AI in Digital Marketing

Being smart in business means knowing what’s just around the corner. It means thinking ahead and preparing for inevitable changes that will impact the way business is conducted. This is what allows a business to be resilient and to thrive in a changing environment. Digital marketing is no different. In fact, in his book The Personal MBA, author Josh Kaufman discusses the value of counterfactual simulation. This means imagining future possibilities and then preparing for them.

Let’s say that you have a big business that is doing well in a specific niche. Maybe you have a company that sells a whey protein shake. The mistake that some big businesses make is to assume that they’re too big to fail and to coast along as they are.

But what would happen if another company came along and released a better protein shake for a fraction of the price? What if a new source of protein were to be discovered? What if a study revealed that whey protein was bad for us? Any of these things could happen, and could completely shake up even the most established business.

The smart company though, will already have considered these eventualities and prepared for them. THIS is counterfactual simulation: it’s thinking about what’s just around the corner and then preparing for those possibilities.

As digital marketers, that means thinking about things that could impact on the face of marketing. And one of the things that could have the biggest impact of all? Artificial intelligence.