How To Use Machine Learning Power To Improve Your Digital Marketing from David Warner's blog

Machine learning is the next big thing that will transform the marketing sector as we know it. According to studies, about 30% of companies will be using machine learning in their sales process by the end of 2020.

What interests us is how machine learning can help a company get ahead of competitors by addressing some of marketing’s toughest challenges, like personalization's, instant customer support, and big data.

The time has arrived in which machine learning is not just a play-thing for computer scientists, but it is becoming a general-purpose tool shaping every aspect of digital life. Marketers worldwide are taking note of machine learning’s capabilities, but are you aware of its potential?

Below you can find ways in which you can use machine learning to boost your digital marketing efforts.

For the uninitiated, the term machine learning might be a little heavy. So, let’s look at what is machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a form of “unnatural” intelligence demonstrated by a machine. By “unnatural,” it means intelligence different from humans and animals. Most people think of artificial intelligence as a computer that can mimic some level of human intelligence, such as a chess-playing computer.

Machine learning is a branch of AI that enables a system to automatically find new and improved solutions by learning from experience and previous mistakes. The more knowledge and data a machine learning algorithm gets, the better it will become in its designated task in the future.

There are typically two types of machine learning systems: guided and unguided.

Guided machine learning systems need the initial feeding of data sets and solutions by humans. People teach the machine to look for specific patterns in the beginning. Eventually, the system gets better at identifying those patterns as it learns from experience.

Unguided systems have access to unsorted and disarranged data sets and are left to decipher patterns independently without any human guidance. These unguided machine learning systems create their unique algorithm and then look for ways to improve their abilities going forward.

Using Machine Learning To Improve Your Marketing

Marketing teams don’t suffer from a lack of data because they have access to substantial curated databases containing all the relevant information for their task. Analyzing the data and putting it to fair use is where machine learning can help substantially.

The most significant advantage of adding machine learning to your marketing stack is that it can process a vast amount of data much faster and more efficiently than humans ever could.

A machine learning algorithm can analyze a large set of data, find patterns, and make predictions nearly instantaneously. These insights can help marketers optimize a considerable portion of their workflow, including running more tests and improving their website’s user experience and personalizing the customer experience, and automating engagement.

The gist of it is that machine learning can improve almost every aspect of your digital marketing efforts.

The primary use of machine learning in any marketing effort is to process and analyze massive data sets.

Machine Learning can also help you find user activity patterns on your website. Instead of going through data in your Google Analytics profile yourself, you can use a machine-learning algorithm to do this work in a few moments. Machine learning can predict future user behavior and identify patterns that you can employ to optimize your website.

It is true that sometimes, humans are more capable of analyzing data and finding the reasons behind unusual visitor behavior. Still, machine learning algorithms can do that work half as fast or accurately as AI-powered solutions.

Marketers can use machine learning to get a better understanding of their customers.

An effective marketing strategy to drive engagement is customer segmentation. It is the process of dividing your current and potential customers into different groups based on various attributes. While effective, it can be time-consuming to segment your customers manually—it where you can utilize the power of machine learning. An ML algorithm can automatically segment your customers based on their actions and behavioral patterns that you might not identify manually.

One cannot understate the importance of content in digital marketing efforts. You might want to learn how machine learning can improve what you write and publish. You should also know why using machine learning in your content strategy is vital for your marketing strategy’s success.

The AI-powered machine learning algorithm can help your article rank higher in search engine results. It is one thing to write great content. However, doing it is in a way that pleases Google, Bing, and other search engines is an entirely different thing. Make sure to write content so that search engines can reward you in the SERPs (search engine results pages). To make your way into the SERPs, you need to ensure that you are using all relevant keywords, discussing every relevant topic, and highlighting all of your bases.

Keeping track of all these things while writing what your audience want to read can be a cumbersome task, which is why AI-powered machine learning tools can be an excellent solution for your content strategy. These tools will compare your content against Google’s top results and ensure that you hit all the relevant points.

There are also machine learning algorithms available that can write content for you. AI-powered copywriting tools can help you create attractive email subject lines and push notification content, with the help of an algorithm that can determine what will be best for driving the highest ROI.

You can also use machine learning to help curate content for your customers. Various AI-powered tools can help marketers find and publish the most relevant and engaging content for their readers.

