AI and machine learning are transforming digital marketing through data-driven decisions, content creation, better customer experience, and automation.
Table of Contents
Artificial intelligence is increasingly shaping everyday life. 4 years ago, we were all writing essays without the help of artificial intelligence, watching videos that humans directed, or speaking with human customer service. These activities are all partly - if not totally - replaced by AI. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Jobs disappeared, new positions emerged, and many new tech companies were founded for AI purposes.
AI made a big impact on our lives, and mostly in the online atmosphere. In this article, we will write about how and in what aspects AI and machine learning transform digital marketing. But first, let’s be clear about what the topic of discussion is.
The connection between AI and machine learning
In this part of the article, we will define AI and machine learning, and find the connection between these two very similar yet different expressions.
The definition of AI
“At its core, AI refers to computer systems capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as reasoning, learning, perception, and language understanding.” - as this quote mentions, artificial intelligence is an intelligent non-human system that performs the same, or even better in most exercises, as humans can.
The first monumental step of the “AI hype” was when one of the most famous chess players, Garry Kasparov, was defeated by a chess system in 1997. However, that was only a classical AI. We had to wait for another 24 years to get a complex AI model that was not only good for one specific task, but could use the general public information to summarize and give the prompter the proper answer.
That was ChatGPT, which was not just a revolutionary software - pundits may say that it was nothing revolutionary in it - but It demonstrated the ability to generate human-like responses based on patterns learned from large-scale datasets.
The definition of machine learning
The mentioned chess robot was a well-trained tool that was well-prepared for the match by many mathematicians. However, it would not have been better by himself. That is what today’s AI tools all include, and what we call today's machine learning, or ML.
In this case, computer systems learn patterns from data and improve their performance on a task without being explicitly programmed with rules. They are programmed, but not for one specific purpose, but to learn from the data they get day to day, and second by second.
How are these two connected to each other?
And we have arrived at the connection of these two expressions. Machine learning is the main pillar of today’s AI applications. Programmers have no time to feed their artificial intelligence with all the information that ever existed on earth. However, they teach them to learn and improve from every bit of information. In this way, the community will make the tool clever. That was the main goal. And the last couple of years, when we started to integrate AI into our daily routines, we also improved them.
Improving them to a level that if we don’t want to miss out on our competitors, we need to implement AI solutions for as many workflows as possible.
4 key transforming areas of digital marketing by these technologies
In this next chapter, we will introduce some areas where AI will be the industry standard, instead of humans.
Data-driven decision making
Data-driven decision-making was always out of human hands. Just think about it, our brain has a maximum capacity of short-term memory, calculational, and observational skills. In the 20th century, small human-based data-driven decision-making has slowly been replaced by formulas and mathematical equations.
However, we couldn’t ignore human help. We needed to discover how to get to a specific result, and therefore, it required time.
With machine learning and AI, data-driven decision-making has gained a revolutionary new perspective. What if we only need to put the data in, tell a programme to analyze the data by specific criteria, and the programme gives us a result within minutes?
With this feature, regular people can analyze big data samples without the help of a programmer or data analyst. The best part is, based on this new information your business decisions are always supported with data. Which is the most valuable domain name for your specific needs, or which lead will bring you the most profit - and the opportunities are uncountable.
The change in content creation
Writing was all over with us throughout human history. Just think about the Greek and Roman writers and poets who crafted exceptional pieces of art that we can still interpret more than 2000 years later. Human creativity is unlikely to be fully replaced by AI-generated content.
However, in the online world, we do not always need to strive for the best work. Think about a product description. Do we need to spend days writing a perfect description if 1 out of 100 users will read it? Of course not! Our biggest boundary is our limited time, and we need to use this time for the most important tasks.
This is the reason why companies would rather stick with AI content creation, instead of humans. They want to save time and money and concentrate on those tasks that really matter.
New ways of creating a better customer experience
Digital marketing has the same goals as offline marketing has: to transform customers into SATISFIED buyers. That’s because all marketing models state the same idea: if the customers are satisfied with their in-store or online experience, there is a big probability that they will become loyal buyers. Loyal buyers, who purchase several times from the same company, increase the company's profitability, but also decrease its costs.
Customer experience is one of the best ways to increase satisfaction in your shop. It’s part of the front-office side of the business that is totally visible to the customers. These are the touchpoints where the visitor meets with the business representatives. A complaining situation, or just answering a simple question.
However, online customer experience has always given headaches to managers. For example, it is “open” 24/7, but your employees can’t work all day. What if the customer tries to buy something during that time period, when no one can help him? You not only lose him, but his negative experience may change others from buying from you.
On the other hand, Large Language Model AI tools can answer customer problems 24/7, from your imported data. So, you can be assured that the program will give the right tips, without more resources taken into account.
Make the monotonous work automatic!
We mentioned before what humans all love about AI: that it saves time and lets them work on the most important tasks. However, there is one more type of work we tend not to like: the monotonous ones.
Monotonous work is repeated tasks that take the same way to get to the solution all the time. These are not exciting at all, and when our partner asks about what we did today, we don’t want to say the same, boring answer all the time: “Nothing”.
AI can help us in most of these cases, as well, since monotonous work is - mostly - replaceable. We can create automatic rules with AI agents that can solve these frustrating tasks at any time.
Conclusion
In this article, we drove you through the exceptional world of artificial intelligence and machine learning from its early years to the present. We also mentioned four key areas that impacted digital marketing, and may be totally controlled by AI in the near future.
Don’t forget: AI will never take our jobs if we prepare for the future. However, AI can help us take our business to the next level!