Marketing meets AI: How Machine Learning can supercharge your marketing efforts
AI is perhaps the most exciting technology since the invention of electricity. Unlike many other technologies developed over the past 100 years, AI has the potential to fundamentally remake society, thanks to the fact that it will weave its way into all aspects of our lives, from how we work to ordering pizza.
For companies, AI is a massive opportunity, helping them to supercharge their digital marketing efforts. But because the technology is so new and advancing so rapidly, many businesses don’t know how to leverage it yet. According to a survey by Demandbase and Wakefield Research, four-fifths of marketing executives believe that machine learning will revolutionize marketing in the next five years, but only 26 percent actually understand the underlying technology.
How Machine Learning Can Supercharge Your Marketing Efforts
Though the technology may be new (and a little scary), it will ultimately make the task of marketing easier. Because machine learning thrives on data, it’s able to make sense of data in a way that traditional statistical methods simply can’t. Passing enough data through a neural net - the brain of a machine learning AI system - routinely leads to learning outcomes that marketing directors never expected, and at scales they never imagined. In short, machine learning is able to offer you insights about your customers which you would never have gotten by yourself.
There’s another benefit to using machine learning bots too: reduced burden on your marketing department. Today’s digital marketing involves a lot of legwork, from customer segmentation to personalization to optimization of marketing messages. Doing this manually is a time-consuming and arduous task, especially for mere human workers who aren’t able to parse gigabytes of data every second. Bots, on the other hand, are perfectly cut out for this kind of donkey work, dealing with otherwise complex processes in a heartbeat, allowing your team to get on with higher value-added tasks.
How To Set Up Your Team For Machine Learning
Setting up machine learning-driven marketing requires you to have a team that understands how to leverage the technology - a significant impediment for many businesses.
According to Alison Wagonfeld, vice president of marketing at Google Cloud, there are three steps every company must take.
1. Data Integrity And Consistency
One of the first problems businesses encounter when they try to use machine-learning to boost their marketing is data integrity and consistency. Ideally, all data coming into the company would be compatible, allowing it to be centrally pooled and analyzed. However, for businesses operating across multiple locations, this may not happen. A priority, therefore, is to make sure that data are standardized so that both old and new data can be integrated.
2. Embrace An Innovation Mindset
Innovators know that you need to risk failure in order to succeed. This means that companies need to begin experimenting with different strategies to realize their machine learning ambitions. Playing it safe is not an option.
3. Be Specific About The Problems You Want To Solve
Wagonfeld didn’t try to apply insights from machine learning across the board right away. Instead, she focused on products which she thought would benefit the most from the technology. Google Cloud division poured its marketing dollars into making better product recommendations - something which had high ROI. The bottom line: focus your AI marketing strategies on one project at a time.