#and how enough love and effort can overturn destiny

[baphometsgirlcock]

ive rambled about this to my friends but i do genuinely find it so funny that dunmesh just randomly is like "by the way this woman has a penis now" as a throwaway detail. her brother has a one-panel crisis in the general vicinity of her newfound anatomy (which is played off more as a joke about him not being ready to have nieces / nephews tbh), and then it never comes up again. falin just Obtains A Dick and there are 0 narrative consequences. there is one panel of fridge humor and then nada. the most casual possible phalloplasty.

Which is fun enough on its own but also. it's a dragon cock. like. she didn't just get a dick, she got like The Dick Of Legend. truly a pioneer in fantasy furry transhumanism.

[chudleycanonficfest]

Rewrite the Stars

Day 7, Post #1 is by @adenei

Title: Rewrite the Stars

Author: adenei

Pairing: Ron/Hermione (Romione)

Prompt: Songfic

Rating: PG 

TW: Depiction of blood purity/discussion of prejudices against Muggleborns, Violence/Murder mentioned (but not graphic)

************

*This fic is inspired not only by the song, but also Anne and Philip's relationship in the movie The Greatest Showman.*

Summary: AU In a world where there’s no Voldemort, but blood purity is strictly enforced, Ron and Hermione must navigate their budding relationship, and all the trials and tribulations that come with it.

********************

“Are you sure this is alright?” Hermione asks as she smooths the front of her dress, checking for wrinkles for the fifth time in as many minutes.

  “Yes, it’s fine! You look beautiful,” Ron assures her.

  He places a warm, comforting hand on the small of her back as they enter the grandiose ballroom where the Auror department is hosting their annual dinner. A handful of Aurors are honored for their achievements, but over the years, it’s turned into an event for the upper classes and Purebloods.

  Hermione knows she doesn’t belong here, amongst the men and women whose wealth and social status put them leagues ahead of anyone else, and it’s rare to receive an invitation to such an event even as a Halfblood. But as a Muggleborn, Hermione braces herself for an onslaught of jeers and slurs. If Ron wasn’t being honored for his success on a case he’d worked six months to solve, she wouldn’t be here at all.

  Ron has always encouraged Hermione to follow her dreams, even during their Hogwarts days. Though they were sorted into different houses, the two shared many Prefect rounds together. Being named Head Boy and Girl also brought them closer together, where they began seeing each other in secret . Neither had intended to break things off upon graduation, but when Hermione received rejection after rejection for potential jobs within the Ministry, she pushed him away too. 

  There was a time years ago when she hoped to be working within the Magical Law Department with dreams of making the magical world a more accepting place for every witch and wizard, no matter their blood status. But those bright-eyed and bushy-tailed dreams have long since dissipated. The rules are archaic, and there’s no chance of overturning something so set in stone until there’s a new Minister of Magic who would be open to the possibility. 

  So, for now, Hermione tends to a job that gives her equal satisfaction. She teaches young Muggleborn students in a special school that she founded with the help of Professor McGonagall. Hermione earned her certification to teach the primary levels at University after graduating from Hogwarts, and now works with Professor McGonagall to teach those students between the ages of five and eleven how to prepare for the world they’ll enter when they’re old enough to go to Hogwarts. This is in addition to all of the regular courses that Muggle England expects them to study.

  The prep school is what reconnected the pair, when Ron was assigned to work the case of an eight-year-old that disappeared last year. It was determined that the child was abducted by Fenrir Greyback and turned into a werewolf. Ron found the boy’s body deep in the Forest of Dean, where it was determined that Fenrir became too bloodthirsty on that particular hunt. 

  Hermione was distraught over the outcome and took comfort in Ron, who was equally shaken by the case. As the weeks following the case progressed, Hermione found herself spending more and more time with Ron. Slowly but surely, they found their way back to each other and had only just rekindled their relationship a couple of months ago.

  Since their relationship still feels so new to Hermione, they’ve kept things quiet. But she knows how important tonight is for Ron, and she wants to be there for him. To support him the same way he supports her. Hermione knows he will be by her side through it all, and has assured  her that no one will make any comments. 

  Ron leads them around the room, exchanging pleasantries and mingling with people Hermione’s only heard stories about. Thus far, everyone she’s encountered has been polite. They are about to make their way to their table when a voice calls out to them.

  “Ron! There you are, dear! We’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

  Hermione turns to see a plump woman with hair the same shade of red as Ron’s. A man follows in her wake who peers at them through half-moon spectacles with the same cerulean eyes that she’s so familiar with, only they’re attached to a different face. They’re much colder than the warmth Ron’s eyes emit, and that’s when the dread begins to expand from the pit in her stomach.

  “Oh, I didn’t realize you were both attending tonight,” Ron attempts to hide the surprise as he greets his parents.

  “And miss the opportunity to see our son receive an award for his hard work? Don’t be silly,” his father responds with a wave of his hand.

  Hermione has yet to meet Ron’s parents. A chill crawls up her spine as they talk to their son as if he is standing by himself. Suddenly, all of Ron’s promises become emptier than the desk of her former student.

  “Er, right. Mum, Dad, I’d like you to meet someone.” Ron gestures toward Hermione.

  She can see his mouth moving, but no sound comes out, at least not that she hears. The blood drains from her ears, causing momentary deafness as she stands under the scrutinizing stares of his parents. Hermione holds her head high as his mother admonishes his choice of a date. There’s no empathy for them whatsoever.

  “...What will everyone think? You come from a certain class of people, and we need to uphold our status. At least go for a Halfblood, darling.”

  Years of following the mantra ‘hold your head high, don’t let it bother you, stay in your lane’ have still not prepared Hermione to endure this moment. She is a strong-willed woman, she fights for what is right, and she refuses to stand here and take this woman’s judgmental words all because of the family she was born into. 

  This is the exact reason why Hermione insisted on keeping their relationship private. Her feet move on their own accord as Hermione tears herself away from Ron’s side and weaves in and out of the clumps of people. She manages to find the visitor’s entrance and exits to the bustling streets of London. Refusing to cry, she rushes along the cobblestone sidewalk and down a deserted alleyway. 

  Hermione forces herself to forget the sound of Ron’s voice calling after her as she disapparates away from the Ministry of Magic. She finds herself in her classroom, staring at all the empty desks in front of her. Desks of students who would be forced to meet the same unfair limitations that she lives day to day. She feels so helpless, not knowing what to do in an effort to make their lives easier. 

  Looking down at the elegant maroon ball gown she’s still wearing, she feels dirty. This isn’t the life she’s meant for, no matter how many assurances Ron can give her. She doesn’t belong in his world. Thank goodness she keeps an extra outfit in her coat closet, which she rushes toward before shedding the expensive formalwear from her body. 

  Once she’s changed, Hermione sits down at her desk, staring at the piles of papers left to be graded. Ron insisted she leave them there so they could spend their weekend together. A heartbreaking realization enters her mind as she thinks of his name.

  We can’t be together. This is never going to work.

  It’s as if he knows that she’s thinking of him as the floo lights up and he stumbles out. Ron sheds his dress robes, leaving him in his starched white dress shirt and pressed black trousers. She refuses to look up even though she can feel his gaze boring into her as he stands at the head of her desk.

  “Hermione.”

  She says nothing because what is there to say?

  “They’re small-minded people. What do you care what they think?”*

  He reaches for her hand, but she tugs it away as she sits back in her chair.

