Marketing & Machine Learning

Executive Summary

The first thing that comes to mind when I think about traditional marketing in an aged old world of print ads, TV commercials and even jingles.? I think of the TV Show MADMEN as an illustration of ancient advertising.? In a day dream I suppose I would envision men sitting at a round table of decision makers with cigars hanging from their mouths. ? I see colorful boards showing illustrations of colorful artwork as men debate, brainstorm and rely on their intuition to market to the masses.? In a daydream I also see women lining up to be the next model as female sexuality was the core of advertising at the time as a major selling point.??

The internet was just born around January 1, 1983.? A decade later a 10 year old child like internet was made public on April 30, 1993.? Wireless internet was rolled out commercially in 1999.??

Between 1994 and 1996 internet users shot up from 16MM to 70MM, in just 5 years.? I won’t go into the evolution of the internet on a granular scale, but instead brought out the general timeline to express that the invention of digital marketing is a little over 30 years old as the concept of digital marketing when the Archie search engine came on to the scene in 1990.??

The internet has aged out of childhood and transformed into the GIANT it is today. It is a mature invention with many children spawned from its internet genes.??

Bred from the internet genealogy came; Yahoo, Ebay, Google, Amazon and the list goes on.? No longer do customers have to go outside to purchase.? Through the internet came convenience, reach and access to the right customers, it became almost a form of teleportation for businesses of all sizes.??

The internet made it possible for businesses to meet the customer in their very own home.? This provided savings for both consumers and businesses alike.???

When marketing online; digital marketing is made possible through a form of machine learning.? However vast its capability,? it is limited based on certain variables; such as only connecting you with the ideal customer based external historical data outside of your business.? You as a business can still develop machine learning models that work hand in hand with digital platforms that are contextual to your business internally and the behavioral data that you have collected from your customers.

Traditional vs Digital Marketing?

The primary differentiator between digital and traditional marketing are the vehicles of distribution to your customers.? Traditional marketing is analogous to our MADMEN correlation where consumers are met with magazines, newspapers, radio ads and so on.? Where in most cases but not all customers had to buy a magazine vs being presented with free content to persuade them to buy through the modern marketing vehicle of digital marketing, which relies on social media, search engines, websites and more.??

As mentioned, rather than driving by a billboard, or going to a store to make a purchase, where you happen to see a large visualization in the mall.? No purchase is required to be solicited too…

With the likes of Google you can sit at home, search for what you want and free content is made visible.? Or on Facebook based on your behavioral patterns you will be presented with content that is free to you.??

To bring this full circle, customers previously had to in most cases buy content in order to be solicited to.? Or to go and make a purchase outside of their house to be solicited to.

I actually feel at ease through digital? marketing that reach has been made affordable and easily accessible to customers.? Where modern day SMEs to large organizations can play on almost the same bidding war when it comes to online advertising.? In fact if your content and value proposition is great anything is possible even if it is a business more known. You have the capability to be presented with the same audiences where the competition is your brand messaging.??

The framework of digital marketing makes it possible to meet your target market directly through behavioral patterns as it relates to your business vs just? external customer trends and behaviors that digital marketing platforms offer.?

What is Machine Learning?

Machine learning from a text book point of view, consists of computer algorithms that are studied either supervised and unsupervised that can improve its deliverability of outputs through experience and the use of data.??

As it relates to marketing there are two parts.? You have targeting data that is cold from those who may not have come across your business and then you have data as it relates to how customers have interacted with your content online.??

The purpose of machine learning applied to marketing is being able to make decisions quickly by accessing data in real time and programming responses based on that data.??

For example if I have 3 customer types and I built a user experience as it relates to each of those consumer groups.??

Let me use a real life example…? I worked with a med tech company that assisted those with infertility issues.? There are different kinds of people who suffer from infertility; males, females, those who suffer from PCOS and more.??

Obviously you can’t really respond to each of these groups the same.? They all have different pain points, they all have different journey’s.? Through machine learning you can design a user experience based on these silos.??

Machine learning isn’t a cure all and takes time and sophistication to build as sometimes especially at the beginning stages where supervised models are being tested and validated. Behaviors and data are changing all the time and new models can be developed or programmed to learn and adapt.? As you get more data, and as? you test and analyze the success response the more your models will improve over time.???

Humans are still needed in the development stages to develop hypotheses and the ability to design models that can operate and optimize on their own over time.??

As a marketer you may have several advertising campaigns running and you may have personas as well as behavioral parameters for each of those personas.? It would take forever to analyze that data on top of being able to create actionable assets and responses to your customer behaviors.? This is where data science meets machine learning.? Data by itself is meaningless, data science is needed to make proper use of data toward a machine learning objective.

With machine learning your marketing data can be evaluated in minutes and placed into actionable response models on automation.? You can have real time automated responses and invest more time into other activities.

Of Course the value of your results depends on the accuracy, and relevance of how your data was modeled and positioned which can be improved over time.? If your data is inaccurate and obsolete so will the value of your results.??

Human beings aren’t fully capable at this time of processing large sets of data and the complexities associated with how it is modeled in alignment with any calculations that are tied into these models at different stages.? Especially at every second and minute of the day.? With digital marketing you can earn money as you sleep but you have machine learning and AI bots working on your behalf in real time at the mere cost of conversion and no need for customer service reps to greet the user at the advertising stage.

Machine learning systems can process hundreds of requests, organize them, and provide results in real time.

Key benefits of machine learning in marketing

• Improves the quality of data analysis
• Enables you to analyze more data in less time
• Adapts to changes and new data coming in
• Allows you to automate marketing processes and avoid boring routine work

Conclusion

Machine learning is a subset of AI.? However the overall purpose and meaning of AI is separate from Machine Learning.? Machine Learning is modeled after human learning abilities.? Many but not all AI systems have machine learning as part of that system.? In a way you can say ML gives AI systems their intelligence, ability to learn and adapt.? Just as much as NLP systems and Computer vision play a role in some AI systems.??

From a marketing perspective, machine learning should be tasked with learning and adapting to marketing data in order to improve delivering ads to those who are behaviorally similar to those who have taken key actions on your website and your apps.

Sign up for a strategy session to learn more about how you can apply Machine Learning to your marketing strategy.? (Access Here)