Imagine a restaurant that serves the exact food that you were planning to eat, with precise taste and quantity to soothe your appetite and mood. And this happens every time you visit the restaurant. Would you ever stop going to this restaurant? No, I do not think so. A business owner who cracks the code of customer behavior, pattern and preferences, will rule the industry. It sounds much like a fairy tale, but this is not something from a distant future, just that this tactic will be leveraged by many, not by a stand-alone player. With the advent of Industry 4.0, a number of technologies that were believed to be way too futuristic ten years ago, have paved their way in our day to-day life. Machine learning, artificial intelligence, internet of things and so on, the era of automation has started and there is no looking back.

While the above-mentioned technologies are disrupting each and every industry and opening gates to newer opportunities, there is a big question of how Machine Learning will disrupt the Marketing industry? A number of assumptions float through the market and not every single of them is in the motion of the advancement of technology. Nevertheless, as per my experience and hand-on to various automation tools across my life, here is what the future of marketing looks through my glass:

1. Budget Conservation: Every marketer out there knows how important is budget segregation and optimization in terms of ads. Even after hours and dedicated inputs, there always is a big chunk of money that goes into vain due to the irrelevancy of ads to a few or more people. With machine learning, this can be and will be optimized automatically, where the preference of people will be learned over time to showcase ads that are relevant to them and redundancy will be completely removed.
2. Smart Chatbot Integration: This is one factor that you can see happening in real-time in the sites you visit and use on a daily basis. The little pinging chatbots on the lower right edge of the websites are learning and growing smarter day by day basis the responses you share and are set to remove human virtual assistants in a few years down the line. Further, these chatbots can process your responses in creating various marketing campaigns to assist the companies in running exclusive automated campaigns on an individual level.
3. Customer Experience: The cornerstone of civilization in this era, Customer experience is the game changer for industry players. Enhancing customer experience means an escalation of interest of the users, leading to better sales and bigger revenues. Machine learning is going to create ripples in creating exclusive customer experiences, varying from person to person depending upon their preferences and tastes. Imagine personalized product recommendations, 24×7 automated customer support and enhanced recommendation mechanism, all without engaging manpower, this is what Machine learning has in the box for customer experience.
4. Innovation: Marketing is all about innovation and creativity, and if a player is able to achieve this in a positive manner, there is no hurdle left to slow down the success rate. And exactly this is what Machine learning is going to introduce in a few years down the line. With the integration of this technology across the industries, basis the preferences and requirements of the customers, newer fields, services and products will come into existence. This is the most interesting part of the Industry Revolution 4.0, for inventing completely new services, products and realms to serve the customers, all through the power of Machine learning.

There is much more than what is yet to meet our eyes and disrupt the world that we live in. All we need is to unfold the chapters and incorporate the changes as they improve and enhance the capabilities of each and every industry. Be it marketing, manufacturing or any other field, Industry 4.0 and its constituents will improve the way we live and function, giving an edge to the industry players in adding more and more to the services they offer, the customer experience they serve and the approach they take to leverage the opportunities.

By Jai Sharma, founder of Jai Sharma Solutions