  “It’s not just them, Ron. You haven’t lived this life. You don’t know what I’ve been up against. You’ll never know what it feels like to be looked at the way your parents looked at me tonight. The way they spoke down about me to my face. I can’t—I can’t be subjected to that. The way people will look at us because we’re together. I don’t deserve to feel that way.”

  Hermione stands up and exits the classroom, stepping into the abandoned hallway. She can’t do this anymore— it’s too painful. She’s learned to pick and choose her battles. It’s better to let people like the Weasleys think they’ve won while she keeps fighting on her own.

  You know I want you, it’s not a secret I try to hide.

I know you want me, so don’t keep saying our hands are tied.

You claim it’s not in the cards, that fate is pulling you miles away and out of reach from me,

But you’re here in my heart, so who can stop me if I decide that you’re my destiny?

  “Hermione, don’t do this. Please. I don’t care what they think. I want you, and nothing else matters.”

  She stops and only turns her head slightly to see him leaning out of the doorway, his hand gripping the door jamb as he calls after her.

  What if we rewrite the stars, say you were made to be mine

Nothing could keep us apart, you’d be the one I was meant to find.

It’s up to you, it’s up to me, no one can say what we get to be

So why don’t we rewrite the stars, maybe the world could be ours tonight.

  “Please, love, don’t let them dictate what our life looks like.”

  The desperation in Ron’s voice is what makes Hermione turn all the way around to face him. She begins to walk a few paces toward him before the voices in her head get a hold of her. He’d become an outcast if she stayed with him. She can’t let him risk everything he’s gained by choosing her.

  You think it’s easy? You think I don’t want to run to you?

But there are mountains, and there are doors that we can’t walk through.

I know you’re wondering why because we’re able to be just you and me within these walls

But when we go outside you’re gonna wake up and see that it was hopeless after all.

  “You know it’s not that easy. We can’t just run away from everything so we can be happy. Your family would never forgive you, or me for that matter! Everyone will do everything in their power to tear us apart. It’s not worth it.”

  “So, what? You’re saying we’re not worth it?”

  No one can rewrite the stars. How can you say you’ll be mine?

Everything keeps us apart, and I’m not the one you were meant to find.

It’s not up to you, it’s not up to me, when everyone tells us what we can be.

How can we rewrite the stars? Say that the world can be ours tonight.

  Hermione reaches out and clasps his hands with her own. “No, you’re not listening to me. You’re worth so much to me that I have to let you go.”

  “But what if I don’t want to let go?”

  All I want is to fly with you. 

All I want is to fall with you. 

So just give me all of you.

It feels impossible (It’s not impossible). 

Is it impossible? (Say that it’s possible.)

  “I don’t want to let go, either, Ron, but I have to. You mean too much to me.” 

  She knows it’s better to be hurt on her own terms than to let someone else hurt her instead. Ron will see reason eventually. He has to. Hermione wraps her arms around him, tighter than ever before, putting all her feelings into one single embrace, hoping that he can understand. 

  How do we rewrite the stars? Say you were made to be mine?

Nothing can keep us apart, cause you are the one I was meant to find.

It’s up to you and it’s up to me, no one can say what we get to be

And why don’t we rewrite the stars, changing the world to be ours… 

  There are many things she can change, but her blood status isn’t one. Above all else, she’s proud of being a Muggleborn, and she’ll keep teaching her students to be proud of their roots as well. She’ll keep her memories of Ron and how wonderful he is locked up tight as she finds a way to navigate this world without him. Hermione has made her decision as she kisses his cheek and lets go. Perhaps in another lifetime, they’ll be able to be together with nothing standing in their way.

  You know I want you.

It’s not a secret I try to hide.

But I can’t have you.

We’re bound to break and our hands are tied.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Her voice leaves the faintest echo among the abandoned halls. Before she loses her nerve, she turns on the spot and apparates away, leaving the hurt look that is etched on Ron’s face burned into her mind as she leaves him alone.

[love-killed-the-superstar]

i finally finished cass week!! its been lots of late nights but so much fun. thank you everyone whos been reading these. tonight i have some real good cassunzel/unknighted dream content for yall, so enjoy if that’s your thing

CASSANDRA APPRECIATION WEEK DAY 7 - FINALE

How is one supposed to feel, showing up at their girlfriend's wedding to somebody else?

Cassandra has been through the whole spectrum of emotions in the run up to it all. There's been joy, of course, and in abundance – these are her best friends, taking that next important step in their lives. While she... takes her own next step. Alone.

She has poured over detailed illustrations Rapunzel sent her in letters of the various wedding patterns she's considered. It's amazing how much input Cass has had in the whole thing, considering it isn't even her wedding, especially when also factoring in the distance between them. She's helped pick out the flavour of punch while hunched over a campfire on a cold night; she's backed up Rapunzel's desire to forego shoes, even in the royal cathedral, in her underthings while her clothes hung up to dry after she got caught in a flash flood.

Half the time it doesn't feel like her place, and she withholds her opinion. Or she'll write back something along the lines of 'you should ask your future husband, not me'. But then Rapunzel counters that with 'well, you're like my future wife, so your opinion is equally important'. And... well, that just leads to other emotions that are even harder for her to deal with.

The flip side of the coin is the disappointment she feels, knowing that Rapunzel can only marry one person and Eugene is the clear winner, in both the royal family's favour and the court of public opinion. After all, who would come to a wedding where the princess marries the very person that nearly destroyed the kingdom? Cassandra can't fault Rapunzel for making the choice to marry Eugene; he was in Rapunzel's life first, he's begrudgingly grown on the people of Corona despite his shady past, and during the mess that she caused he stepped up and took responsibility. He loves her. He'll do anything for her.

She's happy for them, really. But the whole situation still feeds back into this complex she's worked so hard to overcome these last couple years. Marriage just a... a ceremony, a piece of paper, a legal contract. A wedding is a big, over-dramatic party that she would never in a million years want to take part in anyway. And hasn't she always told herself, since she was an angry little kid rolling her eyes at the Day of Hearts' puppet show, that romance, matrimony, all that bullshit, is something she's never wanted for herself?

It's petty, plain and simple, to have such a sting of jealousy at the idea of Rapunzel and Eugene marrying. They deserve their happy ending! More than anybody! Cass will just... have to figure out a way to be okay with that. Chasing destiny on the open road is her happy ending anyway, and that's no life for a... what would she even be? Princess consort? Duchess?

...Fine. She doesn't need a title or status to be happy. So much of her identity has been clinging to words other people might use to describe her and it can only end if she wishes it so.

All the same – it would be nice, just for a day, if she could be Rapunzel's bride.

…

Cass doesn't mean to show up late to the ceremony, although she's sure that Lance will slide up and make some comment at the reception anyway. Maybe she just didn't want to get up that morning. Maybe it's because she stayed up late last night, camping out at the lagoon, thinking about the vows they took all those years ago. After all, wasn't that modelled after a private wedding, between the two rulers who bound their kingdoms together? A marriage that is recognised in Corona's history books? By extension, aren't her and Rapunzel already married, in their own way?

That should be enough.

By the time Fidella and Owl rouse her, their casual annoyance morphing into urgency as the sun rises higher in the sky, she already knows she won't make it on time. She won't even have time to change, after Rapunzel spent weeks pestering her for her clothing measurements to have an appropriate outfit tailored. Thankfully, Raps knows her well enough not to commission a dress.

