Hello fellow marketers and welcome to the brand new, weekly ‘DM Report’ from the Internet Business School.
We will be blogging about all things Digital Marketing and the new trends that are present today, tomorrow and into the future each week.
What can you expect from ‘The DM Report’?
The blogs will cover specific topics once a week that are trending within the Digital Marketing world. We want to ultimately inform you of what the new trends are, break them down so you can gain a better understanding of what each topic is, how it affects the rest of the marketing world and how it might affect you too.
Let’s get reporting!
The first topic to discuss here is Artificial Intelligence Marketing or ‘AIM’. If you’re thinking robots like those in Steven Spielberg’s ‘A.I.’ or ‘I Am Robot’, it’s not quite that but the concept is kind of like a robot!
Let’s break it down, just what is ‘AIM’?
The trend around the World Wide Web is pretty much the same when you do a search for AI Marketing; it’s a way for marketers much like you and I, where large amounts of information are brought together through the use of algorithms. From searching things online, to how we communicate online and then compiling all that data into one report for marketers to formulate the best course of action for their campaigns. In essence ‘AI’ is generating a model that can predict your customers next move and help you refocus your campaign to make your customers experience stronger.
There are many companies out there that are leading the way for ‘AIM’ and the one that I referred to the most in my research is Emarsys.com, they helped this confused Digital Marketer gain a better understanding of what ‘AIM’ is and also gave some good insight on breaking it down.
Emarsys.com talk about 3 core elements when it comes to ‘AIM’:
1) BIG DATA: In basic form, what they are saying here is that big data is all the information that consumers and customers search for on the Internet, such as habits, likes and dislikes, activities, and personal preferences.
Social Media: (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and similar) Social activity, product reviews, ‘liked’ and shared content, loyalty/reward apps and CRM (Customer Relationship Management), these are all things that contribute to big data. All this information that the ‘AI’ gathers from the big data gets fed into the system and then it starts to learn from all that data, what we like to call ‘Machine Learning’.
2) Machine Learning: This is where AI gets to shine – so to speak – after it’s gathered all the big data it then breaks it down into four sub-categories; common occurrences, common insights, responses and actions.
All these compiled together help to draw conclusions for us the marketers, on where the marketers should be focusing their efforts to maximize their campaigns and reach the most people. Which leads to solutions that help AIM to help us.
3) Powerful Solutions: There really isn’t much out there about this core element at the moment, but I’m sure that as ‘AIM’ develops further more will come from it. However, what we can discern from this research is that the powerful solutions side of ‘AIM’ is what’s considered to be the human side of AI. It can understand and eventually learn from the way each and every one of us communicates via social media, blog posts, yelp reviews, even Google searches! Then it takes all that it has learned and sends it to us marketers so that we can compile the data and come up with strategies and campaigns to get our product and services out to the masses.
Those are the basic, core concepts of ‘AIM’ now let’s take a brief look at the five core benefits of ‘AIM’:
1) More Intelligent Searches: RFSE’s (or ‘Rapid-Fire Search Engines’, such as Google), this is where ‘AI’ is paying very close attention to what you are searching for everytime someone says “Google it!” or if you’re trying to find out something that you just don’t have the answer to.
With all these RFSE’s that happen on any given moment during the day, ‘AIM’ takes all that into consideration and it reports back to us the marketers to identify key areas that we should be focusing on when marketing to the customer.
2) Smart Ads: This ties back into the more intelligent searches as well as the machine learning and the powerful solutions mentioned above. ‘AIM’ is using all this information to attach ads to the sidebars of your Yahoo page or when you are Google searching. It places those ads in strategic spots so it’s more appealing to the customer.
Plus ‘AIM’ takes all this and puts it into the big data which in turn is giving us the marketers more insight into what ads can and should be running.
3) Refined Content Delivery: ‘AIM’ is taking all that information from the searches and the smart ads doing just what this benefit suggests, refining the content. It’s basically identifying potential clients/buyers to us marketers and then in turn either we deliver or ‘AIM’ delivers the content for us.
4) Relying on Bots: ‘AIM’ is always learning every second that we are online, chatting with friends, posting on social media. Today you may have noticed that some websites that you visit a little window pops up in the lower right hand corner.
Say hello to the AI bot chat function! Just when you think it’s an actual person on the other side of that box, guess again. It’s ‘AIM’ trying to figure out what it is the customer is there for and then directing them to the desired service that they are looking for.
5) Continued Learning: As mentioned already throughout this blog post, ‘AIM’ is always learning. It’s tapping into once-hidden insights that will give an advantage to us marketers, in coming up with new and insightful campaigns to spread the word about certain products and servers that we are in charge of.
More importantly it is optimising the outreach of just those we feel would benefit from the product or service we are marketing, but ‘AIM’ is helping us target the right customer – clever!
From this marketers viewpoint ‘AIM’ seems to be a good thing for us in the field of marketing as it will shorten the amount of time we spend in the office looking at mounds of data, and help us redefine how we go about providing the products and services to the general public.
Thanks for reading, there’ll be more form The DM Report next week!
The author: Phillip Kirks is an Apprentice of the Internet Business School. When he’s not writing engaging, factual Blogs for our students, he runs his own production company and is a keen filmmaker and producer. He currently lives in Denver, CO.