INSIGHT
REINFORCING MARKETING STRATEGIES WITH A HUMAN TOUCH
Technology’ s four brightest new strategies for igaming will only benefit us if they’ re blended with our own smarts, says Sarafina Wolde Gabriel, from Paysafe’ s Income Access
ENHANCING BRAND EXPERIENCE is increasingly reliant on identifying emerging trends, technologies and needs that can unlock potential. Then there’ s the matter of exploiting that potential once it’ s been recognised.
Affiliate marketers can help businesses to navigate this terrain and define campaign strategies. But with so much excitement around tech— both emerging and evolving— there is also the challenge of forming a genuine connection that encourages sustained activity.
Below are four prominent technologies that influence marketing strategies where a human touch is both encouraged and achievable.
1) Machine learning In a world of trendy tech terminology, machine learning( ML) has a marketing challenge: it sounds less accessible than‘ big data’, lacks the excitement of virtual reality and, although technically a branch of artificial intelligence, it doesn’ t engage the public’ s interest in quite the same way. ML is even more challenging when it comes to assessing how it can strengthen brand marketing and customer relations.
An accurate appraisal likely rests somewhere between those who specialise in ML-based solutions and others who have long-standing careers devising smaller-scale marketing campaigns and strategies.
DataScience, a tech firm in Culver City, California, supplies its clients with an enterprise data science platform. In one blog post, 6 Common Machine Learning Applications for Business, the practice of customer segmentation is highlighted:“ Rather than relying on a marketer’ s intuition to separate customers into groups for campaigns, data scientists can use clustering and classification algorithms to group customers into personas based on specific variations among them. These personas account for customer differences across multiple dimensions such as demographics, browsing behaviour and affinity.”
In affiliate marketing, we’ re continually looking to improve efficiencies without sacrificing customer care. The competitive nature of the industry also means that we require more thoughtful ways of segmenting and clustering those customers to achieve results. However, impressive as the intelligence may be, without a customer-centric mindset these insights risk being wasted along with the resources devoted to acquiring them in the first place.
“ Humans understand context in ways that machines can’ t. AI technology has capabilities that are data-focused, but humans have a depth of context that you can’ t necessarily program,” wrote Chaitanya Chandrasekar, CEO and co-founder of Quantic Mind, in an article for eMarketer.“ Sometimes there are reasons that a marketer just knows something will or won’ t work, but machines don’ t have gut feelings.”
2) Artificial intelligence Forecasting future job losses because of artificial intelligence( AI) can be a distressing pastime. It may also prove unnecessary, given that our status within the global workforce doesn’ t preclude us from reaping the benefits of AI.
Despite their sophisticated learning capabilities, AI platforms are not able to draw on emotional experiences or familiarity with the human condition— essential traits for a strong marketing professional. For marketers, the true value of AI is how, when leveraged accordingly, it can facilitate an array of content marketing activities( such as social media, chatbots, content curation, etc).
Contributing to Curata’ s company blog, Paul Roetzer, founder and CEO of B2B content marketing agency PR 20 / 20, recently wrote:“ Human beings … have a finite ability to process information,
“ Impressive as the intelligence may be, without a customer-centric mindset these insights risk being wasted along with the resources devoted to acquiring them in the first place” build strategies based on that information and create content at scale. Artificial intelligence systems, in contrast, have an almost infinite ability to process data and deliver predictions, recommendations and content— better, faster and cheaper.”
Roetzer is right and affiliate marketers can’ t spend hours sifting through data and identifying actionable insights to optimise acquisition strategies. Engaged in a profession that requires a fondness
52 iGB Affiliate Issue 65 OCT / NOV 2017