Have you ever wondered how you see advertisements of related things you recently searched for on the internet? How do marketers know what you are looking for?
Before the days of digital marketing, companies had very few data points to count on and strategy was heavily driven by intuition. As technology evolves, the number of data points a marketer considers in order to formulate strategy continues to grow. Personal data can be gathered from many places – Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, mobile apps, website cookies, online-offline surveys etc. But the important question is – Is data everything?
The answer is no. What matters is what you actually do with the data. There is so much data available in different forms that it is virtually impossible to get any insight from so much unstructured data. One can’t manually create correlations between randomly collected chunks of data. That’s where machine learning comes in.
Machine learning can assess a lot of data about the consumer and output a personalised message, for example. It can find hidden patterns from the data, give several insights into consumer behaviour and inform companies about what product to offer to whom and at what time. Machine learning enables companies to target consumers based on their interests, habits and personality. It can even suggest to marketers persons at a particular stage in the purchase cycle so that the marketers can find ways to deliver the right message to them at the right time.
In his talk at the Indian School of Business, Jivox’s founder and President Diaz said that past events were a good predictor of future activity and machine learning can predict the future with some probability. He was excited about this new technology and touted machine learning as the future of marketing.
– Himanshu Chauhan, PGP Co2017