sub-editing jobs to be done on the copy they produce. A typical example of this is when automatic translation tools translate a word such as ‘Pilote’ (French) or ‘Piloto’ (Spanish) into English as ‘pilot’, rather than the correct translation as ‘rider’ or ‘biker’.
Image generation via AI is also fun to play around with at present, in terms of product ideation, creative prototyping, logo creation and polishing of existing images for product promotion.
Prompts to Open AI's Images Tool such as ‘Make an image of a winter motorcycle riding outfit for a male rider in Sweden’ or ‘Design a cool retro motocross helmet for a French female rider’ produce interesting results, even if slightly strange.
The key point here is, AI can do simple groundwork in these areas and the wise marketer still seeks input and assets from qualified professionals.
Predictive Analytics and AI driven targeting
By leveraging AI driven algorithms (such as Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics and Natural Language Processing algorithms) marketers can analyse historical sales data, website traffic and demographic information in huge volumes.
AI can also analyse text data from social media, online forums and product reviews to extract valuable insights about consumer preferences, sentiment and emerging trends within specific motorcycle owner communities.
This enables marketers to harness the power of AI to forecast trends and anticipate consumer demands. In turn, marketers can then run targeted advertising campaigns more effectively, optimise pricing strategies, identify opportunities for product innovation, refine their messaging and ultimately allocate advertising budgets more efficiently.
Some of this rapidly evolving AI technology is already built into platforms such as Google Ads and the Meta Business Suite. This means you can already take advantage of AI in your ad campaigns by allowing Google and Meta’s AI to curate your campaigns, find your customers in the most targeted way and optimise your ROI over time.
The expert team here at Motorcycle Marketing can help your brand to feed Google and Meta’s AI-enabled systems with the best marketing assets, set up your campaigns in the most effective manner possible and refine your product offer to whatever the relevant segment of riders are demanding.
With this relatively new and rapidly improving technology we should consider how not to use AI and how to guard against its current pitfalls.
Over-reliance on automation and AI in marketing is a common mistake made by marketers. While AI automation can streamline marketing processes and improve efficiency in certain instances, excessive reliance on automated systems without human oversight does lead to errors, as set out in some of our examples above. Misinterpretation of data and language by AI can mean that you miss opportunities to connect with riders on a meaningful level.
Privacy is another important factor to keep in mind, as AI marketing technology is developing so quickly that regulators can’t always keep up. Marketers therefore need to be ready to react when regulations potentially impinge on the capabilities of the marketing solutions they rely on.
For example, ChatGPT was temporarily banned in Italy in 2023 and is still unavailable in certain territories. Do not become over reliant on an AI workflow which may not be compliant with privacy laws in the markets you are targeting.
Copyright is another issue that marketers in the motorcycle industry should consider when using AI in any element of content creation. Current AI technology may create useful pieces of copy or interesting images for marketing campaigns, but the original content the AI has used for reference and inspiration should be respected, credited and certainly not ‘copied’ in any way.
We would also strongly suggest preventing your customers from feeling like they are talking to a machine or robot, rather than a well-informed and insightful customer service agent or sales assistant.
Whilst Chatbots and virtual assistants are improving over time and might provide tangible results in terms of gathering data for sales or answering simple customer service inquiries, they are usually best implemented when backed up by a team of human sales people or customer service staff.
The day may well come when robots test ride motorcycles and help human riders decide which bikes they are best suited to ride, but we are not there yet!
Preparing for the future and using AI to your advantage
Our main recommendation here is to keep learning (see this additional Hubspot resource) about how to use specific AI technologies, whilst seeking guidance from experts such as the team at Motorcycle Marketing as to how to gradually implement AI into your workflows as and when appropriate.
Not every AI marketing tool is going to be directly relevant to your brand, your target audience or your specific area of work. Over time each relevant area of AI technology relevant to marketers will improve, so the important point is to stay informed on which tools may best serve you in your responsibilities.
Working with a solution such as ‘Grammarly’ to improve copywriting, becomes easier over time as the tool itself becomes more advanced and as you as a user feed it and set rules for it to apply. Grammarly is not new and is just one example of a plethora of continually evolving tools that marketers can experiment and learn with, whilst enhancing and optimising their day-to-day work.
Open AI’s newly launched Sora application for video generation could be a game changer but it’s still early days. The videos it produces will improve over time, it will become accessible to marketers and it will be able to produce videos from text prompts, still images and from shorter video clips which it can patch together. Learning how it works, how to use it and experimenting with it over time is the way to go.
For a glimpse into the future take a look at this video ‘Cyberpunk 2077: POV Photorealistic Motorbike Ride in 8K’ published by NextGen Dreams which features a prototype motorcycle, in a high-definition virtual world built on photorealistic graphics. Being aware of how this type of content is made, who makes it and how it develops over time will help you understand how the AI-enhanced future of motorcycle marketing may take shape.
By incorporating AI technologies into your marketing strategies, you can gain a competitive edge in promoting motorcycle brands, improve customer engagement, and drive sales growth. However, it's essential to stay updated on the latest advancements in AI and adapt them to your specific business needs and objectives.
If you need help with optimising your workflows and improving your marketing campaigns - whether through the implementation of AI or otherwise – contact the Motorcycle Marketing team today for a free of charge consultancy session.
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