Digital Marketing; AI and ML Edition

What exactly is AI and ML?

Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning, both are ways that digital marketers, and businesses, can get to know their customers better, and improve the service they are providing them.?

Artificial Intelligence?(AI) is the way in which machines attempt mimic human brains. The goal of AI is to replicate the way that humans think, and attempts to do so through speech recognition, natural language processing and problem solving, AI’s use algorithms to analyze past decisions and attempt to see future outcomes. AI’s have been used in things such as Chess Move analysis, Siri and Alexa. There are?three main types of AI: narrow AI, general AI, and super AI.?

Machine Learning (ML) differs in the way that the focus is much more on helping humans solve problems in a different and more efficient way, through the extraction of historical data. ML is an application of AI systems, but without needing to be programmed explicitly. ML focuses on predictions and using data to make those predictions. It is typically used for Google Search Algorithms or Facebook Auto friend tagging suggestion. The main goal with ML is to enhance marketing strategies and improve the interactions customers have with the business. ML also has?three types?which are: supervised learning, reinforcement learning and unsupervised learning.?

AI and ML for Digital Marketing

97%?of leaders believe that the future of marketing lies in the?combination?of digital marketing and machine-learning tools. Therefore, it is important to realize just how effective and helpful implementing these tools can be. AI has been used by brands like Amazon for years. It helps show customers relevant products based on searches they previously did. This can highly impact the chances of your customer making a new or repeat purchase. AI most importantly helps recognize and analyze, through collected data. AI has even been used for UI/UX improvement! AI is also being used for chatbots in order to increase customer service satisfaction. As we learned last week, email marketing campaigns are still alive and well, and the best way to create relevant and impactful messages, that customers receive at the right time, is through use of AI.?

Just like AI, ML can help with content marketing. ML focuses much more on understanding the data of your customers and tracking potential trends and insights. Where ML differs, is how it can help companies with their PPC and SEO strategy campaigns. By analysing the data through ML, you can effectively measure strategy campaigns and how they could reach potential customers. Keep in mind however, that while ML is a branch and uses help of AI in order to analyze data, these two tools are also?fairly different?and it’s important to understand just how different they are.

AI and ML in our daily life?

As mentioned above, companies have already been using AI and ML in a variety of ways. The list is endless from things like ride-share apps, to email marketing, and even your Netflix recommendations. One of the most interesting ways that AI and ML have been used in our real world is by Spotify.

If you don’t know,?Spotify?is a music streaming platform. That’s not all though, because Spotify has an extremely powerful and well-developed recommendation software. Spotify uses a mix of AI and ML, in order to create their own type of recommendation?model, to create your ‘Discover Weekly’ Playlist.?

They also use AI and ML in order to successfully create their yearly "Spotify Wrapped" overview. Something that has helped them increase awareness and brand recognition extensively. Overall, Spotify uses three different recommendation models in order to curate your 'daily mixes' or 'discover weekly' playlist. They use a mix of collaborative filtering, natural language processing, and raw audio models. Through these 3 types of intensive models, Spotify is able to successfully recommend you music that you're likely to highly enjoy.

The future of AI and ML

What Spotify, Amazon, Apple, and more are doing with AI and ML is just the beginning. Even in terms of AI, for the time being we haven't even succeed in reaching one of the three AI types; super. There's still a long way to go, but that doesn't mean AI and ML won't help you now. Look at what other digital marketers are using AI and ML for within their companies, and begin to implement the use of them into your marketing strategies. If anything, it'll help you understand customers more, and deliver content to them quicker.