Cass rides like she's never ridden before, determined to get there before the vows. What will Rapunzel and Eugene think of her if they look out to the pews and see she isn't there, after all she's done to convince them she's fine with it all? She promised herself, the moment she held the pale lilac wedding invitation in her hands six months prior, that she wouldn't ruin their big day for them. Even if she shows up with windswept hair and yesterday's travelling clothes on, she has to be there, cheering them on.

With her and Fidella's combined determination they make the journey from the lagoon to the castle walls in record time. Standing at the gate, she purses her lips in annoyance as Stan and Pete, in a frustrating display of competence, ask for proof of ID and her invitation.

“Stan, Pete, this is ridiculous. You know me. You've known me since I was a kid.”

“Sorry, Cassandra,” Stan says sagely, as she begrudgingly hands over her Corona citizen identification card. “Rules are rules, and this is a big day for the princess.”

“Besides, we need to be on the lookout for shapeshifters,” Pete adds on, holding her invitation to the light to search for the subtly printed Corona emblem on the paper. “It's a recent thing we've been told to watch out for. A couple years ago there was an incident at the goodwill festival, see.”

“Pete, that was also me,” Cass says flatly.

“Never can be too careful,” he sighs, shaking his head. “Captain's orders and all. We good here, Stan?”

“Yup, everything looks legitimate. Welcome back to Corona, Cassandra!” Stan says, reverting back to his cheerful disposition.

“I am going to kill Eugene for this. Figuratively, of course.”

Stan motions for the gates to open, and as they do, a narrow stream of what looks to be wine rushes past Fidella's hooves. She moves aside slightly, snorting a little in confusion.

“Eww,” mutters Pete, exchanging a confused look with Stan before clearing his throat. “Well, you'd better hurry to the wedding if you don't want to miss the vows!”

“Yeah. Thanks.” Cass wrinkles her nose a little at the trail of wine leading across the bridge, eyes widening as it becomes apparent that there is much more where that came from. As the gates swing shut once again, Cass wonders to herself what the fuck they have just walked into.

The whole kingdom looks to be a mess. There are lanterns flying everywhere, and between them there are doves. Passing through the lower town, it looks like there's been some sort of roof collapse at the old tar works, and the stream of wine gradually becomes a shallow river. Fidella does her best to step around the mess, but it's nearly impossible; even the houses lining the street have been doused. At this rate, the reception will be an extremely sober affair.

Cass picks her way through the winding streets leading up to the palace, passing by a few torn up carts selling imitation merchandise of Rapunzel's wedding attire. She can't help but scoff at the broken shoe cart. As if Raps would wear shoes, even to her own wedding.

The crowd, all dressed in their Sunday bests, look shaken to their cores when she finally reaches the courtyard. The tables that were laid out for the reception are overturned, there is soup everywhere, and no one knows quite what to do with themselves.

She approaches a guard, looking flustered as he tries to set a nearby table upright, and asks, “Uh, what happened here?”

“Some – some horse burst through in a frenzy,” he explains, shaking like a leaf. “It, uh, from a distance it kinda looked like Maximus.”

Cassandra's brow furrows. “Is everything okay?”

“There are no reports of a disturbance in the throne room,” the guard continues. “But as you can see, the decorations have all been tarnished.”

“Yeah, I can see that. Look, I won't keep you, I just need access to the throne room. I have an invitation here, signed by the princess...”

After an excruciating second ID check (she was seriously going to maim Eugene for introducing this ridiculous 'shapeshifter' check) Cass is granted access to the venue, and figuring it's probably best not to draw attention to her tardiness, she slips in through one of the side entrances, with its door propped open to let in some cool air on such a hot day.

Cass hops down from Fidella's back, scratching the side of her head affectionately as Owl swoops down to take her place. He hoots at her curiously.

“Yeah, I don't know what the fuck just went down either,” Cass whispers. “I'm sure we'll find out later. For now, let's just not make a scene?”

Fate has other plans, however. She makes it barely two steps past the doorway before almost being bowled over by a runaway eight-tier wedding cake.

“Woah!” she gasps, stepping out of the way just in time to avoid getting a face full of cake. She reaches around, gripping the sides of the trolley to try and keep it from rolling all the way outside. Fidella steps in to help, blocking the exit with her body, and Cass heaves a sigh of relief as the trolley grinds to a halt, the cake wobbling precariously for several painful seconds before stabilising. Owl hoots in victory and Cass exhales loudly.

“Oh thank god. That could have been a disaster.”

“...Hey, where's the cake?” a voice, unmistakably Eugene's, calls from beyond the edge of the corridor. Cass cringes. So much for quietly watching from the sidelines.

Steeling herself, she slips around the back of the trolley and with some effort, pushes it around the corner and into the throne room. There's an audible ripple of uncertainty through the pews, as the confused guests mutter to one another about why some windswept vagrant is wheeling out a cake that was already in position at the beginning of the ceremony. There's a hoot of laughter (definitely Lance) at Cassandra's dishevelled appearance, a sharp “is that Cassandra?” from three rows away (her dad's voice, for sure), and a few giggles she's guessing are coming from Kiera and Catalina's direction. She can't even bear to look at the king and queen.

Instead, she sees two figures in white. Eugene, looking proud as can be in his very expensive wedding garb that he bragged about to her in several letters... and Rapunzel, face framed by the soft lace veil behind her, looking so beautiful Cass could cry. Her surprise melts into pure glee, and if it weren't for the colossal cake in between, Cass knows Raps would be launching herself at her right then and there, present company be damned.

She passes Max and Pascal and almost chokes. That would explain the sorry state of the tar works' roof, at least. From somewhere behind, she hears Fidella stifle a snort of laughter.

“Well well well,” Eugene says, with a click of the tongue and a lopsided grin. “If it isn't our favourite little gatecrasher.”

It's his teasing, strangely enough, that helps her to find her voice in front of all these people. “Well geez, somebody had to stop this cake from rolling down the hill.”

…

The wedding reception ends up being less of a party and more of a clean-up operation after Max and Pascal's prior mischief, but when the venue has been tidied up and the main courses have been served, Cass slips away right as the king stands up to give a tearful toast. If she times it right she can change into the outfit Rapunzel has had tailored for her and return before the speech is concluded, no problem.

At this point, her room is basically an empty shell with a bed and a wardrobe, so it takes no time to lay out her new outfit ready. Glancing around the empty husk of a room while she starts to undress, Cass wonders when exactly Corona stopped feeling like her home. Maybe about the time she realised it was the people, not the place, that she gravitated back to time and time again?

The new suit doesn't look all too different to Eugene's, minus his father's sash. It's white, with similar detailing, and even some of the same gold accents on the collar. Cass blanches a little the longer she stares at it. God, she's going to look like she's trying to steal his thunder. On his fucking wedding day.

“Why did I let you do this, Raps?” she groans. She can't deny once wearing it, however, that it makes her look really good.

She stares at her reflection in the mirror on her closet door, trying for a smile. This whole situation feels bizarre, and she still can't stop thinking about how stunning Rapunzel looks in her wedding dress.

I wish she was marrying me instead.

The admission, even inside her head, is enough to make her growl in frustration, slap her forehead.

“Enough,” she grits out. “You are going to go out there and be supportive and happy for them because this is their day and you love them so much. Enough throwing yourself a pity party, Cass.”

