How to Use Machine Learning & Automation to Improve Your Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is constantly changing. The needs of our clients evolve as the pace and competitiveness of social marketing and paid search make it difficult for small businesses to stay on target. They need personalized solutions, continuous optimizations through real-time analysis, and automated solutions to improve to nurture those leads.

That's exactly what machine learning is doing for companies in 2021 and beyond.

If your current strategies are proving ineffective, or if you need actionable solutions to give you an advantage over your competitors, take a look at how machine learning will bolster your digital marketing strategies and ensure that your business continues to be a leader in your industry for the foreseeable future.

What is Machine Learning for Digital Marketing?

Machine learning is a system, or systems, that utilize artificial intelligence to gather analytics and present actionable solutions based on the findings. As your audience engages with your advertisements or shared content, knowledge about each user and their behaviors feeds into an algorithm. The more data that the algorithm receives, the more accurate and effective the proposed solutions will be.

There are two major types of machine learning that experts use to gather and interpret data sets:

Guided Machine Learning

A machine learning system will generally have a difficult time gathering and interpreting data without first receiving the help of human intelligence. In digital marketing, experts will instruct the system on what specific data to track as well as how to look out for patterns of note. You can do this by supplying it with data previously gathered manually from past marketing campaigns.

The machine learning system interprets this data and applies it to data gathered from future marketing campaigns and experiments.

Unguided Machine Learning

This type of machine learning system is exactly the opposite. Experts allow the system to gather data from users in real-time without receiving the knowledge of previous user patterns or behaviors. Artificial intelligence is left to its own devices to sort out the gathered data and come up with solutions to improve its processes as time passes.

The Importance of Artificial Intelligence in Marketing

As a marketing professional, you may be thinking that you already have no shortage of tools to help you gather data. However, the true problem is finding the time and resources necessary to effectively sort through all of this valuable data to present meaningful solutions that get your clients real results.

Artificial intelligence is able to interpret and organize vast amounts of information in a fraction of the time it would take a human employee. In fact, as long as enough data is being fed into the algorithm, the results are virtually instant.

This means that machine learning can free up countless billable hours for your digital marketing agency. With the help of artificial intelligence, you can run any number of experiments with the right tools, focus your efforts on other tasks in the meantime, and return to find meticulously organized and accurate information to perform effective optimizations.

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Machine learning is not only faster but also eliminates the potential for human error. It is effectively improving the digital marketing process for every business in the world.

How to Use Machine Learning to Improve Your Digital Marketing?

Now that you better understand what machine learning is, we wanted to walk through the various ways you can utilize machine learning marketing to improve virtually every aspect of your agency. Below, you can find a list of the most important ways that the top experts are utilizing the best tools to help their teams prove more efficient:

1. Personalizing the User Experience

If you compare your Amazon shopping account with a friend's, you're guaranteed to observe two very different experiences. That's because the website is utilizing algorithms to constantly observe and track user behavior while they are utilizing their platform. As a result, you get personalized product recommendations, unique search predictions, and unique listing rankings.

The same is true for just about every platform you can think of - Netflix, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and many others.

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Your business or marketing agency can utilize machine learning to the same effect. You can utilize these systems to create personalized homepages or platforms for customers using your service. You could also personalize your paid ad or email marketing campaigns to better target users that take unique routes throughout their buyer's journey with your company.

2. Analyzing Your Data

Does your team currently utilize Google Analytics or Facebook Business Manager for your marketing goals? If you answered yes, you're already utilizing machine learning to improve your marketing processes.

These machine learning systems are able to gather vast amounts of data from your audience at a faster rate than humans and do so while retaining accuracy. Your team will quickly learn about customer demographics, bounce rates, retention time, clickthrough rates, etc.

Machine learning can also conduct experiments for you by segmenting your audience into different groups and observing which strategies perform best. It will also be able to automatically determine when its learning efforts are complete and automatically turn off experiments, optimizing the use of your advertising budget without input from an employee.

This powerful method of data analysis outclasses anything you can do manually, and will effectively improve every aspect of your marketing services without question.

