If you’re not already using machine learning to automate your campaigns, you’re one of the few remaining advertisers who are still doing it the old way.

Machine learning is a form of artificial intelligence that allows computer systems to progressively improve performance on a task by “learning” through statistical approaches. That is why Facebook, Google, and all the major media platforms are perfectly ripe for automation—the bigger your paid customer acquisition budget, the more data you can deliver into these machines to enable them to train and learn faster to help you hit your desired success goals.

The question to ask yourself is: what do you want to accomplish by automating something? The stage is set for the following transformation: to move digital media and marketing beyond the purely tactical into a world that’s more intuitive, highly automated, and more strategic than ever before. Given all the promise and possibilities, what can automation and artificial intelligence accomplish when applied to digital marketing efforts? There are several areas ripe for innovation.

Automated Media Buying

Machine learning is a powerful tool for making predictions when given a large amount of data. Major platform providers like Google and Facebook use machine learning to deliver more relevant ad experiences to consumers and improve the performance of their offerings so that advertisers will spend more money. Independent software providers have built out packaged solutions that can save media buyers time on everyday grunt work and free you up to focus on strategy, creatives, segmentation, and more.

Cross-Channel Marketing Orchestration

The next step up from automated media buying is to employ more complex systems that can work across multiple digital marketing platforms. Each major marketing platform offers different capabilities and relative strengths and weaknesses, given your specific marketing objectives.

A key element in an autonomous marketing solution is orchestration. It goes beyond automated bid management to consider your marketing funnel, customer journey, or life cycle. Systems that orchestrate marketing efforts with a full view of the customer journey encompass a host of benefits driven by AI and automation, particularly in the following areas:

Segmenting and targeting customers

• Predicting behaviors across various channels with a unified view of the customer journey

• Fine-tuning and perfecting cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

• Identifying the right channel to drive engagement based on reach and frequency modeling Improving attribution accuracy

• Fraud detection and protection

Content Curation

We're drowning in digital content, but what do our customers like? What do they pay attention to? Artificial intelligence can help marketers sift through vast amounts of content to help them find out what their customers spend their time consuming or engaging with. This can lead to ideas about what media outlets might be fruitful places to advertise. These insights can also fuel your content development, content marketing, and advertising efforts from a creative perspective.

Customer Support and Service

Today, chatbots are the first line of contact for routine customer support requests. Chatbots can handle 85% of all customer interactions with no human involvement. The increased adoption of chat-based interfaces for customer service, marketing, shopping, and more serves both business and consumer interests.

When businesses integrate chat-based customer service and support channels with their CRM systems and data management platforms, they can offer valuable retention-based offers to customers on the verge of lapsing or poised for an upgrade or new purchase based on their behavioral patterns.

Segmentation Development and Management

The amount of data coursing through the global internet at any given moment is nearly unfathomable. Big Four companies alone—Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook—store 1.2 petabytes of data. That's 1.2 million terabytes (a terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes). Trillions upon trillions of customer data points exist within this primordial data soup, ready to be accessed and pumped into the modern digital customer experience: online ads that are customized based on users’ needs and desires.

Companies can use artificial intelligence to create customer segmentation models that combine thousands of attributes, such as household income, zip code, behaviors, and more. These models will be able to access a live stream of customer interactions, transaction data, product usage data, support and service data, and beyond.

Insight Generation

Artificial intelligence can use a mountain of behavioral data on a hyper-granular level to predict what a consumer will do next.Advertising systems use AI to understand the interests, context, and hedonistic activities around users and products by looking at audience behavior. This can lead to new insights that inform your strategy, creative approaches, offers, and more.