The evolution of artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data have been an increasingly integral part in the transformation of many industries, and marketing is no exception. Data-driven technology has made it possible for marketers to build a clearer picture of their target audiences than ever before, and in the hotbed of all this lies artificial intelligence (AI) marketing.
Marketing AI has been gaining more and more attention among marketers, data scientists and business executives alike because of the powerful insights it provides. According to a recent PwC study, 72% view AI as a “business advantage.” But what exactly do we mean by marketing AI?
Marketing AI is a method of leveraging customer data and AI methods like machine learning to gain comprehensive insights about your customers, anticipate their next move and improve the overall customer journey. While this definition provides an overview of marketing AI at the most basic level, there is obviously much more that goes into it.
Understanding What AI Can Do for Marketing
Overall, AI helps marketers create high-impact content, automate routine tasks and surface key insights from data. Successful use cases have demonstrated that AI is profitable and has an impact on the market when organizations use solutions such as:
- Recommender systems which help both customers and your sales force by improving interaction with your customers.
- Identifying customers likely to leave your company and addressing their needs to keep their business.
- Improving SEO results by analyzing page ranking in the results page.
- Natural language processing (NLP) to understand customer communication and immediately provide assistance, based on customers’ emails or social media activity.
- Hyper-targeted advertising that delivers relevant targets based on real-time customer understanding.
What is new about AI marketing is the accuracy you have when delivering and executing toward a specific target, the complete (or almost complete) automation of procedures and actions, and the high economic efficiency resulting from using AI in these marketing activities. This is yet another reason for marketing teams to leverage AI: If you don’t, you risk falling out of sync with customers and losing the competitive edge as consumers turn to AI solutions as well.
AI or Machine Learning? Realizing the Power of Deep Learning for Marketing
AI is getting all the hype these days, but building AI solutions is complex and requires putting together multiple resources and competencies. This is why it may be better to aim for a machine learning solution first, mapping data to results.
If you have enough data, deep learning opens a world of possibilities: Even if it requires more effort and use of specialized teams, deep learning can solve problems in a better way than any other algorithm when you have the right amount of data.
It’s because of deep learning and its deep neural networks (DNNs) that it’s now possible to:
- Detect and localize objects in images
- Transform images into text descriptions
- Process audio to extract text from it
- Process text and connect it to a specific meaning
- Translate foreign languages
- Interact with humans in an intelligible and reasonable way
In the past, similar activities required you to hire a host of experts to study the problem until they could design a piece of computer code that they claimed solved the problem, but not always with satisfying results. Some problems are so complex that you won’t get good results no matter how many experts you hire, unless you adopt deep learning as part of your solution.