Research suggests that by 2020, around 1.7 megabytes of new information will be created for every person on the planet, every second. Thanks to the wider adoption of machine learning technology, marketers are able to gain deeper insight into customer behaviour than ever before. So how will machine learning enhance customer targeting, and what insights will we be able to uncover?

Big data, bigger results

Machine learning enables marketers to harness the power of big data to do everything from optimising television to identifying content. One powerful application for big data in marketing is to provide greater efficiency when buying programmatic media, which has become commonplace over recent years.

Cutting through the noise

With such a vast amount of data so readily available, how can marketers cut through the noise and find data that is of real value? Having the right skillset within your marketing team is key.

Organisations are beginning to look for external support from service providers to gain better results from their data. Data professionals from research backgrounds are being brought into work alongside marketing teams to assist with analysis and help marketers to gain a better understanding of the results generated by machine learning tools. Marketers looking to get the most out of machine learning should look to recruit individuals with this skillset to remain relevant.

Capitalising on intent

Intent marketing does not make assumptions about your ideal customer. Instead, it looks for people demonstrating signals of intent - often imperceptible variations in their behaviours which indicate they are actively intending to make a purchase decision. Most brands look for people who have demonstrated that they are in the market for your product or service, and here’s where the challenge comes in.

Machine learning tools are able to learn from real actions, so if you expose machine learning to people who go onto buy from your brand, whether in an online store or at a real shop, you have an opportunity to gather insight on the individual’s behaviour prior to making a purchase and assess whether marketing messages provided on the customer journey have had a positive influence. Over time, machine learning tools are able to build an understanding of how individual customers behave and create a rich signature of what good intent looks like for each person. This then allows marketers to scale much more effectively and target the right customers at the right time and place.

What does machine learning offer on a holistic level?

By looking at different variables such as time of day, weather patterns or news sentiment, machine learning technology can make sense of patterns and behaviours much more efficiently than a human. Machine learning can add significant value by going beyond the consumers that you already know are interested, to finding others you would never have previously considered to be potential prospects. This adds huge value for brands at a critical time for the industry, providing marketers with an edge to stay ahead of the competition.

To learn more about how machine learning will impact marketing, keep a lookout for the second part in our series, where we’ll be looking at why, for marketers, machine learning is all about big data.

 

By Paul Wright, CEO of iotec

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