With nothing else to say to herself, she ties back her hair, shaggier from her foregoing a haircut in quite some time, neatly plaiting it and securing it with a short piece of string from her satchel. Pulling a pair of white gloves on to tie the whole outfit together, she glares at her reflection for a few seconds to compose herself before heading back towards the venue.

“Looking dapper, Cass,” Lance mutters in greeting as she slides up beside him, trying to pretend that she hadn't slipped out in the middle of the king's big speech. He glances over at Eugene, sat beside Rapunzel at the front table reserved for the royals, and then back to her again. “Tell me, which one of you is the groom again?”

“Don't you dare draw anyone's attention to this, Lance. Raps has no idea how petty this makes me look to onlookers.”

He bursts out laughing, which quickly dissolves into a fake cough to deter the few people who turn to stare at him disapprovingly. “Haha, hmm. Uh, you know that was definitely intentional on her part, right? She wants you to feel included.”

“Included? I just feel like I'm third-wheeling a wedding.”

“Isn't that exactly what's happening?”

She groans quietly, before bursting into polite applause as the king embraces Rapunzel tightly and then raises his glass, before taking his seat. Edmund rises, and she can already see Eugene looking nervous at the weird shit he's about to start spouting to the unsuspecting audience.

“I came back here to support them, not to upstage Eugene at the after party.” She chews her lip. “Maybe I should change. D'you think I should change?”

“Look, Cass, Eugene knew about the matching suits ahead of time. If he had a problem with it he would have said something, believe me.” Lance grins and shakes his head. “I was just messing with you before about the third wheel stuff. You're their equal, don't you get that? This might as well be your day too.”

Cass pinches the bridge of her nose. “Don't say this stuff to me, Lance, or I'll seriously start feeling depressed. I need a drink. Is there any booze left, or is it all out on the street?”

“Unless they're planning on breaking out the communion wine, I think we're out of luck.”

“Damn it. Maybe I should just hide in the bathroom for the next six hours.”

As the toasts conclude, Rapunzel and Eugene are called to the dance floor for the first wedding dance. The orchestra rise as Arianna removes the train from Rapunzel's hair, and she and Eugene make their way to the centre of the venue with their hands clasped. Rapunzel's eyes search in the crowd as she walks, finally locking in on Cass as the conductor motions for the band to play.

“I love you,” Rapunzel mouths, and Cass weakly nods before losing Rapunzel's attention to the sweep of the music and the arms of her new husband.

…

“Cass!”

Rapunzel finds her on the steps, having put some distance between her and the rest of the party about an hour ago. After a couple hours of shit-talking bad dancers with Lance from the sidelines, catching up briefly with her father, and downing about a third of the punch bowl in an attempt to avoid conversations with people, Cassandra is all partied out.

Rapunzel's hair is mussed from hours of relentless dancing as she patters down the steps and flops down beside her, uncaring if the dust from foot traffic leaves a mark on the fabric.

“Hey, newlywed. You having a good time?”

“Of course! Oh, Cass, aren't the orchestra just wonderful? They play the classics, for my parents, but the upbeat stuff was a great surprise! When I'm queen, we'll dance like this at every function, mark my words!” The gleam in her eyes only brightens as she adds, “Besides... I keep stopping mid-step and thinking, I'm married now. I get to spend the rest of my life with Eugene. Isn't that just – just wonderful?”

“It is.” Cass offers her the warmest smile she can muster. “I'm so happy for you, Raps, really. You and Fitzherbert are going to have a great life.”

“All three of us are.” Rapunzel scoots closer and rests her head against Cassandra's shoulder. If only time could stop right now, Cass wishes silently, she wouldn't ask for anything ever again. “Cass, you are both my future. It's been so hard to find time to be with you today, and it's driving me crazy! You deserved to be up there with us today, you know?”

“But Corona law doesn't allow it,” Cass says softly, as if saying the words delicately will shelter her heart from fully feeling the weight of them. Rapunzel swallows and nods.

“Mhm. Yeah, it... it doesn't.”

She reaches for Cassandra's hands and squeezes them in her own. Cass can feel Rapunzel's wedding band dig slightly into her index finger, and tears spring to her eyes.

“Well,” she forces herself to say, “it's okay. If you had to marry either one of us, it should be Eugene. He's the more stable presence in your life, after all. He can help you keep this place afloat, while I – while I'm off travelling.”

“Let's not talk about this,” Rapunzel whispers, a pleading tone creeping in. “This... this should be a happy day for us, Cass! The start of something new!”

“You're right. Raps, this is a happy day. And – and I mean it, Rapunzel, I am so happy for you both. My best friends get to be happy together forever. Why wouldn't I be?”

She stands up quickly and holds her hand out, pulling Rapunzel to her feet. Rapunzel stares at her for a heartbeat, face clouded with some emotion too tumultuous to unpack in this moment, before reaching over and wiping a tear away as it spills over from Cass's eyes.

“I know you are.” Her face softens into a smile. “Hey, dance with me? Please?”

“I don't know, Raps...”

“Just one dance?” she asks, biting her lip. “I'm about ready to turn in, but... it wouldn't feel right if I didn't share at least one dance with the woman I love the most.”

“That's sweet of you. How will the man you love the most feel if I take the last dance?” Cass asks, quirking an eyebrow as Rapunzel begins tugging her up the steps by her wrist. “And your father, for that matter?”

“Oh, Eugene won't mind, silly,” Rapunzel laughs airily, marching them both towards the centre of the dance floor as other party-goers begin to stare. “And my father isn't dancing with you, I am.”

There are some whispers as they begin to dance slowly, stepping in time to a waltz; it's more of an open secret than anything, the way Rapunzel and Cassandra are with each other, but it still feels pretty brazen all the same. Cass is a bit rusty on her feet, having gone years since she last danced ballroom-style, but as she stares lovingly at Rapunzel's face, counting the smattering of freckles on her nose and seeing her own flustered face in Rapunzel's eyes, she realises it doesn't really matter. The steps are bullshit; everything is, except the hand clasped in hers and the other curled around the back of her neck.

Out of the corner of her eye Cass spies Lance, grin a mile wide, offering his hand out to Eugene. They start their own dance, a little clumsier, a little more comical than their own. Rapunzel giggles as they waltz past, Lance almost knocking into them as they spin.

“See? Eugene and Lance can make their own fun.”

Cass smiles back, exhaling slowly. There are still a few people watching with rapt interest: Queen Arianna, looking misty-eyed; Cassandra's father, fidgeting a little, his anxieties no doubt feeding off of the nervousness in Cass's own body language; a little girl she doesn't even know, clad in a waistcoat and pants, looking like she's seeing someone who mirrors herself for the first time. But as interest in their dance begins to wane, so do her fears.

“Dancing still isn't really my thing,” she confesses, as they begin to slow down. “It feels... awkward.”

“Oh.” Rapunzel pouts. “But, you know, gotta try everything once?”

“Of course. I can stand it if I'm with you.” She leans in to press a kiss to Rapunzel's forehead, but thinks better of it, leaning back again. “I, uh... yeah, it might be time for me to turn in, Raps.”

Rapunzel's smile fades a little in disappointment, but she nods. “Yeah. It's about time for us to leave too, so...”

“You're leaving tonight?”

“Yeah. No time like the present, right?” Rapunzel winds her arm around Cassandra's, clinging on as she calls over the din of the music. “Eugene! Are you ready?”

