What Machine Learning Means For Marketers
In a given day, 4.5 billion Facebook likes are given, 4 billion YouTube videos are watched, and 3.5 billion Google searches are conducted. For marketers, these are all signals that a consumer is giving out. A marketer’s job is, at its core, to listen to the customer and change what you do in response to the lessons learned from listening, so these signals are vital. However, the sheer size of these numbers means that it is simply impossible to make sense of them all.
However, machine learning is allowing marketers to cut through the noise. Everything a consumer does online is a measurable event that can be linked together into a decision path. When every event is identified and aggregated, patterns start to emerge that reveal what consumers like, what they don’t like, what they will react to, and so forth. If we think of it in terms of marketers being in a room full of people all shouting what they want at the same time, machine learning essentially picks out each individual voice, divides the room full of shouting consumers into groups of people saying the same things, and sends them off to different rooms. A marketer is then able to walk between the rooms and better understand its inhabitant’s wants and needs. Machine learning essentially renders simplicity where there once was complexity. This means increased personalization.
It is marketer’s jobs to react to these findings, but machine learning also does much of this too. It determines the offers and kind of content that are likely to resonate with particular audience members, and when and how often these should be deployed. Automated marketing technology can then deliver relevant messaging to the consumers when and at a frequency that is appropriate, without human involvement, and run large-scale A/B testing to determine whether or not it works. This allows organizations to reach a far larger audience with a much wider range of experiences. With machine learning, marketing personalization and optimization easily scales to many millions of customers.
Many organizations are already realizing this potential.
