Digital Marketing Superheroes – Machine Learning Edition
To address the situation of obtaining superhero powers of digital marketing, let us first remark on the article, 7 Ways Machine Learning Can Enhance Marketing (Digital Marketing Institute, 2024). The article was incredibly informative and easy to follow with the seven means of improving marketing efforts via the use of artificial intelligence clearly delineated throughout. Each point had a valid application within the digital marketing process, even down to AI’s relationship to content and how that can be optimized.
One scenario that can be applied to answer this prompt is the ’simple’ matter of farmers shopping for startup materials including tools and seeds despite the mountain of bureaucracy that comes with that process (especially considering seed intellectual property rights). If I were a company with a target audience of first-time farmers within the age range of 21-45 years, living in the Mid-West United States, who voted independent this election, I’d have a lot of digital real estate the play with and many options to optimize the shopping experience for my potential clients.
The SCI principle of ‘thought leads to action, action leads to achievement, and achievement leads to fulfillment,’ plays perfectly into this scenario. Farmers are incredibly educated in the language of agriculture and study our Earth to understand how to best grow. If my brand is looking to cultivate a relationship with this audience, I would have to first capitalize on their interest in sustainable farming products, tools, and practices. One benefit to AI in the digital marketing space is the ability to create new revenue streams whilst enhancing the overall customer experience (prompt 2, 7 Ways Machine Learning Can Enhance Marketing, Online, Digital Marketing Institute, 2024). Personalization has become the language through which potential clients are introduced to and made aware of brands that suit their interests. According to the study, ‘Amazon has harnessed the power of machine learning,’ to the tune of 30% annual revenue generated through personalization via AI (prompt 2, 7 Ways Machine Learning Can Enhance Marketing, Online, Digital Marketing Institute, 2024). According to Business Insider, ‘Amazon also utilizes its cloud computing service, Amazon Web Services, to make machine learning and other AI available to outside companies’ (Business Insider, Machine learning driving innovation at Amazon, 2017).
With the application of emerging data and technology, companies can have the most granular insights available to them for decision-making in this arena. This also allows for the ability of AI to guide the customer journey in a more personal way, through recommendations and ensuring stock is always ready and available, in this scenario, rotating seasonal items/seeds, and monitoring best sellers by season.
Next, the opportunity to develop more products and services is a necessary play in the automated, streamlined world that is digital and programmatic AI marketing. Machine learning software has made it possible for companies to target niche audience segments in their industry and constantly refine their own curated customer base AI (prompt 3, 7 Ways Machine Learning Can Enhance Marketing, Online, Digital Marketing Institute, 2024).
Content optimization is an area which has the most potential to increase awareness and extend reach for any company online through machine learning and automation. As a human, I appreciate the fact that machine learning is solution-based and analytic in nature, despite the idea that machines want to take over the world. As the article mentions, marketers can utilize this machine behavior through A/B testing, which in my mind seems simply like activating different versions of a campaign to test which material scores higher with the intended audience, yielding the most favorable and profitable results. This practice allows for ‘more targeted content (by) ultimately collaborating with machines,’ (prompt 4, 7 Ways Machine Learning Can Enhance Marketing, Online, Digital Marketing Institute, 2024).
As a seasoned marketer, I’d go out of my way to put emphasis on the idea of reducing marketing waste. Especially now that the online web is so vast and categorically miscategorized, it seems like a no brainer to want to mitigate the inevitable waste and misdirection that might come with advertising online across various markets, to endless segments of available audiences. As a brand, you simply do not want to spend money targeting the wrong people. Unless there is an initial interest, these efforts can prove unfruitful and detrimental to the overall ad budget and ROI. Having the ability to identity trends in real-time is incredible valuable, and machine learning has made the sense of urgency a priority and provides marketers with the precise tools to meet their intended audience, resulting in higher engagement and conversions (prompt 6, 7 Ways Machine Learning Can Enhance Marketing, Online, Digital Marketing Institute, 2024).
As someone with plans of running a small to medium operation one day (whether fully digitally or physically) I see the utmost benefit to allowing AI to engage customers on behalf of my brand. Majority of companies have now automated their call-receiving to provide menus for immediate customer relief, for example, you can check your bank account balance via phone with just a few clicks. If someone is calling to request baseline information, it is most effective to route those types of inquiries to an automated system. With the ability to augment the digital chatbot presence and allow for machine learning to refine the customer experience, there’s a greater level of efficiency possible.
I don’t feel there is a need to fight the implementation of AI into the fabric of digital marketing, after all, we’ve been existing alongside the emergence of AI for at least the last six decades. It seems the benefits to utilizing AI technology greatly outweigh the potential for threat. In the end, it is the responsibility of humans to maintain order in the world of AI. It is only without our oversight and the ability to intervene and train AI, should we recognize the existence of any threat unforeseen.
References: Digital Marketing Institute, 2024, 7 Ways Machine Learning Can Enhance Marketing. Retrieved, March, 2025, from https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/blog/7-ways-machinelearning-can-enhance-marketing Camhi, J. and Pandolph, S., 2017, Machine Learning Driving Innovation at Amazon. Retrieved, March, 2025, from https://www.businessinsider.com/machine-learning-drivinginnovation-at-amazon-2017-4