“Sunshine, I'll be right with you,” he calls back, in the midst of being dipped by Lance. Once he's back on his feet and says his goodbyes in a bone-crushing hug, he joins the two of them as they make their way to the edge of the dance floor.

“Is... is it okay for us to just leave like this?” Cass asks suspiciously. “You two don't need to make some kind of big announcement, or anything?”

“...Nah,” Eugene says after a long pause, exchanging a look with Rapunzel. “We can let the king and queen deal with that, right? Besides, the ship won't wait forever.”

Before Cass can protest further, Eugene slides up to the other side of her and links his arm in hers, and the two effectively march her down the steps and towards the docks.

“This is lovely and all, but I can't help the feeling that you two are kidnapping me,” she points out, as the three of them march on in silence.

“What! No! We – we just think you should see the boat! It's really gorgeous, and there's apparently an ice sculpture on board,” Rapunzel gabbles, starting to wax poetic in her ear as Eugene stands on the other side of her, equally enthusiastic.

“And get this – they didn't screw up my nose this time!! That's a huge deal, you absolutely cannot miss it-”

This weird pimping of the boat continues as they follow the path down to the harbour, greeting a few puzzled guards on the way as they tag along for protection. Cass can't shake the feeling that something extremely weird is going on. Eugene and Rapunzel have been shooting her odd looks all day, and she thought it was because her complicated feelings were obvious to everyone around her, but as they get closer and the ship comes into view, it definitely feels like there's a bigger story than that.

The boat is beautiful – the wood is dyed a deep cherry red, and the sails are the same rich purple as the Coronan flag, complete with the golden sun crest. On board, true to their words, is an ice sculpture, but as she strains her eyes, the sculpture depicting the happy couple looks suspiciously like a happy throuple, instead.

“Raps... Eugene... what exactly is going on here?”

“Oh, you'll see,” Eugene says under his breath, while Rapunzel giggles gleefully and gives no further answer.

Trunks of their belongings are already being loaded onto the ship when they arrive, and Cass notices a familiar satchel and carry on pack nestled beside one of Rapunzel's cases.

“Are – are those my things? Guys, what is going on?”

Finally, the two of them release her arms and she takes a step back, eyes darting all over as she tries to comprehend what the fuck is happening right now.

“Cassandra,” Rapunzel begins, clasping her hands together joyfully, “we're boarding the ship for our honeymoon, and... we were hoping you would like to come with us.”

She stares. “...But why?”

“Why?” Eugene scoffs. “Why indeed, Cass, let me think. You're our best friend, you're in a relationship with my wife – something as intimate as a honeymoon doesn't just happen with two out of three when it comes to us, you understand?”

“But – but this wedding isn't for us, it's for you,” splutters Cass, still wondering if she knocked her head at some point and woke up in a parallel universe, where things like a honeymoon for three were commonplace. He rolls his eyes, hard.

“Cass, look at us. We're wearing the same freaking suit. You do the math.”

“And we had our own wedding dance,” Rapunzel chimes in. “Even if you didn't really like it.”

“All right, just... stop, okay? Give me a minute to think.” Cass is starting to feel dizzy. “I – I know you both love me – in different ways,” she adds sharply, as Eugene opens his mouth. “But this is... pretty crazy. Even for us. I mean, people will talk about this, guys.”

Rapunzel and Eugene exchange amused glances. “Cass, everyone who knows us knows, and everyone who doesn't have a pretty good guess about what goes on between us three,” Rapunzel says slowly. “You don't have to worry about that anymore, do you understand?”

“It's different now!” Cassandra protests, shaking her head in pure, unfiltered amazement. “You two are married now and it's – adulterous. Probably. Maybe even treasonous? God, my head hurts.”

“So it's not a cut and dry situation, that's fine!” Eugene throws up his hands in exasperation. “But damn it, Cass, you're acting like this is the end of days. If you stuck around more than a few days at a time, you'd realise that the people of Corona really don't care as much as you think they do.”

Cass opens and closes her mouth a few times, unsure of where to even start with protesting everything they've been saying to her. She loses the train of thought anyway once she lays eyes on Rapunzel, with a desperate look in her eyes as she watches Cass, fidgeting with her hands.

“Cass,” she says quietly, taking a tentative step forward, “we can't force you to come with us, but we would really like you to. So we can right this – this rigid law that stops us all from being happy.”

“...Okay, now you've definitely lost me.”

Rapunzel makes a frustrated noise in her throat, running her fingers back through her hair and resting both hands on the back of her neck, like she so often does when she's trying to think.

“Cassandra – once we are outside of Coronan waters, the laws don't apply anymore.”

“...And?”

Eugene half-laughs, half-coughs, and Rapunzel shoots him a pointed look before continuing more gently, “And, when we're out at sea, certain... marriage laws... don't apply either.”

She bites her lip, hoping this will be enough to get the gears turning in Cassandra's head, but she stares on blankly.

“Oh, for christ's sake!” Eugene slaps his forehead and pulls Cass along to stand beside Rapunzel, staring them both down with folded arms. “Cass, I don't know how many times we have to spell it out for you, but this has always been your wedding day too. If you want it to be, anyway.”

The words finally seem to hit home, and she stares between them with eyes as wide as a deer being stalked.

“What?” she squeaks.

“Cassandra, I have wanted to marry the both of you for as long as this has even been a conversation,” Rapunzel explains, and her voice shakes a little with her next words. “Of course this is crazy, everything we do together is crazy! And, Cass? If you don't want to get on the boat and do this... I'll accept that. But – but I hope, after all that we've been through together, that you want to be my wife as much as I want to be yours.”

Time moves slowly as the weight of these words sink in, and Cass glances between Eugene, who is beginning to look emotional just in the presence of this proposal, and Rapunzel, laying her heart on the line just to show Cass how much she matters.

“You'd really do that? For me?”

“With you,” Rapunzel corrects, mouth splitting into a grin as her eyes gloss over with tears. “Cass, I would sail to the ends of the Earth if it meant I could marry you when we get there.”

“Oh god,” Eugene says in a hushed voice. He turns away, hand over his eyes. “You're both killing me here.”

“Can it, Fitzherbert,” Cass says on instinct, before a laugh bubbles up from her throat. “Raps, I – what do I even say to that?!”

“Say yes already, oh my god!”

“Eugene!” Rapunzel shakes her head, giggling helplessly. “Sorry, proposals get to him.”

Cass gives a watery laugh. “I'll bet. What's he going to do when we actually get married, huh?”

Rapunzel blinks a few times, then gasps in delight. “So it's a yes?!”

All Cass can do is nod before Rapunzel throws herself at her, hugging her tight enough to choke. Even with all the oxygen being squeezed from her lungs, Cass feels like she can breathe for the first time all day.

There's the sound of a throat being cleared behind them, and they turn to see a guard looking a little awkward to interrupt.

“Excuse me. Um... the smaller bags, should we load them on the ship, or...?”

“Yes, you should,” Cass says, barely able to contain her cheer. “Wherever these two go, I'm going with them.”

The guard shrugs, quickly turning back to the remaining luggage, and Cass cups Rapunzel's jaw, pressing a quick kiss to her lips before hiding her face in the top of Rapunzel's hair.

“Aww, don't be shy! I loved that!” Rapunzel giggles, pulling her in closer. “I loved that so much. Wherever we go, you're coming too. Yep... that's going in my journal for sure.”

