Marketing Men & Machines: Balancing Technology And Human Capital

Photo: Jim Yu

With the rise of big data, machine learning is offering marketers new opportunities. Columnist Jim Yu, founder and CEO of BrightEdge, the leading enterprise SEO Platform explains how the technology can help you create a personalized experience for Web users.

Photo: Marketing Land 

There has been an incredible explosion of content on the Web. By 2020, the digital universe will grow by a factor of 300, from 130 exabytes to 40,000 exabytes, according to IDC (International Data Corporation). The wealth of information on the Web will be incredible, as will the potential for effective marketing.

There is one chief problem that will only be exacerbated by this incredible growth: The human brain can only hold roughly a million gigabytes of memory.

The sheer size of the impending online world will be too much for the human brain to process. Marketers will find themselves with the information necessary to reach their customers but will be unable to comb through the data to find what they need.

For systems to be efficient, they must be able to scale to the enormous impending size of the digital universe. To understand the problem, think about the early internet classification systems.

Classifying The Internet 
Yahoo initially became successful by tagging sites into specific categories and using this information to help users sort through websites. As the internet began to grow, however, this system quickly showed its inefficiencies. It simply was not possible to maintain this manual approach.

By contrast, Google arose to prominence because of its creativity in understanding websites. Through the development of its algorithm, it created a system for gaining insight into the intentions and value of websites.

It looked at factors such as how many people linked from different websites and the types of vocabulary on the site to “understand” the page.

As the Web continues to grow, machine learning offers marketers and site owners similar opportunities to use technology to read articles, grasp their intent and match them to users. The prospect of machine learning is no longer a question of if — it is more of a question of when, but that can feel intimidating to some marketers.

It is important to understand the role of machine learning within marketing. This will not be a cure-all that leaves marketing and advertising in the hands of a computer and its algorithm. Instead, it will be a powerful tool in the creation of a personalized experience for the Web user.
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Source: Marketing Land