Artificial intelligence and machine learning are making their way into the marketing world and slowly taking over. The insights and trends that automated algorithms can identify are giving businesses that have adopted the technology an edge over their competition.
What is machine learning? How does it work? Read on to find out more about how this incredible technology can help you push your business to the next level.
How Machine Learning Works
It can get very complex and involve a lot of computer coding and high-level mathematics, but put simply, machine learning is using algorithms and consumer data to identify trends, niches and gaps in the marketplace and predict consumer behaviour.
Machine learning systems do not simply supply you with data sets, however. The artificial intelligence that underpins machine learning has the ability to analyse data, make connections, and find insights that would not be discovered by human study.
This is possible because of the huge volumes of data that artificial intelligence can process in a short amount of time and the clever programming of algorithms that can spot patterns and trends easily.
Artificial intelligence has many practical applications in business and broader society and will be an important part of our future. If you are thinking of using machine learning in your marketing strategies it is a good idea to learn more about artificial intelligence and how businesses can implement it.
Dynamic Pricing
The price of your products and services has a huge amount of influence over your average customer spend and your customer retention. Even the price you charge for packing and delivery can have a massive effect on your overall sales.
Machine learning can allow you to use dynamic pricing schemes, which change the prices you charge based on a number of factors. It can monitor your competitors and price match their offers, or beat them, and it can use location data to give consumers a delivery price tailored to their address.
If you sell products internationally, machine learning can use the latest currency exchange rates to ensure that your global customers are getting value for money and you are not losing profit in the switch from one currency to another.
Personalised Marketing
Machine learning can help you find out more about your customers and what they are looking for from your company. It can allow you to segment your customer base into different demographics, such as age or location, and identify common trends within that cohort that you can use to your advantage.
The insights that artificial intelligence can harvest from your customer data can help you market more effectively to groups of customers and even specific users of your business. Tailoring marketing and special offers to specific consumers can be powerful tools that can increase sales and web traffic.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning can also help you to identify the customers you do not have by finding demographic gaps in your customer base. This can help you make marketing campaigns that target the customers you don’t have to expand your reach and grow your company.
Search Engine Optimisation
If you have been operating your business for a while now you must have heard of SEO or search engine optimization. This strategy is informed by the common search queries that users search for on sites like Google or Bing and tie these search terms to your website, web pages, and products.
With the help of machine learning, you can identify these keywords quickly and create fresh content that helps bring these users to your site. Existing pages can be updated to satisfy these search terms as well.
Many companies can struggle to make the most of search engine optimization, but machine learning and artificial intelligence do the hard work for you so you can concentrate on your marketing content and strategy.
Machine learning can also analyse these common search terms and keywords and spot consumer trends. This can help you get ahead of the game and start focusing your content and products to satisfy these consumer queries and drive traffic to your website and products.
Predicting Purchases
Artificial intelligence is very good at predicting human behaviour and sifting through mountains of data to find small pieces of information that can lead to more sales.
If you are running an office supply company, for example, you may have a regular customer that buys reams of printer paper from you every three months. This is a high-value customer that you need to keep, but you may not notice this pattern of behaviour.
Machine learning will notice, however. This consumer pattern can be used to market to them specifically and offer them a discount on a larger than normal purchase or offer them a special price on their regular purchase to keep them coming back.
Machine learning can offer some highly effective marketing strategies to businesses big and small. This technology has the potential to change the way we sell products and shop for them.
