Machine learning and artificial intelligence have multiple applications in various fields. Communications and marketing is no exception. Just like other industries, it can help improve how smoothly everything runs and offer additional insights that were difficult to obtain manually.
We asked members of Forbes Communications Council for ideas on how machine learning and artificial intelligence can help marketing and communications. The answers all pointed to creating extra time for humans and doing current tasks more efficiently.
1. Leverage The Power Of Voice Assistants
Marketers can make use of AI by leveraging the reach and power of the modern voice assistants like Amazon's Alexa. Developers can create skills that can be launched on Alexa. Provide your customers access to your services and your brand through the existing voice infrastructure of Amazon and build a closer and more personal relationship with your customers. - Marcel Hollerbach, Productsup GmbH
2. Assist With Content Writing
There are several platforms available that assist with writing content. They allow you to enter in a few keywords about the topic you are interested in writing about, and then it creates the basis of a writing piece. I don't foresee it ever being the sole provider for content generation, but can be a powerful launching pad for creating something that is your own. - Jessica Hennessey, Wakefly, Inc.
3. Automate Connections
We're using attribution modeling in conjunction with our various personas to help automate the connections between the right message and the right audience. By successfully coordinating delivery around an extensive array of data points, we are more capable than ever before in delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. It's a game changer, especially in long B2B sales cycles. - Andrea Boccard, AccountingDepartment.com
4. Use Data To Improve Your Effectiveness
Technology enables tracking visitors' movement, time spent on specific areas of your website and data collection. By understanding how they are consuming information and what interests them, you can strategically position information and target marketing more specifically to the user. Think about how Amazon and Facebook work -- your interests are reflected back at you through product advertisements that are based on your user data. - Tony Holbrook, Ingram Micro Commerce & Lifecycle Services
5. Use Online Chats
A great way to do this is using some form of online 'chat' tool for your website. The chat function provides a quick way for the machine to learn the typical reasons people are visiting you and what their questions are; for those questions that are most popular, it generates immediate responses. - Caroline Lyle, TMW Systems (a Trimble Brand)
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6. Experiment With Chatbots
While incorporating neural conversational agents (chatbots) and voice search capabilities into your site are perhaps the most accessible machine learning entry point, marketers should also consider experimenting with Google Cloud Natural Language API or AutoML to, for example, to better categorize web form submissions or data housed within a content management system. - Cameron Conaway, Solace
7. Work With Visual Performance Data
AI is now helping brands quickly identify what content and messages are resonating with their audiences so marketers can spend less time producing better content. One such tool is Stackla’s Co-Pilot machine learning engine that learns from performance data to recommend what visuals will perform best across your digital channels. - Mallory (Blumer) Walsh, Stackla
8. Humanize Communications With Personas
Funny as it may seem, AI can help brands communicate more personally with their customer. Marketers can leverage the power of AI in order to create micro-segmented customer personas and communicate with each one according to their specific preferences and via their preferred channel. That is a game-changing innovation setting brands apart, as leaders in customer experience know how to harness machine learning to humanize communications and enhance personalization. - Pini Yakuel, Optimove
9. Create Personalized Experiences
AI and machine learning both offer a lot of possibilities across industries. When executed well, these strategies should not be noticed by consumers. Instead, leverage the rich data from ML and AI to create more targeted and personalized experiences for your customers. - Alyssa Kleinman, CipherHealth
10. Apply AI To Design
In a world where all documents are expected to be visually appealing and well-designed, there’s an even larger opportunity to improve our everyday work: AI for design. Applying AI to design might seem counterintuitive. Yet, with AI-powered presentation tools, good design is no longer a gift that belongs only to professional designers; it can be a given in the communications work that all of us do every day. - JD Prater, Beautiful.AI
11. Test Against Insights
AI can provide additional data points to a marketer as they work to understand their customers better. For e-commerce businesses, AI-powered tools like chatbots and ad optimizer are designed to show you what messages, images, etc., resonate with your audience and how to communicate better with them. However, you should take those learnings to test against while still using other research. - T.J. Welsh, Stryde.com
12. Think About Small Tasks
Look for smart technology that uses AI to help you accomplish small tasks. Searching for the AI silver bullet is going to take you down the wrong road. Our firm is using an AI tool to help us conduct competitive brand reviews, both verbal and visual. This gets the team about 80% down the road with quick and accurate legwork, then they can apply the real brainpower. That's working smarter! - Mike Neumeier, Arketi Group
13. Personalize Content
No marketer today is starved of customer data; in fact, they’re flooded with it. But data access alone isn’t enough for marketers to win the race for customers through impactful, personalized campaigns that connect. Investment in machine learning capabilities that can convert raw data into insights is the performance-enhancing tool they need to cross the finish line first. - Martin Häring, Finastra
14. Drive Loyalty For Brands
There is huge untapped potential in the millions of brand mentions that hundreds of millions of people are exposed to every day. AI can review 100% of brand mentions, categorizing them intelligently into addressable and prioritized buckets, using sophisticated analytics and data tagging. Elevating online customer engagement to online brand management allows us to seize the opportunity to make a splash when someone is having fun with a brand. - Andrew Kokes, HGS
15. Eliminate Opportunity Loss
Every marketing executive hates the opportunity loss aspect of A/B testing. And because consumer data evolves, A/B testing will always be necessary. That's why the multi-arm bandit approach to A/B testing is so helpful. You virtually eliminate the opportunity loss and accelerate the speed at which you approach optimal content and ads. It's a great way to boost your marketing strategy. - Jeff Grover, Best Company
16. Spend Less Time On Strategy
Machine learning tools allow you to spend less time developing content strategy, but measuring performance and engagement rates on existing content. Marketers also benefit from using machine learning to measure pay per click ad campaigns, while simultaneously helping to drive lead generation by creating personalized content drips based on web behavior. - MaryAnn Holder-Browne, One Network Enterprises
17. Improve Customer Satisfaction
Using chatbots can provide unique, interactive experiences that streamline the customer journey and allow marketers to focus their time on requests that require more personalized responses. While the chatbot handles common requests like quick information gathering and routing, marketers can spend more time building trust and nurturing loyal customers. - Andrew Caravella, Sprout Social
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