Online marketing is entering a new phase where artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer just a cool addition but a must-have. Creative minds are combining with smart algorithms to totally transform how businesses grow quickly and succeed. Affiliates aren't just aiming for small improvements anymore; the smartest ones are using AI and automation to achieve massive growth, seeing their ad campaigns grow by 400-500%.
In this article, we'll share 5 simple hacks to help you boost your campaign ROI with AI. Whether you're an experienced affiliate or just starting out, these tips will show you how to use AI to take your campaigns to the next level.
Strategy 1: Make use of AI-optimized campaigns
One of the best tools for affiliate marketers, media buyers, and advertisers using AI is Meta's Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. This tool lets AI test hundreds of different creative combinations and target the audiences most likely to make a purchase. For example, it's easy to see a return on ad spend (ROAS) jump from 50 to 400 just by using AI optimization.
To get the most out of AI-optimized campaigns, marketers should give the AI system a variety of ad creatives, like images, videos, and copy. This allows the AI to figure out which combinations work best and match them with the right audiences. The main point is that every creative piece has an ideal audience, and AI is great at finding those perfect matches.
Strategy 2: Use AI to transform data into actionable insights
Big companies usually have special teams for business intelligence and data science to find useful insights for marketers. But now, tools like ChatGPT have made it possible for anyone to access powerful data analysis. By simply entering raw campaign data into ChatGPT, marketers can get visualizations (like heatmaps and graphs) and discover actionable insights in just minutes.
For example, you might find out that your peak sales happen on Mondays at 6 AM and Sundays at 3 PM—times you might have missed without AI analysis. You could also discover that your CPMs are lowest between 4-6 PM, but your budgets are decreasing during these hours, leading to missed opportunities. With these insights, affiliates can make data-driven decisions to optimize bids, budgets, and creative strategies for significant growth.
Strategy 3: Use real-time data to be more agile
In fast-moving, time-sensitive campaigns like Black Friday promotions, being quick and flexible is important. Relying on slow data reporting and decision-making can hurt your performance. To avoid this, you can create a real-time performance dashboard using Google Sheets, which pulls live data from ad platforms and payment gateways. This gives your team an up-to-the-minute view of the business, allowing them to quickly spot and fix issues or seize opportunities.
For example, if you see a generic ad is not performing well, you can work with designers to create, produce, and launch a new, better-performing ad within hours. Similarly, if a bug is found on a landing page, it can be fixed within an hour to prevent lost sales. If you notice that your ad budgets are being spent too early compared to when conversions actually happen, you can adjust the budget pacing throughout the day. By using real-time data, you can make changes 5 times faster, helping you scale from $100K to $800K in just three weeks.
Strategy 4: Adjust your budget based on peak conversion times
Real-time data often shows that campaign budgets are spent evenly throughout the day, even though sales peak at certain times. To fix this, you can use ChatGPT to analyze your campaign data and find the best times to spend your budget.
For example, AI might show that the best time to increase your budget is between 11 PM and 3 AM. By using tools like Smart Bidding and Performance Scheduling in Meta, you can automatically adjust your bids and budget to make the most of these peak times. This strategy can significantly boost your return on ad spend (ROAS), sometimes by up to 4 times.
To take it even further, you can use ChatGPT to group geos with similar peak sales times and schedule your budget accordingly. This way, you can optimize your campaign on a global scale.
Strategy 5: Increase engagement and lower CPMs with AI-powered comment moderation
Affiliates often focus on creating great ads but sometimes forget about the comments section. This is where potential customers look for reviews and reasons to buy. If you ignore it, comments can fill up with spam and negative feedback, which can hurt your sales.
Using an AI tool like Brand Bastion (just an example, no affiliation) to manage comments can help. This tool can handle spam, engage with your audience, and answer common questions, which can lower your CPMs. More engagement shows algorithms that your ads are relevant, improving your ad performance and making your ad spend more efficient.
