The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing Innovation for Forecasting New Student Admissions

This article discusses the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology in the industrial era 4.0 and its role in digital marketing and forecasting. This study aims to forecast the number of new students before and after the COVID-19 period using the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) method and explore the role of AI in digital marketing. This study uses explanatory sequential mixed methods, which combines a quantitative approach with the ANN model and a descriptive qualitative approach to determine digital marketing strategy. The data used is new student admission data from the XYZ Institute from 2014 to 2023. The forecasting results with the ANN model showed an accuracy of 98.808% before COVID-19 and 98.866% after COVID-19, with MAPE values of 1.192% and 1.1ss34%, respectively, indicating that this model is very accurate. Before COVID-19, digital marketing was not implemented in 2014-2015 but began using Google and Facebook in 2016-2018 and continued after COVID-19 in 2019-2023. This research gap fills the gap by using explanatory sequential mixed methods that are rarely used in similar studies, and the results show that the use of AI in digital marketing strategies can increase effectiveness, especially by using Google and Facebook as the leading platforms.