“No,” groans Cass, still giggling despite herself. “Please, no record of anything sappy I say ever again.”

“Too late. See, you should know by now, Cass. Everything mushy we ever say will be immortalised in our wife's notebooks for the rest of our lives,” Eugene sighs, slinging an arm around her. Cass nods, keeping close as they steer her towards the boarding plank.

Our wife. It feels too fucking good to be real.

“This isn't a dream, right?” she asks suddenly, as they're halfway up the plank. “This is really happening?”

“Of course it's real, art can't imitate life!” scoffs Eugene, looking a little offended. “This face can't simply be replicated in dreams, Cassandra.”

“No one is saying anything about your face, Eugene,” Rapunzel sighs, shaking her head fondly.

“You know what, Fitzherbert? You've got a point. If this were a dream your nose would be a totally different shape, for a start.”

“I don't get it! How hard can it be to draw somebody's nose in accurate proportion to their face?!”

As they take their first steps onto the boat and the plank is removed, they turn to see a few familiar faces have gathered. The parents have come to wave their children off, in a quiet moment of finality before the next chapter begins. Arianna waves to them, her aura simply overflowing with joy, Frederic watches on with a stiffer wave, clearly still coming to grips with what's about to happen once the boat leaves Corona. Edmund, stood off to the side, is loudly asking Hamuel why their good friend is tagging along for the journey.

A little further back, Cassandra's father watches on. Upon first glance, she freezes; Rapunzel's arm is still holding her in close, and she nods towards him, trying for a smile. He nods back, slowly at first, before raising his arms to wave.

He is called over by Arianna and sheepishly joins her, his eyes never fully leaving Cass as he does so. Overwhelmed, she glances down at Rapunzel, who is leaning with her head against her shoulder, still beaming and waving at her parents.

“My father knew about this, then?” she asks quietly. Rapunzel shrugs, a shy smile on her face.

“I know we don't need it, but I wanted his blessing. I wanted him to know that you're loved, and you're gonna live a long life and be okay.”

The regal trill of trumpets fill the air, as the small cluster of guards on the dock stand to attention. A few words are read from a prepared scroll, carried away by the ocean breeze before Cass can hear, and then suddenly they're moving. The faces of their parents are growing smaller, the stretch of ocean growing larger, and Cass exhales shakily before turning to Rapunzel and Eugene.

“I think I'm going to puke,” she confesses.

“What?!” squeaks Rapunzel, alarmed.

“Well, now would be a terrible time to tell us you get seasick,” Eugene jokes, clapping her on the back. “Seriously though. You okay?”

“I'm fine. I just... realised how much of what was said happened in front of all those strangers. And then our parents. God, I'm gonna jump.”

“Yeah, no jumping,” Eugene says firmly, tugging her away from the boat's edge by her shoulders. “How long until we're out of Coronan waters.”

“Less than an hour.” The tremors are back in Rapunzel's voice again.

“And there are... aha! Three hours until the clock strikes midnight. You're in luck, ladies. If we play our cards right, this day will go down in history as both our anniversaries. How's that sound, huh?”

“Sounds like everything I've dreamed of,” Rapunzel sighs, melting against Cass. “Doesn't it feel good just to be here and not having to hide it?”

“I mean, we're embarking with a very small crew for a private ceremony outside of Coronan waters,” Cass points out. “Feels pretty hidden to me.”

Rapunzel pouts. “Ah, you're right.”

“You know... I think it's better this way. I wouldn't want it to be some public affair anyway,” Cass says quickly. “But yeah, this still feels like I'm in some sort of fever dream.”

“Want me to pinch you to be sure?”

“If you pinch me I will kill you. And hey, what was all this about a shapeshifter check at the gates, huh, Fitzherbert? I missed your wedding vows just so you could mess with me?!”

“Oh, that. I thought it would be funny!”

The ship sails off, disappearing into the evening sky, and even as she's bickering with Eugene and being held back by an exasperated Rapunzel, Cass can't help believing that this might be the start of her own happily ever after, after all.

[thatwitchrevan]

resolution (pt 1)

In honor of New Year’s and of all the joy Kingdom Heart’s has brought to me in 2019, I’m working on a SoRiKai fluff fic of them spending New Year’s together! It’s meant to have three parts, one from each kid’s POV, but in case I don’t get to finishing and posting the whole thing quite on time I thought I’d go ahead and share this first part! It’s pretty much just fluff and silliness but I feel like that’s perfect for our Destiny Trio being back together on New Years. I’m hoping to post the full fic on ao3 tomorrow or maybe the 2nd at latest, but no promises because I’m terrible at deadlines.

-

Sora was giddy as he sat down in Riku’s living room with him and Kairi, gathered around the low coffee table with crossed legs on the floor. Kairi opened up the box of the board game she had brought, and Sora helped her set it up as Riku got up and wandered to the kitchen. By the time they’d finished unfolding the board, arranging the pieces, and sorting the cards, Riku had come back with three steaming mugs of hot chocolate, carrying two in one hand and one in the other. He handed one to Sora and one to Kairi before sitting back down with his own. 

Sora smiled and wrapped his hands around the warm mug, relishing the sweet smell of the chocolate. He took a too-large sip too soon, almost burning the edge of his tongue, but it was worth the risk to satisfy his impatience. Riku and Kairi chuckled and shook their heads at him, Kairi setting her own mug down to let it cool first and Riku blowing gently on his. 

“Alright,” Kairi began, grinning brightly as she began shuffling the main deck of cards. “You guys will love this game.” She said it very casually, but there was an underlying certainty to it, and since she had a pretty good idea what her boys liked, she was probably right. She started dealing the cards, one pile for each of them and one for herself. 

“Don’t look at them now - we’ll draw them when we need them.” 

Sora watched as she distributed all the cards, straightening his pile without overturning any once she was done. Kairi sat back and explained the rules of the game, and Sora’s mind drifted a little bit even though he was trying to pay attention - it was just a lot of information at once. He learned better by playing, anyway, so he wasn’t worried. 

He ended up being terrible at it, though. The competition was really between Riku and Kairi, and it was fierce. Riku was engaging in some light-hearted trash talk every time he got an advantage, and Kairi was less overtly aggressive, but she kept grinning smugly at him sideways whenever she got ahead. Sora lagged behind both of them the whole game with little hope of catching up, but he didn’t really care much because it was just so much fun watching them race to the finish, getting increasingly excited with each turn. 

In the end, Riku reached the final square first, but the card he drew set him back two, giving Kairi the opportunity to swoop in and claim the victory. Her eyes gleamed as she slammed her piece on the winning square and jumped up, throwing the remainder on her cards on the board. “YES!” she cried, pumping her fists in the air and giggling. 

Riku laughed, too, playfully shoving her. “Don’t be a sore winner.”

Kairi spun around in an impromptu victory dance. “You’re just grumpy because you lost!”

“Oh yeah?” Riku pushed her again, this time just enough that she fell over into a pile of pillows that they’d thrown in front of the couch. She landed on the soft bed of cushions, still giggling, but her laughter turned into a squeal when Riku scooted closer and started tickling her sides. 

Kairi kicked softly at Riku’s arm and chest, but she’d have to fight a lot harder if she wanted to discourage him. “Stopppppp!” she whined through her laughter. “So-Sora, help!”

Sora grinned and walked on his knees around the table, coming to Kairi’s side. “Good call, Kairi. Tickling you is a two man job!”

