Going AI-First - Why Digital Marketers need to embrace Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
The moment you enjoy any online video, the website offers more videos that 'you may like'? And it isn't a surprise that many times those are exactly the kind of videos you would like to watch. Have you also noticed that the apps you use for shopping take no time in listing 'recommendations' of products that you may want to buy? What sounds uncanny is actually an Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered predictive system operating behind the veils and more often than not, it influences our buying decisions. And this predictive analysis is only scratching the surface of a complex multi-layered system.
During the last decade or so, technology has made several disruptions that have helped marketers reach the right audience with the right message. With each passing day, AI is becoming ever more powerful and tremendously useful, leaving no sector untouched - making its presence felt through its supplementary processes such as Big Data, Internet of Things and Machine Learning. Large corporations are investing significant amounts of money in advance research and design of people-centric AI systems, to develop a more humanistic approach to artificial intelligence. Now, even Digital Marketers are shifting their focus from creating content for small screens (mobile-first) to working on incorporating AI into the latest scheme of things (AI first).
Bringing the benefits of AI to Digital Marketing
The data footprint left behind by users on social media is a goldmine for digital marketers. Using built-in algorithms of machine learning, it is now easier than before to do a predictive analytics and enable targeted marketing to multiply sales, strengthen the pipeline and to offer better customer experience, increasing the ROI. It's a win-win for the brand and the customers.
Previously, marketers were apprehensive to incorporate AI into their strategies, perhaps due to the ambiguity regarding the results. Now, however, we see a remarkable shift in their confidence to embrace AI. From autonomous targeting and media buying to cross-channel execution, testing and optimization, analytics and insights there is nothing that AI is unable to do resulting in several industries continuing to reap the benefits. Think optimized decision making, better sales-cycle and 'predictive' buying and selling processes – who wouldn't want that?
Step up the game
In digital marketing, it isn't about randomly building AI products or tools, but the idea is to understand AI in totality so that you can put in a conscious effort into the research and development of AI projects that fit within your customer's daily lives or professions. The concept is to utilize the power of AI to understand and respond to user queries in the same manner as a human would.
Building an 'AI-first' digital marketing company or a team requires a deeper change of mindset. In order to be able to truly transform, the focus needs to be on contextual information, using intelligent technology to improve customer experience. It's about understanding how to pick and approach content for virality for the web and social channels including web pages, banner advertisements, email, SMS, blog, inbound and mobile marketing to close the ROI loop. Diving deeper, it is about understanding the algorithms of the electronic word of mouth and the power of viral marketing, influencer management and campaign management. It's about upping the antennas with social listening and sharp observation with Business Intelligence and dashboards for marketing applications and making use of Machine Learning for customer profiling, using analytics tools classification, clustering and market basket outcomes. For this, you not only need the right software and development tools, but also the appropriate hardware to operate the demanding algorithms.
And while AI helps you target the right audience and understand the buying behavior, it also gives you a realistic picture of your firm's resources and capabilities letting you manage the product and the brand through the right advertising and sales promotion including social, mobile, analytics and cloud. This is the bigger picture.
The smart thing to do in order to assess the impact of digital and social media marketing, is the imperative to create a road map for the digital marketing initiatives and integrating the offline and online channels. Understanding ROI for digital marketing projects would help you in leading and managing the projects better. You would then focus on the strategic role of Big Data and emerging technologies for digital marketing, pumping it with innovation and the right amount of funding, championing and sustaining digital marketing initiatives.
And that is why at NIIT, we have built comprehensive multi-modal courses on digital marketing. These courses not only strengthen your knowledge of traditional marketing management theories but also provide you an in-depth knowledge of digital marketing and analytics concepts teaching you to plan, implement and measure a digital marketing strategy. Further, the courses prepare you to build a project of your choice on digital and social media marketing ably guided by an instructor. It also qualifies you for digital disruption in marketing for branding, sales, advertising and customer management.
The potential areas where AI can boost digital marketing are plenty and these possibilities are only in the nascent stage right now but 2018 could prove to be path-breaking for AI-powered digital marketing.
Authored by:- Prakash Menon, President, Global Retail Business, NIIT Ltd.