First up, what is machine learning?
Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence that allows computer systems the ability to automatically learn, re-inforce and optimize from experience without external intervention by a programmer. Machine learning involves algorithms that uses data to learn for themselves and provide insights based on what they understand. So, how is machine learning transforming digital marketing and how it is changing the way marketers perform their day to day activities.
Content Marketing
Machine learning can now read the text / content and auto tag, saving your time in tagging assets. You can focus on strategy and creative planning and let machine learning handle the mundane task of tagging a video, photo or an asset. With this technology it will make it easier to group similar content together and help you target the right audience with related content. How many times you had to resize the same image for usage on multiple different social media platforms? With new plaforms emerging each days, it could require time and cost to redesign existing assets. Machine learning can smartly crop the media assets based on predefined settings so that you just focus on creating the asset once and let the program handle resizing, formatting and cropping for various platforms.
Email Marketing
Every marketer must have used email marketing tools such as mailchimp, Hubspot or Mautic to create responsive emails and track analytics. With Machine learning you can enhance your email marketing techniques and automate your workflow. E.g. You can design email flows that will add basic logic such as “If your recipient Z takes action X, then it sends email Y.“ but it will be awesome if the system learns how long it takes for recipient Z to interact with your emails and instructs your customer service team on the best time to follow up an email with a call based on an unopened email.
Furthermore, the model can help you pick high converting keywords and action calls for your subject lines based on previous subject lines and open rates. These features are already available in many of the recent e-mail platform applications and will enhance the productivity of marketing and sales teams.
Digital Advertisements
Earlier it used to be just text based ads and that too on Google search network but now we can create banner ads, display network ads, youtube ads and make them show on tablets, phones and desktops. With the recent advancements in programmatic advertising, marketers can monitor ad performance and track how they are working at specific times on specific devices. You can control the spend based on location, device, time, placement and increase your ROI. With programmatic advertising, you can learn which ads are underperforming and based on that shift your focus and budget to high converting ads.
Google is a giant fan of machine learning and its top revenue engine, GOOGLE ADWORDS uses machine learning to which ads are most relevant to searchers and the cost per click of ads by using factors such as click-through rate, ad copy relevance, and landing page quality.
Marketing analytics
To all the people who like metrics and data analysis, machine learning is icing on the cake!
There are tons of models that helps to analyse data and exploit anomalies in data. You can study web traffic data, social engagement data, conversion data and come up with predictions about which platform will perform better for what type of content.
Predictive analytics are used in many verticals and professions, digital marketing is one of the best area where you can use this technique to optimize your digital campaigns. In the marketing world, predictive analytics layers on top of our standard analytics data to give us more insight and help shape marketing actions.
Here is my personal idea:
How about we create a machine learning algorithm that takes email addresses as input and spits out YES or NO for every individual. YES means he or she is mostly likely to unsubscribe  and NO means he or she is mostly likely to engage with your brand after importing those contacts in your marketing automation database. You will first upload your contacts through this system, get a filtered version that has contacts that are likely to engage with your brand and then upload it to your email / marketing automation platform. This system will save insane amount of time and money in managing bad data. Remember that there are costs associated with storing, cleaning, managing and optimizing your contacts in the database.
