It’s often said that artificial intelligence is the future of marketing. But what many marketers don’t recognize is that AI is already an integral part of the digital ecosystem as it exists today. Whether you are a marketer applying predictive algorithms to optimize creative messaging or a customer service manager employing chatbots to answer customer questions, you are doing AI.
Don’t believe me? Here are eight ways you may be using artificial intelligence right now.
Customer Profiling
With consumer profiling, brands use large-scale data analysis to sort their customers into different groups based on their demographic information, past purchases, offline behavior and online browsing history. Through predictive analytics, marketers can even identify when consumers are going through major life events — the time periods during which they are most likely to switch up their shopping habits.
In one famous example, Target used its customers’ past purchase activity to send mailers featuring baby products to women it predicted were pregnant, tipping off one father before his daughter had told him the news.
Programmatic Advertising
If you’ve ever run a programmatic advertising campaign, you’ve taken advantage of computational advertising — a series of algorithms that allow marketers to deliver the right ad at the right moment based on factors like the user’s demographic information, their past online behavior and the content they’re looking at when the ad appears.
This technology allowed the ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi LA to show Facebook users customized Toyota ads that recommended they take up weird activities based on their specific interests. For instance, people who were both martial arts enthusiasts and barbecue fans saw ads suggesting they try out a hobby called the “Tai Kwan Tenderizer.”
Dynamic Pricing
Dynamic pricing uses machine learning to set the optimal price point for a seller’s goods and services at any given moment based on what people have been willing to pay for the product under similar circumstances in the past. It’s why airline ticket prices fluctuate depending on when you buy them and why you’re likely to get hit with a surge pricing fee if you use a ride-sharing app on a Saturday night.
In the e-commerce world, a company called Feedvisor automatically optimizes prices for sellers on the Amazon Marketplace, allowing them to maximize their revenues while remaining competitive with rival sellers. In the marketing realm, Google’s dynamic price floors automatically adjust the minimum amount of money a publisher will accept for a given ad impression based on what buyers have previously paid for similar inventory.
Read more from Ben Plomion here.
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