It’s impossible to have a conversation with a fellow marketer these days without the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI) cropping up. The potential for this kind of technology to make marketing more efficient and effective – and to deliver much more impressive ROI – seems to be on everyone’s minds. There are no robots involved here, just some rather smart solutions to the problems of insight and data.
Machine learning and behaviours
One thing that AI does so much better than human beings is to be able to identify intent in a potential audience. Often it’s an audience that the human marketer may have missed altogether because the cues were too subtle. This intent can be gleaned from previous behaviours i.e. what the person has done and how they have engaged online, even before any action – such as a purchase – has been taken. Brands using AI in this way will have the advantage of being able to market to those already susceptible to a product or service.
Getting to grips with big data
Big data is still viewed by many as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. However, what is becoming clear is that its many benefits are only available to those able to wade through the enormous volume of information that it presents. This is where AI can really come into its own in a marketing context, crunching data to acquire insights that have been informed by a much deeper and broader data set. AI will provide us with the ability to deal with this data and to do it at a much faster speed, processing six figures of variables every second. The combination of AI and big data could be incredibly powerful for those looking for actionable marketing insights.
Responsive learning
The whole point of AI is that it’s not a static technology but one that continuously evolves to respond to the challenges that it’s presented with. For example, marketers using AI might set the task of extracting data to enable better targeting. Assigning this to an AI will not only produce better results at a faster rate than a human being could achieve but will also produce improvements to the process as the AI refines its own parameters to make it more effective.
Driving personalisation
Personalisation is not just a nice to have, it has a tangible business impact too – Econsultancy research revealed that 93% of companies see an uplift in conversion rates from personalisation. AI has the power to amplify personalisation, producing much more focused insight and on a much wider scale. Using it will give marketers the ability to reach a broader audience and to make marketing communications and content far more effective and targeted.
At Iconic Digital we see marketing trends come and go and there’s no doubt that AI is one of the most fascinating of marketing horizons – with the most potential. We predict that within a year many of us will be engaging with it, if only on the most basic of levels.