source: TheNextWeb |
Digital marketers today are faced with a unique challenge: tell a creative, compelling brand story while simultaneously fitting it to a formula that ensures the message ranks among competitors, goes viral, or is perfectly optimized for all platforms. Also, the formula changes every day without notice, so make sure you stay on top of it at all times.
What’s a digital marketer to do?
AI is here to help. I repeat, AI is here to help. There is a lingering fear that robots, AI and machine learning will replace everyone’s jobs in the next six years, but the reality is far more nuanced.
As noted by the Marketing AI Institute, some marketing jobs will go away because of AI, some will be enhanced by AI, and some new jobs will be created by AI. Marketing jobs that consist primarily of repetitive tasks or data analysis are going to be at risk.
But creativity remains in the hands of humans, even if “beauty” is in the eye of the algorithm.
Here’s why:
Farewell, A/B testing
Nothing validates a marketer’s gut instinct like A/B testing. I’ve completed thousands of A/B, multivariate, and Taguchi tests to understand which headline or image works best. It’s a marketing best practice.
[Read: The 3 subconscious states of mind driving customer behavior]
Unfortunately, it’s also flawed from inception because marketers approach A/B tests with built-in bias. For example, I decided which video would be “A” and which would serve as its challenger “B.” With my human opinion involved – and the outcome I’m hoping to see in mind – the A/B test only proves two variations, ignoring outliers or subtle patterns. Machines find these outliers and patterns. AI spotlights objectivity and derives more nuance from patterns than humans can.
Machine learning has an additional one-up on A/B testing: it can predict, with statistical significance, which option is best without running the A/B test. Instead of creating a 2×2 matrix, drafting twice the assets, spending the time, budget, and energy to run the test, then reporting on outcomes and having meetings to talk about the outcomes… marketers can instead move forward with the answer in the first place!
For the last 15 years, marketers have been told to lead with data, to become more like machines. Now there’s a new call to digital marketers who will succeed: be more human. And that’s not just anecdotal. Up to 36% of business executives say the primary goal of incorporating AI into their business is to automate tasks and free up workers to be more creative.
Read more at TheNextWeb