Personalization is essential for attracting new customers and retaining old ones. Research shows that 91% of customers prefer brands that remember who they are and what they want. Providing relevant offers and recommendation is a sure way of increasing conversions. If you don’t offer your customers a personalized experience, they are extremely likely to switch over to a competitor.

While it is virtually impossible to provide every customer with a personalized experience if you only have a few humans for thousands of customers, machine learning can help you with this problem.

Machine learning algorithms can track customer behavior on an intense level and learn what they like, dislike, and create a uniquely personalized homepage and recommendation feed for every customer.

Giant corporation like Amazon uses AI-powered machine learning tools and algorithms to analyze people purchase history and items in their cart to recommend them stuff that they are more likely to buy.

You can also use these machine learning tools to boost personalization and create unique offers for every customer and email your consumers the recommendations when they are most likely to purchase.

The benefits of machine learning do not stop at better personalization. AI-powered machine learning tools can help you transform your brand’s engagement with the customers, and you can also use them to automate your marketing efforts better.

Almost every brand sends an automated email to people when they sign up for the newsletter or abandon their cart. Though most brands send out generic emails, those who have adopted machine learning can create a tailored email with offerings based on a person’s browsing history. For example, if a person has searched for a mobile phone before signing up for your newsletter, a relevant offer on cell phone accessories can make them much more likely to re-engage.

Marketing automation is a powerful tool. According to data, marketing automation leads to more than a 14% increase in sales productivity and above 12% reduction in marketing overhead. While it is possible to achieve these metrics without using AI, the time and effort AI will save you is immense. Machine learning can also make your automation efforts significantly more personalized and powerful.

Chatbots are becoming more and more prevalent by the day. It is a powerful customer service tool, as evidenced by the fact that eight out of ten people who interacted with a chatbot report a positive experience. People running an online business should not discount the viability and importance of a chatbot.

Chatbots eliminate the need to having a person ready all the time to answer your customer’s queries. Machine learning-powered chatbots can automatically respond to customer’s questions with an impressively high accuracy rate. Chatbots using the power of AI can learn from your website content and the interaction they have with the customers to continually improve their answers.

Chatbots continuously evolve and get better with time; they deliver a better and better customer experience with more conversations. In the starting, it is best to set up a bot in a way that it will pass the complicated customer queries to a human to interfere, but with time machine learning will catch up, and you will no longer require a human to intervene in the conversation.

Eventually, the bot will become smart enough to answer the questions and upsell the consumer.

When your chatbot accumulates enough data, it will be hard to tell it apart from a human customer service executive. Even your customers will be hard-pressed to find a difference. With AI and NLP (natural language processing), a chatbot can accurately mimic a human being. You can feed the data generated by your AI-powered chatbot to another machine-learning algorithm to create insights that marketers can use to optimize their marketing efforts in the future.

Technical breakthroughs and advancement in machine learning and AI has made it a rapidly growing and changing environment. The world of machine learning is developing fast, and there are significant opportunities for this tech to make our life easier. Researchers are working on various unsupervised machine learning algorithms. These algorithms don’t require human input initially, making them much faster and more comfortable for the average marketer to implement.

With the development of machine learning and AI technology, personalization will also become more powerful. Machine learning algorithms are starting to become more sophisticated towards discerning what people want. In the future, the way machine learning algorithms get integrated into a website will also improve.

Soon, with machine learning’s help, the marketer will be able to customize every aspect of the website as per the user’s preference, similar to what social media websites do.

Considerable advances in mobile machine learning are also on the horizon. With every manufacturer focusing on AI and machine learning,  AI-powered digital assistants will become a prominent part of everyone’s life. Marketers can also take advantage of on-device AI processing to have their mobile applications use machine learning features similar to how their websites can use AI right now.

While the future of AI and machine learning is all-encompassing, you should not get overwhelmed by it. Try focusing on what tools are available right now and start integrating them into your marketing strategy. With time you will learn to harness the power of machine learning, taking your business to new heights.

It is no secret that machine learning can transform your marketing efforts. While it can be enticing to go out and play with AI tools, adopting machine learning solutions without understanding the technology and its potential place in your company will do you more harm than good. Avoid rushing and first learn about machine learning and know how you can use it to your advantage.

AI-powered machine learning algorithms can be robust, but it is not a silver bullet. Try adoption one solution at a time, and you will do fine.

The best way to evolve your understating of AI and machine learning is to read about how these technologies work and their role in SEO. With that knowledge, you can make a better decision when integrating machine learning into your digital marketing strategy.