All you need to know about AI In Digital Marketing Technology

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have become the most powerful technologies of the future. One of the key domains which are getting revolutionized by Artificial Intelligence is Digital Marketing Technology. Today, they are being applied in almost all the domains. In fact, we all see examples of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in our day to day life:

• Siri and Ok Google Assistant
• Google Search
• YouTube video recommendations
• Facebook news feed

It is evident that Artificial Intelligence is hugely impacting the lives of billions on the globe and is going to touch all aspects of our lives.

Digital Marketing involves marketing products to customers across various digital channels like Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc), smartphones (mobile games), Web (Google ads), etc. The idea of Digital Marketing evolved with the evolution of Technology. As Technology improved, more and more people adopted it and so, the digital channels were crowded with consumers. As a result, many companies are following the Digital Marketing model where they advertise to users in these channels.

The advantage is that Digital Marketing is highly scalable – you can reach out to millions and millions of people instantly which is practically not feasible by non-digital channels. For instance, it is next to impossible to create so many billboards.

The latest advancements on Digital Marketing have been about personalized marketing. Personalized marketing involves creating a 360 degree view of the target user and figuring out which advertisements would be the most relevant ones. For instance, Facebook today knows almost everything about you – your name, age, date of birth, gender, movies that you like, places that you visit, your friend circle, university, etc. Therefore, they are able to accurately predict what advertisements are likely to be viewed by which and which ones you will probably ignore.

The technology behind such personalized marketing is essentially Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Based on the past advertising data, the Facebook advertising algorithms are able to develop models about you – your likes and dislikes. For instance, they know that since you just wrote that post about FIFA World Cup, you are more likely to click on sports related advertisements.

The Machine Learning algorithms are able to quantify this pattern and create a score out of it. Every person is represented as a probability vector which indicates the likelihood that the person will click on the advertisement of a particular domain. A sample vector could look like:

Sports	Food	Education	Technology	Others
0.40	0.10	0.25	0.13	0.12

Clearly, the person of the above personna is more likely to click on sports advertisements as against food advertisements. These kind of Artificial Intelligence based models are quite powerful and help in generation of a lot of revenues via personalized advertising.

Besides being used in creating a 360 degree view of the customer, Artificial Intelligence is also being used in developing marketing tools like ChatBots. ChatBots are basically tools that are able understand user queries and automatically respond to it. ChatBots are powerful marketing tools. For example, when a user visits an organization’s website, a ChatBot can pop-up and tell the customer about the new product that has been launched.

The ChatBot can also help the customer in answering queries related to the product that the customer may have. Such ChatBots are Artificial Intelligence powered in that they are able to use AI to understand what the user is saying and then extract meaning out of it. ChatBots today have become an indispensable tool for any business and they are a classic example of how Artificial Intelligence can revolutionize Digital Marketing.

Another way by which Artificial Intelligence is being applied in Digital Marketing is by creating models about user behavior based on user’s Google search history. Billions of searches happen through Google on a daily basis as a result, Google has a humongous amount of search data for each user. Therefore, Google is accurately able to model the user behavior and show highly contextual advertisements. Such models are created using Artificial Intelligence algorithms that analyze hundreds of petabytes of user data on a daily basis. In fact, advertising is the primary revenue source of organizations like Google and Facebook and they invest a huge amount of money in optimizing the algorithms to make the more and more contextual and personalized.

Lastly, one more interesting way by which Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing the way websites are optimized. Today, one of the biggest challenges that digital-driven business face is to figure out how to optimize the website so as to maximize the number of visitors on the website. For instance, which color to use? What font to use? Where to place button? etc. Artificial Intelligence algorithms are able to generate gazillions of such combinations and show them to the users. These algorithms are then able to measure the response for each of the combination and find out the one that is optimal and is getting the maximum number of hits. This way, the algorithm is able to suggest the optimal configuration for the website which is most likely to be liked by the audience.

To summarize, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are changing the way brands/businesses interact with users via Digital Marketing channels. The algorithms are helping brands understand the customer better which eventually helps them make their content more contextual and more personalized – eventually making it more closer to the consumers. In future, it is very likely that this revolution will continue with not just Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, but also with a combination of other technologies like Blockchain and even Augmented and Virtual Reality.