Kairi shrieked in pretend protest as the boys ganged up on her, shaking with laughter until the tickling became too tiring to be fun anymore. “Okay, stop for real now,” she breathed through a laugh, and Sora and Riku both stilled and sat back from her immediately, still smirking as she got the last of her giggles out and wiped her eyes. “You guys are the worst,” she complained, punching them both gently in the arm.  

Sora laughed and kissed her on the cheek. “You love us.”

Kairi shook her head, but she was still smiling too much to fool anybody. She turned around to the couch and where her phone was resting and checked the time. “It’s almost midnight.” She grinned at Riku and then at Sora, her eyes twinkling. 

Riku smirked, glancing between her and Sora. “So who gets to kiss who first?”

Sora blushed, but Kairi had an answer immediately. “I want to kiss you both at the same time!”

Riku frowned thoughtfully and took a sip of his cocoa. “How’s that going to work?”

“We could both kiss her on the cheek?” Sora suggested. 

Kairi shook her head. “Nah, we’ll just mash our faces together. It’ll be super romantic.”

Riku snorted lightly, but neither he nor Sora offered any objections. The boys set their cocoa down as Kairi set up an audible countdown on her phone and they all three scooted closer to each other, knees brushing as they formed a rough circle and leaned in close. 

“Ten, nine, eight,” the phone counted. The kids looked around at each other, all giggling.

“Seven, six, five, four.” Kairi grabbed Sora and Riku each by the hand. The boys glanced at each other and joined their hands as well. 

“Three, two, one.” 

All three leaned in at once, smushing their cheeks together as their lips met in the center. Sora bumped his forehead against Kairi’s, making them both giggle even more, but the three of them mostly succeeded in kissing each other on the corners of their mouths. 

Despite their best efforts, though, it only lasted for a second before they all dissolved into laughter and backed away. Kairi flopped back against the couch, shaking with laughs so hard she had to hold her side. “Well, that sort of worked.”

Riku chuckled dryly and leaned back, folding up a knee to rest his arm on top of it. “It’s not the most effective way. Or the most dignified.” 

Sora rocked back and forth a little, feeling too flustered and silly to sit still. At the same time, he felt too tired to do anything with all that energy. He let out a big yawn, stretching his arms over his head. 

Riku and Kairi had shifted closer to each other, holding hands with their backs against the couch, and from what Sora had caught of that conversation it sounded like they were deciding on another board game to play, but when Sora yawned they both looked at him and smiled with light exasperation. 

“Well,” Kairi sighed. “I guess we’d better get to bed before somebody gets cranky on us.”

Sora made a face that didn’t really help his defense, but he got up to go to bed anyway. Riku and Kairi both stood up with him automatically, but Sora waved his hand. “You guys play whatever game you were talking about, and you can join me later.”

Kairi frowned, looking between Riku and Sora like she was conflicted. Then she figured something out, bouncing on her heels. “How about this? We’ll come tuck you in and say goodnight, and then we’ll play our game.”

Riku rolled his eyes. “How old is Sora, five? Are we his parents?”

But Sora grinned and grabbed them each by the hand. “Yeah, Kairi’s right! You have to kiss me goodnight or I won’t be able to sleep.”

Riku gave a big sigh for show as Kairi and Sora drug him by hand to his room. Sora was, of course, already in his pajamas, so he just climbed into the bed and scooted down to the end, leaving room for Kairi in the middle and Riku on the other side. 

Kairi pulled the covers up to Sora’s chin and kissed his forehead. “Sleep tight, you big baby. I love you.”

Sora squeezed her hand and murmured ‘love you, too,’ before she pulled away to make room for Riku. 

Riku kissed him almost exactly where Kairi had. “Love you, Sora. Happy New Year.” 

Sora tried to reply, but it was drowned out by a yawn. Kairi and Riku laughed at him, and they turned off the light as they left the room, letting the door remain cracked open. 

Sora fell asleep to the sound of them setting up their next board game, laughing and joking as they played. About an hour later he was woken by them both climbing into bed beside him, snuggling up close and falling asleep.

[jarmes]

JJBA Twisted Destiny Chapter 8 - Coldplay, Part 4

Masterpost - Previous Chapter - Next Chapter

Nero dashes into the X-Ray room, charging for the golden elephant Stand. His Stand, Viva La Vida, flies forward to strike the elephant. A pillar of ice forms in front of him. Viva crashes headfirst into the pillar.

Frost appears on Nero’s legs, climbing up his body and encasing him in ice. Viva La Vida turns around and strikes its user, melting the ice and sending Nero flying out of the X-Ray room.

Nero crawls to his feet and sighs. “I have a feeling that this will take a while,” he says.

+++

Johana and Mylo run down the icy hallway, trying to get as far away from Mr. Burnham as possible. “Your attempts to flee are pointless, Mr. Xyloto,” Mr. Burnham says as his Stand aims its harpoon and fires.

Johana shoves Mylo to the side, moving him out of the path of the harpoon. Ice forms on her legs, sticking her to the floor. The harpoon flies by and strikes a vending machine at the end of the hall. The Stand pulls its harpoon back, dragging the vending machine down the hall.

Johana grabs Mylo by the shoulder and flings him over the vending machine. “Run!” she shouts as the vending machine crashes into her.

Mr. Burnham walks over to Johana. She’s injured, barely conscious, and crushed beneath an overturned vending machine. Mr. Burnham leans down and spits in Johana’s face. The spit freezes as it hits Johana’s cheek, giving her a rather unpleasant burning sensation. “That’s what you get for getting in my way, bitch,” Mr. Burnham says.

Mr. Burnham reaches into his pocket and pulls out his wallet. He taps a few buttons on the vending machine, ordering a bottle of soda. He opens up his wallet, sighs, and returns it to his pocket. “Pardon me, but would you happen to have some change I could borrow?” he asks. “All of this attempted murder has left me a bit parched and I’m a tad bit short.”

“Go to hell,” Johana says.

Mr. Burnham shakes his head. “Kids these days,” he mutters. “So rude.”

The Stand fires its harpoon into the vending machine and rips out a can of soda. Mr. Burnham takes a sip before gagging and throwing it over his head. “Stupid hospital,” he mutters, “Soda’s so cold it’s almost frozen.”

A snowball flies over the vending machine and hits Mr. Burnham in the head. Mr. Burnham growls and climbs over the vending machine. Instead of Mylo being long gone like he expects, the young man stands at the end of the hallway, shivering as he raises his fists in a timid fighting stance. “I figured you’d’ve fucked off by now,” Burnham says.

“You’re after me, right? Johana isn’t part of this,” Mylo says. “I don’t want to abandon her.”

“How noble.”

“Look, I’m not a very respectable person. I don’t have a job, or a girlfriend, or any friends, or a dog, or loving parents-”

“Is this little tangent going to go on for much longer?”

“Johana’s risking her life to save mine. It doesn’t seem right for someone that good to die for a miserable sack of shit like me.”

Mr. Burnham laughs. “I like you,” he says. “Shame I have to break your fucking neck.”

The Stand lifts its arm and prepares to fire its harpoon. Ice forms on its arm, locking it in place. Hundreds of icicles form on the ceiling and rain down on Mr. Burnham.

Before the icicles can impale Mr. Burnham, his Stand fires its harpoon at a wall. Mr. Burnham is pulled into a neighboring exam room, narrowly dodging the icicles.

