Machine Learning, ML, is not new. Don’t be shocked; the good old MS Word Spelling and Grammar Checker also used machine learning principles, as does any search engine. What’s all the buzz about, then, you wonder?

Well, the buzz is justified, because machine learning has advanced with such dizzying speed, that it’s already helping digital marketers change their fortunes within days.

Not only with marketing campaigns, but machine learning is also revolutionizing Wi-Fi and even the top wireless routers leverage the power of AI. Before anything, let me address the big question – Why Is Machine Learning Unlike Any Breed of Current Marketing Automation Tools?

Machine learning is unlike any previous technology that impacted marketing because:

  • It can identify patterns by analyzing massive amounts of data that the human brain just can’t process
  • It makes inferences based on the data
  • It can execute tasks based on the inferences

So, the impact machine learning could have on marketing is humongous. From freeing up marketing team’s time to solving problems that marketers never knew existed, machine learning is doing it already. I will tell you more; read on.

Using Advanced Content Analysis to Drive More Conversions

Traditionally, marketers have to rely on A/B testing tools to figure out the best lexical recipes on their own. Machine learning has tremendous application in performing focused lexical analyses to help digital marketers understand the words, phrases, and their contextual usage to drive customer engagement up.

The idea of using machine learning into marketing was floated first by Paul Blamire, Vice President of client experience at Atomic Research, in Gilbane Digital Content Conference. He suggested that machine learning powered lexical analysis can help with:

  • Identification of ideal topics
  • Finding the perfect language to strike emotional connections
  • Identifying the ideal structure and timing to publish
  • Helping marketers identify the right sentiment to express

Companies can use lexical analysis to write landing page copy that converts, product descriptions that drive sales, and email bodies that drive website visits.

Predictive analysis publications of the likes of insideBIGDATA opine that machine learning will change the way online storytelling strategies work, leveraging data-driven storytelling.

Automated Data Visualization To Drive Confident Decision Making

Big content marketing brands use advanced data analytics tools such as Qlikview and Tableau and trust their rich data visualization widgets to get insight from structured and unstructured data.

Machine learning can help in driving the value of insight from the data higher, by creating more meaningful, contextualized, and expressive visualizations for marketers to use for real-time decision making.

Systematic Improvements in Marketing ROI

Every digital marketer has a core problem – deciding how much money and time to spend on which channel. Of course, marketing automation and analysis tools help in identifying the best performing channels, but they are just providers of data reports, leaving the judgments to be made by marketers using statistical models and intuition. Machine learning powered marketing solutions take it a step further.

The current breed of machine learning powered analytics tools is already moving towards automation of visualizations, and that’s a wave that marketers will be looking to surf on.

Machine Learning Fuelling Email Marketing Success

Marketers rely on email marketing solutions to help improve customer engagement and automate email campaigns. Machine learning, however, can add in a whole new dimension of personalization by quickly aligning the campaigns to send the right email to the right person, at the right time

Brands are already using machine learning to automate email marketing and improve ROIs manifolds. SailThru is the perfect example; the platform provides highly focused email marketing solutions to brands and used machine language to analyze customer behaviors. This analysis is distilled in the form of actionable data to help marketers decide on email delivery timings. The Clymb, a web store selling outdoor gear, saw a 12% increase in revenue linked to email marketing within 90 days of adopting Sailthru’s personalization service.

Market Monitoring – For Brands That Value Urgency

The average human attention span duration is dipping, and this leaves digital marketers with little scope for laxity in how they target and leverage opportunities. In markets where urgency is crucial (for instance, online news portals and trading portals), machine learning powered tools have tremendous benefits to add.

New York-based Dataminr is a great example. The platform is able to identify tweets related to stock trading and monitors the threads and communications to identify relevance and urgency.

It uses the data to create insights, and sends alerts to traders, giving them an invaluable advantage in terms of time. Similarly, news services are using this technology to quickly identify news stories and have reporters deployed or engaged to cover them.

Extracting Unprecedented Level of Insight from Unstructured Data for Targeted Content Marketing

Great content only brings great business outcomes if it’s showcased to the relevant target audiences. Machine learning powered tools that can create unprecedented insight from all kinds of structured and unstructured data. Clarifai is proving invaluable for digital brands that focus on video content for their marketing and customer engagement. The platform uses machine learning to analyze video content and identify key information aspects from them.

For instance, in a demonstration, the software was able to analyze a 3.5-minute video of a varied alpine landscape in 10 seconds, creating a timeline with graph lines to indicate the detection of different objects.

The analysis helps uncover important information from the video content that can help marketers align the right advertisements with the right videos. It also helps marketers organize video content into lists and libraries, apart from helping them quickly edit footage.

Final Words

Machine learning is changing our world, and it’s certainly going to change the dynamics of digital marketing. Marketers who’re quick to jump on this data-driven bulldozer will ride on, and others will be bulldozed.