How Machine Learning Can Boost Your Digital Marketing Efforts
In 1899, the Director of the US Patent Office confidently pronounced: “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” For a man embedded in a world of invention, you would hope Charles H. Durell to have shown more confidence in his people’s ability to create. As the course of history proves, we are far from the zenith of innovation.
Nowhere is this more applicable than in Digital Marketing.
Technology Is Powering Innovation
Digital Marketing is the catch-all term for every aspect of online marketing. It includes content marketing, video marketing, email marketing, and search engine marketing (SEM), among other formats.
In recent years, the sector has become dominated by household names such as Google and Facebook, leading to a fear that there’s no room left for innovation; that all invention has already happened. However, countering the belief, new technology has emerged and is currently turning this oligopoly on its head.
Machine Learning is a subset of Artificial Intelligence that uses systems to analyze data, recognize patterns and make decisions with little or no human involvement. Machine learning spans everything from Amazon Alexa responding to your voice commands to Facebook recognizing your face — and tagging you — in a picture.
But the real value of machine learning lies in its algorithms: the programs that help mere mortals to solve complex problems in a more efficient manner, thus reducing your reliance on third-party applications. And while marketers have demonstrated a reluctance to adopt unproven technology over the years, recent applications have opened the door for a variety of new strategies for digital marketers to apply.
The algorithms have proven to be so successful that most of the marketing world has now opened its mind to this new, revolutionary approach.
- In a survey by Salesforce, 51% of marketers admit to already use some form of Artificial Intelligence
- 27% of respondents confirmed they plan to incorporate the technology in 2019
- 97% of marketing influencers believe the future of digital marketing will involve human marketers working alongside machine learning-powered automation
If you haven’t yet jumped on the machine learning bandwagon, 2019 could be the year to do so.
There’s More to Marketing than Google and Facebook
Google has long been the marketers’ best friend. In fact, the search giant makes $100 billion in advertising revenue a year from capturing what’s on a user’s mind, storing that detail against reams of personal data harvested from across the web, and retargeting ads based on this information. Google’s access to your personal data has helped the search engine maintain its top spot as the dominant digital advertising platform, absorbing up to one-third of US digital ad spend in 2018.
But the truth is, Google does not know everything. The platform cannot serve the entire market’s needs. And many already look beyond Google for several reasons — with machine learning applications only influencing the migration away from the platform.
Single Customer View
Google only knows so much about your customers: what they’ve searched for, or if they’ve clicked through to your website. Google can provide information on organic traffic and paid traffic. However, anything the search engine shows your prospect is primarily based on this relatively siloed dataset.
It is a reactive remarketing method based on search history. It offers little insight into the user’s worldview, personality, or character. And where Google uses machine learning, the technology can still suffer from limitations we discuss in the next point.
Custom Models
Business owners often want to build a custom model that governs the user experience depending on how they arrived at a website, or what they clicked on. This is to influence the path-to-purchase through an optimized user journey, ultimately driving conversions and sales.
The issue is, Google data doesn’t always fit the parameters of your custom model or offer sufficient information to support your model’s end-goal. Moreover, it could be difficult to correlate a Google search and a purchase. A factor that’s driving one-third of online marketers to divert ad-spend to Amazon as marketers know: if a user searches for a product at the eCommerce retailer, they typically want to buy it.
Personal Preference
Then, there are those marketers who simply choose not to use Google: due to privacy concerns, inclinations towards other channels, or mere personal preference. And with the advent of machine learning, Google, Facebook, even Amazon, are no longer the only data-rich weapons in the digital marketer’s arsenal.
How Machine Learning Will Revolutionise Marketing
The most significant advancement offered by artificial intelligence is that digital marketers now have a tool that can predict how a consumer is going to behave. By feeding vast datasets into a computer, machine learning algorithms can analyze past decisions to provide an accurate prediction of the action a customer will take next.
As such, marketing is no longer reactive. It can become reliably predictive.
Originally published at www.dlabs.pl on February 20, 2019.