You don’t always need expensive tools, though. A team dedicated to managing and responding to comments can also boost your results.
To make things easier, you can create a custom ChatGPT prompt that turns the AI into a personal assistant for your business. By entering your campaign data into this prompt, you can get specific growth strategies tailored to your needs, ready to use right away.
With these AI-powered insights, affiliates can potentially see their results increase 5x times within the next 30 days.
Q and A with Marisha Lakhiani, the CMO at MindValley
Marisha Lakhiani
Q: Can you share a bit about your background and how you got started in marketing and growth?
A: I've been in the marketing space for over a decade and have helped dozens of brands scale to over 8-figures in revenue. At Mindvalley, I shifted the business to a subscription model, increasing customer lifetime value from $300 to over $3,000. I also launched our certification program which I scaled to $20M in the first year. My approach is all about chasing bold innovations and exponential growth.
Q: Mindvalley has become known as a leader in digital marketing. What do you think sets your marketing strategies apart?
A: We're always pushing the boundaries and looking for innovative, disruptive ways to drive growth. While many marketers go for incremental gains, we aim for 3X, 5X, 10X improvements. We're early adopters of new AI tools and use them in creative ways - which is why we often end up as case studies at affiliate marketing events. And we move fast. When we see an opportunity or something that's working, we scale it quickly and aggressively.
Q: You 5X'd your Black Friday sales in 2023 compared to 2022. What were the key changes that drove those results?
A: It came down to five key things:
- Adopting Meta's AI-powered Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns which automatically optimize creative and targeting
- Using Chat GPT to surface insights and strategies from our real-time data
- Building dashboards with live data feeds so we could track and react to performance instantly
- Leveraging AI to optimize the comments on our ads, which lowered CPMs by 74%
- Scheduling our budgets based on when Chat GPT predicted peak sales times for each region
By leveraging AI across the whole campaign lifecycle, we uncovered opportunities we would have missed and scaled the winning elements extremely quickly. That's how we hit 5X growth.
Q: What advice would you give to advertisers looking to start leveraging AI to improve their campaign performance?
A: The key is to dive in and start experimenting with AI tools now. Use them to automate campaign optimization, surface data insights, predict future trends, engage your audience, and so on.
Look for the quick wins - like adopting Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns or moderating ad comments. Those are easy to implement and can have an outsized impact.
Move fast and don't be afraid to take risks. With AI, marketers can uncover and scale winning strategies incredibly quickly.
And use AI throughout the entire campaign process - from creative generation to budgeting to optimization to analytics. The more you leverage AI at each stage, the more opportunities you'll find to drive exponential improvements.
Q: Where do you see the biggest opportunities for advertisers to leverage AI in the near future?
A: I think we're just scratching the surface of what's possible with AI in marketing. As the tools mature, I expect we'll see AI play a bigger role in predicting consumer behavior, enabling truly personalized experiences, and automating more of the campaign creation and management.
I'm also excited to use AI to tap into new formats like virtual product try-ons, interactive video ads, conversational commerce, and so on.
But perhaps the biggest opportunity is in using AI to surface the insights and strategies we would otherwise miss. As the AI race heats up, the advertisers who can use it to uncover new growth levers and execute on them the fastest will be the winners.
Ultimately, I believe AI will be the key to unlocking exponential growth and massively increasing ROI in the years ahead. So my recommendation is to embrace it fully and start using it to power every aspect of your campaigns. The results will follow.
Conclusion
The days of small marketing improvements are over. Now, we're in an era of massive, highly profitable growth driven by AI. The Mindvalley case study shows just how big the rewards can be for marketing teams that are quick and creative.
By using the five strategies in this article – AI-optimized campaigns, AI-driven insights, real-time data, smart budget scheduling, and AI-powered comment moderation – affiliates can achieve incredible growth and exceed their 2023 goals. The future of marketing is all about using AI smartly, and with the right strategies, the possibilities are endless.
