Marketing is now more critical than ever. In fact, we’ll even venture as far as saying that, without an effective marketing strategy, the chances of success for a business are slim. Nowadays, an effective marketing strategy relies on content, personalization, and a streamlined customer experience.
Machine learning can bring about a significant improvement in all of these, which in turn will increase a business’s return on investment and revenue. In addition, it offers several other capabilities like automation, predictive analytics, dynamic pricing, and lead scoring.
In simple terms, machine learning has a lot to offer to marketers.
So, for businesses who are thinking about using machine learning to improve their marketing, we’ll look at some of the ways machine learning is transforming marketing.
Personalization
One of the places where machine learning is having the most significant impact on marketing is personalization. The reason why it’s so essential is that it allows businesses to deliver a better customer experience.
With personalization, the customer feels like the business is speaking directly to them. And this is crucial, considering that, according to Salesforce, 52% of customers are likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t make any effort to personalize its communication with them.
The most obvious example of personalization in action is Netflix. Its recommender engine gathers data every time a viewer watches TV and uses it to personalize the viewer’s recommendations, thereby improving the experience and keeping customers engaged.
When it comes to marketing, personalization means getting the right message to the right people at the right time. When the right customer gets the right message, they’ll be more likely to buy. As a result, businesses can increase their return on investment and revenue.
Content Optimization
Taking personalization a step further, businesses can also optimize their content using machine learning. In this way, they can create content that better resonates with their audience.
One of the ways machine learning enables businesses to do this is through content curation. This process entails sourcing content from online destinations and personalizes the content experience for customers. So, much like personalization, it gets the right message to the right people at the right time.
Another option is where machine learning algorithms analyze and learn from messages, tone, and individual words to determine what content impacts a business’s audience most effectively. To do this, the algorithm uses A/B testing to determine which type of content resonates more with the audience.
Once businesses know this, they can tailor their content based on this data. And if the messaging resonates more with the audience, it will have a better return on investment.
Customer Experience
The days of phoning a business for support or customer service are long gone. Likewise, email is also slowly being moved to the back burner. Simply put, customers want answers, and they want them in an instant.
As a result, many businesses are adopting chatbots in their customer service strategies. The reason for this is that they are revolutionizing customer service processes. And it’s easy to see why. When using chatbots, businesses can give their customers the information they need right when they need it. So, there’s no more waiting for hours or even days for a customer to get answers to their questions.
These chatbots work by analyzing and constantly learning from customer responses. In this way, they’re able to answer questions and provide information more accurately. For those instances when they can’t answer the question, they can instantly refer the question to a human customer service agent.
As a result, they’re simply a better way of customer service compared to more traditional methods. As a bonus, they free up human agents to answer other, more complex, and challenging questions.
Optimized Advertising
To further improve return on investment, businesses can use machine learning to optimize their advertising. Traditionally, businesses would optimize their marketing campaigns based on decisions like the appropriate channel to use, the timing of the ads, and the duration of the ads.
This is generally a manual process where businesses would measure and compare the different channels to each other to find the one with the best return on investment.
Machine learning gives businesses a way to automate this process and use more data to optimize the performance of their marketing campaigns. One example here is Facebook’s Lookalike Audience feature. It allows businesses to market to audiences with similar attributes to their existing customers.
Another example is Google’s Smart Bidding system that uses machine learning to automate bids that will give the business the best return on investment.
Dynamic Pricing
Apart from marketing to the right people at the right time, which increases the return on investment, businesses should also make sure that their products are priced optimally. In other words, for businesses to stay competitive, their products have to be priced right; otherwise, customers won’t buy them.
By using machine learning algorithms, businesses can dynamically price their products based on factors like the channel on which the product is sold, the supply and demand of the product, competitive pricing, and the sales period.
A perfect example of this is e-commerce retailers like Amazon and eBay, who change their product prices daily based on a product’s popularity, the maximum discounts that they can offer, and how often a customer has purchased from the website.
Because this effectively allows businesses to price their products at the optimal price to ensure the best return, many big retail companies are now using dynamic pricing as part of their marketing strategy.
Better Marketing Campaigns
Ultimately, machine learning will allow businesses to implement better marketing campaigns. It’s able to analyze vast amounts of data to recognize trends and patterns from customer behavior.
Using these trends, businesses can find those customers who are more likely to purchase their products. These are the customers that are most likely to convert and, in the process, allow businesses to increase their sales and revenue.
The Bottom Line
For business success, effective marketing is essential. Machine learning gives businesses the tools they need to improve their marketing efforts significantly, and many businesses have already adopted it to boost their marketing strategies.
Compared to many other technologies, though, machine learning and artificial intelligence are still in their infancy. As the technology is made more accessible, it will be exciting to see what they can offer marketing in the years to come.
Also read about: Difference between Artificial intelligence and Machine learning
