If a picture is worth a thousand words, then big data is worth millions. Big data is the modern-day equivalent of an oil well; you never know what you will get. But what happens when you miss it?
According to a Harvard Business Review report, about 30% of a company’s marketing budget is wasted on ineffective strategies. Well, it’s not hard to understand why that money was wasted. The culprit? A lack of understanding of useless channels and strategies used and what factors contributed to other successful marketing campaigns.
The good news is that AI has made significant advancements in tracking and analyzing marketing data to uncover trends and anomalies in marketing.
Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming a powerful tool for marketing teams, providing insights into data. And now, one of the most valuable things AI can do for businesses is to reveal hidden anomalies in data sets.
How is AI Your Life Jacket?
AI can be used for many things. However, one of its most important roles is helping marketers find anomalies in their data. These anomalies are often small details that can make a big difference when it comes time for actionable insight, making them critical for business intelligence and optimization across industries. People alone can not spot these subtle differences because it takes too much time or too much information is available at once (think spreadsheets). With the help of algorithms like those found in AI solutions, humans can get a better grasp of how customers behave.
How AI Can Uncover Hidden Anomalies In Marketing
Identify Customer Segments That Are Being Under-served or Over-served
The first step to finding these anomalies is understanding your data. It’s common for marketers to allocate more time, effort, and resources to certain customer segments because they believe these people are more valuable than others. But what if your most valuable customers are being underserved? AI can help you identify this and allocate the right resources to each segment based on its actual value.
Using AI, marketers can also discover hidden correlations between customer attributes and their responses to marketing material. These correlations may signal new opportunities for segmentation.
Reveal Hidden Anomalies in Data Sets
AI can help B2B marketers unlock insights from their data and get more accurate predictions in a time when marketers have access to an ever-increasing amount of customer data. This is especially important because marketing operations are still plagued by a lack of data quality, which leads to incomplete and inaccurate customer profiles, incorrect customer behavior models, and inefficient campaign targeting.
32% of U.S. marketers believe that their customer data is inaccurate. Furthermore, 83% of commercial companies say that a lack of accurate data is the reason for poor campaign results and revenue.
AI can create an effective solution to marketing’s data problem by uncovering hidden anomalies in your marketing data — trends and behaviors that are not in line with the company’s goal or ideal scenario. The insights derived from this process enable marketers to make smarter decisions about planning and optimizing their campaigns.
Detect Fraudulent Activities and Unusual Customer Behaviors
AI can detect fraud across all kinds of touchpoints — from email to ad campaigns to user behavior. For example, if you notice a sudden spike in traffic, AI can help you spot patterns or hidden anomalies that may indicate fraudulent activity. You could have been hacked or infiltrated by bots. Bots could be masquerading as humans, inflating traffic numbers, or clicking on ads. AI can help detect these and save your business money.
Using AI, marketers can identify atypical purchase behavior or find irregularities in customer retention patterns. Uncovering these anomalies will enable your business to adapt strategies accordingly and improve your customer experience.
Expose Unexpected Correlations Between Metrics
Your brand can also use artificial intelligence to find unexpected correlations between metrics. This information is valuable because it can help you understand how different aspects of your campaigns are related. For example, if AI finds that a certain marketing campaign is correlated with an increase in website traffic, the team may want to consider running more campaigns like that in the future.
These are insights that human analysts wouldn’t have uncovered because they didn’t know what to look for and where to look for it. And even if they did, they wouldn’t have been able to process all the data and make sense of it without the help of AI.
Pinpoint Areas Where Marketing Spending is Not Delivering Results
In addition to finding correlations, you can pinpoint areas where marketing spending is not delivering results. One of the biggest challenges for marketers is knowing where to invest their budgets for maximum return on investment (ROI). Thus, this information is valuable because it can help you decide where to allocate resources for maximum ROI. If a certain marketing strategy is not delivering results, the team may want to consider shifting their spending to another area.
Fix Marketing Funnel Anomalies
Analyzing funnel data through traditional analytics can leave out some key insights. One of the most powerful ways to use AI for detecting anomalies is to make sense of gaps in the customer acquisition and retention funnels. This can be done by identifying customer patterns with machine learning and then applying those patterns at scale to reveal where customers might be dropping out of the funnel. This is a relatively simple problem when looking at one customer at a time. Still, it becomes more difficult to analyze tens or hundreds of thousands of customers simultaneously, which is why advanced machine learning techniques are needed to solve it.
Track Ongoing Episodes and Provide Insight
Episode marketing is a technique that involves releasing a series of marketing emails over some time. This approach can be very effective, but it can also be easy to go too far with. Artificial intelligence can track episodes and provide insight into when an episode has gone too far. This information is valuable for marketing teams because it can help them ensure that they are not overdoing it with their marketing campaigns.
Spot Customer Sentiment Changes in Real-time
Have you ever been sitting in your office one day when a new report comes across your desk indicating that your customers are suddenly unhappy?
What if you could get a real-time alert the moment this change occurred, allowing you to respond quickly? That’s what AI can do. It can monitor real-time data and spot changes in customer sentiment (or other KPIs) before the damage is done.
You won’t have to wait until the end of the month or quarter for reports. Instead, you’ll get alerted when a problem arises, knowing exactly what caused it.
Final Thoughts
The truth is that AI can take your marketing campaigns to a whole new level of success. The technology provides a consistent flow of valuable data essential to growing a successful business. Whether you’re looking to increase customer loyalty, gain a competitive advantage, or drive more revenue through your marketing efforts, AI could be the fuel you’ve been looking for.
