It’s no secret that artificial intelligence (AI) has come along in leaps and bounds since Deep Blue first hit the headlines by beating chess champion Garry Kasparov back in 1997. In fact, you could argue that it’s only in recent years that hardware has advanced enough for AI software to advance towards its full potential, and there’s still a long way to go.
Still, AI is starting to make its presence known in all sorts of industries, from healthcare to finance and beyond, and marketing departments too are likely to find themselves dealing with AI more and more in the coming months. It’ll be built into marketing automation platforms and lead nurturing systems, allowing them to understand data from disparate sources and to build a more complete picture of who our leads are and what content is most likely to resonate with them.
One of the great strengths of artificial intelligence is that it can process huge amounts of data much faster than us mere mortals, and it will also make fewer mistakes while it does it. That’s not to say that the machines are coming to take our jobs, though. In fact, the truth is that they’ll just change the way that we carry them out, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Making sense of the data
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt famously said back in 2010 that we create as much information every two days as we did up to 2003. We’re creating more data than ever before, and that data can be used for everything from risk assessments and complex modelling to predictive analytics and advanced customisation.
For marketers, this could change everything. We’ve long known that the key to successful marketing is to reach the right person in the right place at the right time, and AI can help us to do that. In fact, it can even allow us to know our customers better than they know themselves, which can only be a good thing. It’ll help us to serve up the most relevant content possible when they visit our websites.
AI can also be of huge help in other fields, such as the running of programmatic advertisements. It’ll help marketers to change their advertisements in real-time to react to whatever’s going on in the world around them. It could even create landing pages on your behalf to facilitate conversions and enhance your lead generation programmes.
Conclusion
AI has been showing potential for several years now, but it’s only recently that it’s started to come into its own. It can seem like, as marketers, we’re constantly being told about the next big thing, but AI actually has the potential to deliver on it. We’d be fools not to at least keep our eyes on it as a trend and to see how it develops in 2018 and beyond.
Struggling with lead gen? Don’t worry – we’re here to help you to gather the leads you need to boost your business. Request a demo of Bant.io to find out how we can help your company to grow by sending hot B2B leads directly to your inbox. You won’t regret it.
Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.