How to Use Machine Learning to Improve Your Digital Marketing

Machine learning is on the verge of transforming the marketing sector. In many ways, it’s already started. According to Gartner, 30% of companies will use machine learning in one part of their sales process by 2020.

What’s more, these companies are using machine learning to get ahead of competitors by tackling some of marketing’s toughest challenges, such as personalization, instant customer support, and big data.

In other words, machine learning isn’t just for computer scientists. Marketers should sit up and take notice. Below, I’ve covered five ways you can use machine learning to supercharge your digital marketing efforts.

What Is Machine Learning?

Before we get into the marketing side of things, let’s take a second to establish what artificial intelligence and machine learning are.

Artificial intelligence is simply any form of intelligence demonstrated by a machine instead of the natural intelligence displayed in humans and animals. When most people think of artificial intelligence, they think specifically of computers that replicate some level of human intelligence, like a chess-playing computer I mentioned in the introduction.

Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence that enables systems to find new and better solutions automatically by learning from mistakes and experiences. The more data and experience a machine learning algorithm has access to, the better it becomes in the future.

Machine learning systems can largely be divided into two subsets: guided and unguided. Guided machine learning systems are supplied with data sets and solutions by humans in the first instance. They are taught which patterns to look for initially and will then get better at identifying those patterns going forward.

Unguided systems are given access to unsorted and disparate data sets and are left to decipher patterns independently without guidance from humans. Unguided systems will create an algorithm and then look for ways to improve it going forward.

Using Machine Learning to Improve Your Marketing

We know that marketing teams don’t want for lack of data. Marketers struggle with making sense of all the data they have at their fingertips and then putting that data to use. This analysis is where machine learning comes in.

The primary reason to add machine learning to your marketing stack is that it can make sense of vast amounts of data much faster and much more effectively than humans.

Machine learning can use data to identify patterns and make predictions almost instantly. Marketers can then use these insights to optimize a huge portion of their workflow, from running more tests and improving their website’s UX to personalizing the customer experience and automating consumer engagement.

The long and short of it is machine learning can be used to improve just about every part of your digital marketing efforts. Below we discuss five of the most important ways.