3. Automated Customer Service

An estimated 85% of all customer service interactions online will be resolved with an AI chatbot by the end of 2021. The statistics show that businesses and users alike enjoy the benefits of chatbots for the following reasons:

• Immediate response times
• Available 24/7 – no waiting for business hours
• Immediate solution suggestions
• Ability to sort customer queries and direct complex issues to human experts
• Ability to assist hundreds of customers simultaneously

While you will always have a share of consumers who insist upon human interaction, most are simply looking for their problems to be resolved as quickly as possible. As a result, businesses can utilize chatbots to handle billing and payments, subscriptions, account-related issues, and so much more.

A chatbot driven by machine learning can also sort through a vast library of help articles to provide the right solution to the user immediately. Additionally, if the chatbot is unable to help a user, it still gathers the data and offers your team insights on how to improve the automated customer experience.

Automated customer service can also potentially save your business thousands of dollars annually.

4. Improve Your Website and Landing Page Designs

Before machine learning, web designers were largely left to guesswork when it came to optimizing webpage layouts. With these new AI systems, you can learn everything you need to know about user activity on your site.

Web designers can now take advantage of heat mapping, which tracks which sections of the page receive more clicks as well as how long their eyes stay on a particular segment. Sections of the page that are ā€�hotā€¯ are safe to call keepers, while notably ā€�coldā€¯ sections likely need a redesign.

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Businesses and marketers can also take advantage of A/B testing, which allows you to direct your audience to two different versions of the same website. Machine learning will automatically track user behavior on each page, calculate which performs best, and automatically redirect users to the better page when enough data is gathered.

You will once again save time and money by performing optimizations backed by data from real users that want to engage with your content.

5. Optimize Your PPC Campaigns

Every business has a set budget when it comes to monthly digital advertising, so it's essential that you don't leave it up to guesswork. Machine learning now outperforms manual decision-making by helping experts choose the best types of ads, where and when to launch them, and how much of your budget you should use to boost engagement.

AI-driven machine learning will save you countless dollars and work to lower your cost-per-lead month after month (Are you beginning to see the pattern?)

For example, many social media platforms that offer to advertise can accept your previous campaign data to guide future efforts. The algorithm takes previous metrics, applies that data to users on the platform, and automatically generate what’s known as a “lookalike audience” to reach new customers that are most likely to convert.

Machine learning systems can also take over and autopilot the bidding process, adjusting bids according to your set limits, and knowing when to cease budget use when keyword costs become too competitive.

6. Improve Your Presence on Social Media

More than half of the world is now participating in social media. That statistic alone describes how necessary it is for every business to market themselves through those platforms.

With the help of machine learning marketing, you can easily turn Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more into tools for success. Similar to the methods mentioned above, machine learning systems can automatically track and compile data from your audience to determine what types of content foster higher levels of engagement and impressions.

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Something that is unique to social media is knowing what days of the week to post as well as the best times to catch your audience's attention. Machine learning utilizes that same data from your audience to create an easy-to-read map of the best times to share your content on each social platform. User behavior greatly fluctuates depending on where you're posting, and AI-driven marketing provides you with immediate answers.

7. Machine Learning is Now Mandatory for SEO

Experts are no longer combing through each of your business's web pages with a fine-tooth comb. If you're not already, you need to be taking advantage of the world's top SEO tools including SEMrush, Ahrefs, KWFinder, and Moz - all of which utilize machine learning.

Once again, these AI systems are able to scan, track, and identify SEO errors across each page of your site with almost zero waiting period. These error reports will also come with proposed solutions that your team of experts can put into effect. This allows for more effective optimizations that in turn help your brand become more competitive in search rankings no matter how new your website is.

Additionally, these automated SEO reports can help dictate which type of content will best help improve website traffic and engagement. You will be able to track content keywords your audience is using and create articles, videos, or images for your site that naturally satisfies the demand.

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Conclusion - Adapt to Machine Learning Marketing or Be Left Behind

Machine learning marketing doesn't eliminate the need for intelligent, seasoned marketing experts. It simply takes over the role of completing the necessary, yet time-consuming, trivial tasks, and does so faster and with greater accuracy.

The role of future marketers is not to complete hours of menial tasks, but to utilize the tremendously beneficial insights that artificial intelligence can provide. The most competitive brands will utilize these tools in their marketing arsenal to continuously optimize web design, content creation, paid campaigns, search rankings, and everything else that goes into your overall business success.

By adapting to machine learning, you will save thousands of dollars, free up countless hours for tasks that can actually enhance your business, and do so while putting out better content than any of your competitors. If you've yet to embrace it, you're already late. Adapt now, or get left behind for good.