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Buzzwords: The Newsletter | CorrTek Marketing Mixer #48

CorrTek marketing mixer newsletter number 48 for January 17, 2021

Coming up in this week’s newsletter:

  • AI, marketing, and content
  • AI reading recommendations
  • Hot links

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Over the last couple weeks I’ve felt extremely… discombobulated. With everything happening in politics, plus a major windstorm that destroyed a lot of property in its path (including my poor fence) I’m having a hard time focusing. You could say that about most of the last 12 months, but the last couple weeks have been extraordinarily difficult to process all the information being thrown at me. 

It is pretty obvious there isn’t a path back to the “before times” like what we all thought back in April. This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about as I’ve been attempting to do some planning and goal setting for the next 12 – 36 months. As an avid strategist, regardless of what is happening in the world, I can’t fathom not having at least the slightest hint of a plan. Unfortunately, thinking about the future is nearly impossible right now.

One of the topics and tactics I’ve been trying to wrap my head around is Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning and how these technologies will impact marketing. It is obvious in the next 5 years putting AI or NLP on your resume will be a necessity. Yet, following the news and trends of marketing as closely as I do, it is definitely not on people’s radar. 

Go deeper: AI vs. Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning

Impacting more than you think

The biggest question for me is why should small businesses, especially one’s without their own marketing department, care about AL, NLP, and ML. For many it is hard to fathom how these technologies will impact industries built around manual, physical labor that don’t have Facebook businesses pages or even a website. 

Looking at what’s happening in this space, I think this tech will be a game changer for small businesses who don’t have the budget for marketing, IT, data management, or other departments. All of these technologies are best at doing repetitive tasks, looking for trends, and simplifying complex data. Which is something we all need.

More details: What is natural language processing? The business benefits of NLP explained

Tools, not magic

Without a doubt, there are plenty of misconceptions about AI. Long have sci-fi troupes formed our opinion of what artificial intelligence will be. But, none of these are going to be hidden robots which are easily confused with humans and there needs to be a special test to determine who’s real, no matter how much we love Blade Runner. 

All of these are tools and are used as such. This should make more complex tasks simpler, or enable us to spend more time on what matters. For example, if an AI bot can handle filling out schedules and updating maintenance calendars, you can spend more time training your crews to upsell on jobsites. 

Some other things I thought of as it pertains to marketing:

  • Using OCR to read handwritten job invoices and notes, then adding to your customer records.
  • Collecting questions people ask in public social media posts about their landscape and collating into a report for customers in your area.
  • Sending emails to customers about weather reports.

Wrapping it up

I am just scratching the surface and have read enough to pique my interest. What I know for sure is AI, NLP, and ML will have far reaching impacts. Much greater than we are currently prepared for. I know in this newsletter I haven’t answered any questions, but that is because I still have so many and am getting started on this journey. 

To be honest, I know very little about how it is impacting marketing. My plan is to spend significant time in 2021 fully immersing myself in it. Along the way, I’ll be sharing lots of information, insights, and details about these technologies right here in this newsletter. 

What I know for sure is that we can either choose to embrace change, or watch the world leave us behind. I don’t know about you, but I have zero plans to ever be content with the old ways and be known as the person who tries to stop progress in exchange for comfort. 

So let’s get on the change train. 

Here are some recommendations I’m using to get started: 

Hot links

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