5 Reasons You Should Use Machine Learning in Marketing

As almost all businesses, irrespective of industry, is becoming more and more competitive, it’s becoming more important to use more effective marketing. Effective doesn’t only mean that your marketing reach as many people as possible, but also that it reduces the cost and take the guesswork out of what works and what not.

To make things more difficult, there are literally thousands of marketing tools available on the market today and more are developed every month. It may be difficult to choose the right ones for your business and which will be most effective.

One of the ways you can improve your business’s marketing efforts is to use machine learning (ml). It enables you to harness the power of your business’s data to increase, improve, and optimize your marketing efforts. In simple terms, machine learning marketing is essential for your business.

But why exactly fo you need machine learning in marketing? How do you apply machine learning to your marketing? In this article, we’ll take a look at these questions and more. 

Why You Need Machine Learning in Marketing

Let’s first think about what the main goal of marketing is. With any marketing plan, your main goals are to create brand awareness, generate leads, grow thought leadership, increase customer value, and empower your colleagues. In short, you want to increase your business’s ability not only to acquire customers but to retain them.

But where does machine learning fit in? Imagine if you could predict your customers’ behavior before you market to them. That would make a huge difference to your marketing efforts and this is where machine learning comes in. In fact, today it has become more important than ever to use machine learning if you want your business to be competitive.

By using machine learning for marketing you use data to predict how your customers will react, what they will buy, and what form of marketing will appeal to them the most.

Using this you can improve the customer journey throughout the customer lifecycle from customer acquisition to customer communication. Here are 5 reasons why you should use machine learning in your marketing:

• Improve the customer experience.
  • By using machine marketing in everything from recommendation, stock control, and customer communication. This creates a more personalized customer experience that can boost engagement.

• Optimize content.
  • By knowing what you’re customers like and what not, you’re able to serve only the content to them that will lead to more conversions. Here, A/B testing allows you to try various options and decide which is best for your audience.

• Increase conversions.
  • With improved customer experience and optimized content, you’ll improve engagement and conversion with your marketing campaigns.

• Reduce marketing spend.
  • In a competitive market, it’s now more important to ever to get the most out of your marketing efforts. In other words, you need to get the most bang for your buck. By using machine learning marketing you can take out the guesswork and use marketing that works.

• Increase Revenue.
  • When you have increased conversion, coupled with reduced marketing spend, you’ll drastically increase your revenue.

From this, you can see how important machine learning can be in your marketing. With it, you’ll be able to market better, market more efficiently, reduce marketing spend, and up revenue. But how do you apply machine learning to your marketing efforts? Let’s take a look.

How to Apply Machine Learning to Your Marketing Efforts

With the above in mind, there are several ways how you can apply machine learning to your marketing efforts. These all aim to improve the customer experience, optimize your content, or reduce marketing spend.

Use a Recommendation Engine

Recommendation engines are one of the prevalent ways to use machine learning in marketing. Companies like Netflix, Youtube, and Amazon use recommendation engines to recommend products to users based on their history. This creates a more personalized experience for the user which leads to an improved customer experience.

A recommendation engine doesn’t necessarily make recommendations just on products, though, but can also recommend what content customers prefer. You can use a content curating service that can serve the right content to the right customers. They use content available on the internet and customize the content for your customers.

You can thus use machine learning for personalized email marketing campaigns that allow you to serve personalized content or advertising to customers. This, in turn, increases engagement and conversions.

Use a Chatbot

One of the simplest ways to improve the customer experience is to use a chatbot on your site. With a chatbot, customers don’t have to search for relevant information or wait to have their questions answered. They can be assisted immediately.

A chatbot not only provides faster customer service but can also help with follow-up campaigns or give information about new products and deals.

This increases engagement and conversions. 

Automate Your Marketing

Through all your marketing campaigns, you’ll gather data on which campaigns are effective, what they cost, and how they influence your revenue. To optimize your marketing efforts, you’ll have to allow this data to tell a story.

By using marketing automation tools, you’ll be able to use machine learning to learn from this data. The patterns that emerge from the data will provide insights that you can use in content and advertising targeting.

This makes it easier for you to make decisions based on the data.

Optimize Your Advertising

By using marketing automation tools, you can gain insights from the data of your existing customers. This can show you what marketing and which channels are effective for your existing customers. By optimizing your advertising to target similar audiences, you’ll be able to increase conversions and, ultimately, revenue. By using machine learning in advertising you can target your campaigns more efficiently.

Now that you know how to apply some machine learning to your marketing efforts, let’s look at some best practices when using machine learning in your marketing.

Some Best Practices and Pitfalls for Using Machine Learning in Marketing

To harness the full potential of machine learning with marketing, there are some best practices you can apply to make sure it perfectly supplements your existing marketing efforts. There are also some pitfalls if you choose not to adhere to these best practices.

Set Your Goals

To ensure success when using machine learning in your marketing, you have to be clear about your goals. These goals can be anything from increasing conversions, reduce marketing spend, or increase revenue. Each goal will have a different algorithm that will make different recommendations on the same data.

For instance, an algorithm that focuses on increasing conversions, may not necessarily recommend marketing methods that will reduce your marketing spend.

What your goals are will have an impact on which machine learning tool you use. By using the wrong tool for a specific goal will lead to less success.

Clean Your Data

As machine learning models rely on data, your data should always be clean. This means your data should not contain incorrect or incomplete data. It should also not contain any corrupt or irrelevant data.

Before using the data, you should thus remove inaccurate, incomplete, incorrect, duplicate, and corrupted data from a dataset.

If your data is not clean, you’ll get poor results that will hamper your success in your ml marketing efforts.

Be Patient

Keep in mind that machine learning models take time to learn. Although you may use a large dataset to train the model, which can take time, it’s results may not be that accurate.

This model, however, keeps learning and the results will improve with time. Once implemented you should also ensure that you keep training the model with the new data that you obtain.

This will make your model make better and better recommendations and suggestions as time passes.

Examples

Now that you’ve seen how machine learning marketing can improve your marketing efforts, you have decided that you want to use it. Let’s look at some examples of tools you can use.

• Facebook’s Lookalike Audience is a perfect example of how ml marketing can automate your marketing. With it, you can reach customers with attributes similar to your existing customers.
• Tools like Mailchimp can make your email automation easy. It enables you to do split testing on campaigns that can show you where you have the greatest return on investment.
• Services like Curata and Vestorly use machine learning to curate content you can serve to your customers.
• Phrasee uses machine learning to write better email subject lines that, in turn, increase opening and conversion rates.

Final Thoughts

 Even with everything said here, we’ve barely scratched the surface when it comes to using machine learning for marketing. There are many more tools and technologies available that you can use to improve your marketing.

If you want to learn more about machine learning or how it works, subscribe to SDSClub newsletter where we do deeper dives into this amazing technology. Don’t forget to share this post on social media if it was useful. Stay on Top with SDSclub!