Hands up if you use Spotify? Personally, I’m hooked on it. Commuting, relaxing at home, or cancelling out the distractions of a busy office when a deadline is closing in, I’m probably humming along to a tune.
The “Discover Weekly” playlist is a great example of how AI is making an entrance into our lives, without us even realising it. This week it offered me, among other things, Bullet For My Valentine’s Tears Don’t Fall.
It’s a great tune, but it’s already in my go-to playlist! If AI can’t tell this, we probably don’t need to build a nuclear bunker to protect us from killer robots just yet! But the use of machine learning will enable you to streamline your sales and marketing processes if you use it properly.
Start with what you have
As a business you’ll already have numerous clients who you interact with on a regular basis. Perhaps this is through one to one emails or personal calls, but the likelihood is that they’ll still receive marketing emails at some point. Capitalise on this. Get to know your customers: identify their interaction patterns and consistent themes.
You already have a wealth of information available, you only need to utilise it in the correct way. Learn from your customers. The time of day they open emails, when they interact with those emails, and preferred content type. Identify what they react to best and use it! Whether that be blogs, social media, or infographics.
Through using AI, you could delve further than this. Imagine being able to identify how your audience will react before even sending out the email. You could change the tone, length, or content to better suit the target audience.
Everyone is different, but tailoring your content to suit the audience is surely the logical way to increase sales and engagement.
As marketers we may think we know what people respond to best. The reality: we don’t. Testing is our trusted method to getting closer. We’ve harped on about how great split testing is already, and we stand by it! But with AI coming in fast, we’ve already thought about how we’re going to integrate this into our testing. Alternating weeks is the method which fits our marketing strategy, but it won’t work for everyone. Decide how you can employ AI in your own plan, and run with it.
Review, review, review
People don’t stay static, and so neither should your marketing. You may identify what works summer of one year, but by that winter it can be completely different. Keep reviewing your data to spot changes to data trends and uncover new insights. It will help you determine how your prospects requirements change over time.
Don’t despair!
We know it’s scary, and its going to take a while to understand how to interpret and apply AI results, but don’t lose hope. We believe this is going to benefit the marketing industry hugely. Likewise, don’t expect to see changes in your engagement straight away. AI takes time to build up insights into your data. The longer you use it, the more accurate your results will be. And if you don’t even know where to start or why you’d use AI, check out our past blogs on the topic here.
