- One of the most fundamental ways
machine learning can improve marketing performance
is by strengthening marketing identification and targeting.
This way, you know who to target to build your brand.
Digital campaigns generate so much data,
that it's just not realistic for humans
to spot all of the patterns.
That's not the case for computers, hence, machine learning.
What you can do is train an algorithm
to assess the data for you.
Specifically, you can focus on
identification of market personas
that are really interested in what you have to offer.
By that, I mean that there are different segments
of customers really interested
in what you have to offer, and the trick
is to find out who those people are.
So it's the Holy Grail of the right message
to the right person, at the right time.
By taking this approach,
you can also figure out what messages
your customers respond to the most.
And not just messages, it can be an image,
it could be a color, it could be layouts.
It could be a call to action.
Think about how much smarter your campaigns can be
with these types of insights.
How much more impactful they can be.
For example, by using machine learning,
Harley-Davidson was able to double sales
and identify ways to improve
market message traction by over 400%.
To start using ML, here is a process you can follow.
First, you analyze customer data to identify
quality customer characteristics.
These characteristics will likely be unique to your brand,
but some examples are customers who spent
a certain amount of time on your website,
or added an item to their shopping cart online,
or are a subscriber to your email marketing list.
Using the resulting profiles,
you develop lookalike models
to resemble these characteristics.
Then, you organize these models into segments,
and run test campaigns against them.
You'll run just enough advertising
to validate certain hypotheses.
In agile marketing, this is called
the minimum viable campaign.
They provide a feedback loop to optimize and to hone in
on the right variables that you choose.
Those campaigns can be scaled up
to maximize ROI, or return on investment,
once you've done the validation.
So when you think more about machine learning,
think about how it can help you to be smarter,
how it can augment what you're already doing,
to better understand your customer
and your growth potential.