The impact of AI and ML on Marketing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are not ‘on the way’ anymore. They are already here! AI and ML are causing disruptions and transforming the technological landscape in almost all domains of each industry.

Modern business ecosystems have seen pervasive uses of AI in the form of:

• Digital Assistants
• Image-recognition apps
• Self-driving cars
• Automated manufacturing
• AI-driven supply chain management solutions
• Autonomous trucks
• Voice assistants
• ML-enabled marketing solutions

The progress is rapid. In case you missed what AI and ML actually are, here is a quick recap:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI): The study of making our machines more intelligent and capable enough to solve problems the same way humans do.
• Machine Learning (ML): The new way of creating problem-solving solutions, here we teach computers to learn from existing data without hardcoding them within a rigid set of rules.

What once was something out of a science fiction movie, is now an integral part of our daily lives. AI and ML are taking new leaps in all spheres. But in this blog post, we will answer a very specific question – What’s the impact of AI and ML on marketing?

Before we answer that question, let us understand the difference between traditional and AI-based marketing.

Traditional marketing approach has limited insight into user behavior and buying patterns. Whereas, AI-based marketing utilizes detailed information on buying patterns and behavior.

Thanks to these detailed ML models, the present-day marketing teams can leverage the power of AI into their businesses.

Some ML-based marketing models in the market today include:

These are a few examples of models that use different types of algorithms to empower marketers and allow them to create a better user experience, improve outreach in the targeted segment, trigger a response, and improve the relevance of the audience.

Along with a wide range of powerful tools powered by ML, cloud-based platforms and apps are further creating a paradigm shift in emerging markets.

It is essential that we understand the importance and advantages of AI and ML-based marketing. Some of the most important ones are listed in the following points:

• Leveraging big data to get a better value
• More competitive advantages to explore
• Stronger customer relationships
• Accurate market forecasts and sales projections
• Data-driven, optimized marketing campaigns
• Better marketing qualified leads (MQL)
• More sales qualified leads (SQL)
• Better insights to improve positioning
• Increased relevance at scale
• Reduction in customer churn rate
• Reduced inventories
• Smarter point-of-sale systems
• 360-degree view of customer needs
• Exploiting more business opportunities
• Fine-tuned propensity models to create focused marketing strategies
• Customer satisfaction with improved user experience
• Reduction in marketing costs for better ROI

Marketing and advertising executives across the globe have one aim: Achieve relevance at scale. AI and ML have taken them a step closer to realizing this goal.

The advance AI-enabled features have opened new avenues for marketing and storytelling. AI is the driving force behind an era of marketing that specializes in attaining new levels of customization and targeting within the confines of context.

The way people interact with technology, data, brands, products, and services has experienced a major disruption. It is all thanks to AI’s intervention.

Big players like Google are reinventing all their existing products by integrating AI into them. Let’s take a look at the Google Assistant. By using speech recognition and language understanding, it can create a conversation in the real world.

Here is a video that demonstrates Google Assistant’s capability of making a phone call on your behalf to make a reservation.

AI and ML have shifted the focus from mass advertising to a more micro-targeted approach. Marketers can achieve outstanding results by implementing ML algorithms in their marketing processes.

With great challenges come great opportunities. As customer expectations continue to rise, marketers are presented with the opportunity of realizing personalization and relevance at scale.

This can be made possible through tailor-made campaigns that focus on customer intent in real-time. AI and ML help increase the relevancy of campaigns.

Marketers will be able to take into account all the different signals that customers send out—purchase history, layout preferences, and others—and optimize their campaigns on the fly.

The global machine learning market is expected to grow from $1.41 billion in 2017 to $8.81 billion by 2022, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 44.1%.

The Future of Marketing with AI and ML

Let’s start by looking at AI and ML-based smart automation solutions that are influencing the marketing industry. Some of them include:

While we gain so much from AI and ML, we are prone to make some mistakes along the way. Despite having advanced systems in place, it is essential to have a living marketer at the helm.

A marketer’s role should not be diminished. Human oversight is important and AI still needs strategies that humans devise to improve their cognitive capabilities.

Here are some common mistakes that a good marketing strategist avoids at all costs when creating AI-driven marketing processes:

• Targeting generic and broad customer personas
• Following a generic approach
• Working with insufficient customer data
• Not analyzing and testing the performance of past marketing campaigns
• Not addressing regular and returning customers
• Focusing on multiple outcomes at the same time
• Generating and publishing irrelevant content
• Too much reliance on gut-feeling

With the information we discussed, you will be able to integrate multiple aspects of AI and ML into your marketing strategy.

To Wrap Up

AI and ML will be the pioneers in taking new ideas from spark to flame and surpass the existing levels of creativity. New ways of storytelling will emerge as we leverage more media platforms and this is when we are just getting started with AI.

Many major corporations are already leveraging AI and ML to create new marketing strategies.

Are you up for the challenge?