THE FUTURE OF MARKETING IN THE REALM OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI is quickly pervading every aspect of life – and that includes marketing. AI disrupts traditional marketing decision-making. Rather than spending a long time collecting and analysing marketing data before taking decisions, AI not only automates these processes but also answers essential questions, including: “How do we decide what our next steps should be and optimise our actions for the best chance of success?” The potential for this predictive and suggestive technology in marketing is massive and it is already being demonstrated how AI platforms can interpret and ‘learn’ from data. The result within the affiliate marketing network world is that advertisers will no longer be dependent on network account managers or digital marketing executives to analyse campaign performance and recommend improvements. And that will make a very significant difference to both customer experience and ROI.
The value of automating this data analysis task cannot be overestimated. A typical marketing campaign might generate thousands of sales a day, based on hundreds of thousands of pre-sales activities as customers click through various links. Over a matter of weeks, this can amount to millions of data points, presenting a real challenge to marketers who wish to analyse this data for information about campaign success. From zettabytes of data about advertising platforms, product preferences, time of day and positioning of product, AI can identify the marketing approach that is most likely to end up in a sale. Essentially, AI will enable marketing to match people to the items they want – from trainers to electrical goods – more quickly and efficiently.
These are the examples how marketing benefits from AI so far:
Speech / Text Recognition (Conversational Commerce)
In 2014 and even in most of 2015, it might have been safe to say that while chatbots and speech recognition were an interesting use for artificial intelligence, it still hadn’t made a legitimate impact in marketing or advertising. At the beginning in 2016, a wave of legitimately viable speech and chat interfaces have crossed over into the marketing worlds – and some of them showed grand promise.
Marketing Forecasting
Being able to predict the success of an email campaign or marketing initiative can help companies continuously improve marketing efforts (in display, text, video, or even direct mail). We can expect more companies in the future, and more refined marketing efforts from companies large and small as these technologies / assessment tools improve and become more mainstream.
Programmatic Advertising
Simply stated, programmatic advertising is the automated process of buying and selling ad inventory through an exchange, connecting advertisers to publishers. This process uses artificial intelligence technologies… and real-time bidding for inventory across mobile, display, video and social channels – even making its way into television. Artificial intelligence technologies have algorithms that analyze a visitor’s behavior allowing for real time campaign optimizations towards an audience more likely to convert. Programmatic companies have the ability to gather this audience data to then target more precisely, whether it’s from 1st party (their own) or from a 3rd party data provider.