Mylo turns to face the wall and prepares himself for Mr. Burnham’s eventual counterattack. “He’s going to fire that harpoon, then burst out and strike me with his Stand,” Mylo mutters to himself.

Little does he know that, at that very moment, Mr. Burnham is using his Stand to pull himself up to the third floor. Once on the third floor, Mr. Burnham positions himself above Mylo. He fires the harpoon through the floor, striking Mylo in the shoulder.

Mylo is pulled into the ceiling, breaking his nose as well as the ceiling tiles. The Stand releases Mylo and he falls back onto the floor, landing on the concrete floor. Mylo opens his eyes in time to roll out of the way of the harpoon, fired again in an attempt to strike a vital area. The harpoon stabs the floor beside Mylo.

Mr. Burnham and his Stand fly through the ceiling, pulled towards Mylo. As they fall, the Stand pulls its fists back to smash Mylo. Mylo raises his hands over his head in a feeble attempt to defend himself.

In an instant, a dozen sharpened spears of ice form on the floor around Mylo. Mr. Bunham, unable to react in time, is impaled on the frozen spikes. “Didn’t see that coming,” he mutters, blood dripping from his mouth.

Mylo runs over to the vending machine. He grabs the bottom of the machine and starts to lift. Well, tries to lift. The heavy vending machine doesn’t budge, no matter how hard he exerts himself.

Suddenly, the vending raises slightly. Not because of Mylo’s efforts, of course, but rather as a result of Johana using Hamon to increase her strength enough to budge the vending machine. “Johana!” Mylo shouts.

Johana lies in a plank position, with the weight of the vending bearing down on her back. “This is about all I can muster,” Johana wheezes. “Go get Nero, he’s in the basement. He’ll be able to fix this.”

Mylo shakes his head. “This thing is crushing you,” he says. “By the time we get back, you’ll be dead.”

“What do you suggest we do then?”

“This,” Mylo says as he slides his head under the vending machine.

“What are you doing?” Johana asks.

“My Stand creates ice to protect me, right? That means it won’t let this vending machine crush my skull.”

“That’s insane.”

“Drop the vending machine. We’ll see how insane it is.”

Johana shakes her head. “I’m not going to do that,” she says.

Mylo smiles and punches Johana in the arm. Johana slips, crashing down onto her chest. Before the vending machine can land on Mylo’s head, a jack made out of ice forms beneath the vending machine and holds it up.

Mylo lets loose a sigh of relief. “Can’t believe that really worked,” he says.

Johana crawls out from beneath the vending machine. “That was really brave of you,” she says. “Not the type of thing a miserable sack of shit would do.”

Mylo laughs. “Maybe I was a little hard on myself,” he says.

+++

Nero walks as far from the X-Ray room as he can so he can get a good running start. He barrels down the basement hallway, charging for Mylo’s Stand. He leaps through the door, summoning Viva La Vida midair.

As he moves through the air, Nero freezes, becoming as stiff as a statue. Still, the momentum from his running start keeps him moving. He closes in on the Stand, Viva La Vida’s fist stretched out in front of him.

The Stand smacks Nero with its trunk, knocking him off course and sending him crashing into the X-Ray machine.

+++

Johana glances over at Mr. Burnham. He’s still impaled on the ice spikes. “Hey! Are you still alive?” Johana yells.

“Just you wait,” Mr. Burnham grunts through chattering teeth. “In a moment, you’ll be dead, and I’ll have what I want.”

“I told you, I don’t have the arrow,” Mylo says.

Mr. Burnham laughs. “The arrow? You think I’m after the arrow?” he says. “I already have a powerful Stand, why on earth would I need the arrow?”

“If you don’t want the arrow, why are you after Mylo?” Johana asks.

“I’m here for the fucking bracelet, dumbass!” Mr. Burnham shouts.

Johana glances at Mylo’s arms. A paper hospital bracelet is wrapped around his wrist. “Do you mean the hospital bracelet?” Johana asks.

“The hospital bracelet? Surely you jest. I’m referring to the ruby bracelet Woodstock gave Mr. Xyloto,” Mr. Burnham says.

Johana gives Mylo a confused look. Mylo shrugs his shoulders. “I don’t know anyone named Woodstock, and I don’t know anything about a ruby bracelet,” he says.

Johana turns back to Mr. Burnham. Before she can ask him about Woodstock, she notices that the Stand’s harpoon has been fired into the floor. Johana jumps back. “Mylo, he’s got something on the end of the hook!” she shouts.

Mylo runs to Johana’s side. “He was keeping us talking so he could pull something from a lower floor up here,” she says.

“The harpoon normally returns almost instantly,” Mylo says. “How deep did he shoot the harpoon to make it take this long to come back? The basement?”

Mr. Burnham laughs. “I sent my hook far deeper than the basement,” he says.

The harpoon rushes back to Mr. Burnham, bringing with it gallons of molten magma, ripped from deep underground. The magma splashes over the walls of the hospital, narrowly missing Mylo and Johana. “Run!” Johana shouts.

Mylo and Johana run from the burning hallway. The harpoon flies between their heads. Mr. Burnham, freed from his prison when the ice spears melted, flies down the hallway. He reaches Mylo and smacks him with his Stand, slamming the young man into a wall.

Mr. Burnham grabs Mylo by the throat. “Your stupid ice won’t form now that I’ve heated this hallway with lava!” he shouts.

“It’s magma,” Mylo mutters.

“What?”

“It came from belowground, that makes it magma.”

“Yes, but I drug it up using my Stand. That makes it lava.”

Johana grabs an IV pole and slams it into Mr. Burnham’s skull. “Catch me if you can, asshole,” Johana says before sprinting down the hallway.

Mr. Burnham drops Mylo and chases Johana down the hallway. He fires his Stand’s harpoon at the end of the hall and flies towards Johana. She ducks just in time to avoid being struck by him.

Mr. Burnham lands at the end of the hallway. He turns around and fires his harpoon at Johana, striking her in the shoulder. He drags her to him and knees her in the stomach. “How foolish, to think you could escape from me so easily,” Mr. Burnham says.

“I wasn’t trying to escape, I was trying to lead you away,” Johana mumbles.

Mr. Burnham slams his Stand fist down on Johana. That didn’t work out, did it, bitch?”

Far away from Johana and Mr. Burnham, Mylo leans against a wall. “You’re part of me, right?” he whispers to himself. “Stands are a reflection of someone's soul. That means you should be able to hear me. I need you to do something for me.”

Down in the basement, Mylo’s Stand hears his plea. “I know you only protect me, but I need you to make an exception,” Mylo whispers. “Johana’s my friend. She’s been protecting me better that you have. Please, use your powers to save her.”

At the end of the hall, ice forms on Mr. Burnham’s legs. “You misunderstood me,” Johana says. “I wasn’t leading you away from Mylo, I was leading you away from the magma.”

Johana kicks Mr. Burnham in the elbow. Mr. Bunham’s arm and his Stand’s arm are knocked back, pointing at a frozen window. The ice grows, freezing Mr. Burnham’s arm and locking it in place.

“It’s over,” Johana says. “If you fire your harpoon, you’ll be pulled out that window. I don’t know if you’ll survive, but you definitely won’t be able to hurt us.”

+++

Nero crashes fist first into the X-Ray machine. The machine starts to spark and sends out a blast of X-Ray radiation directly at Mylo’s Stand. The Stand shrieks and strikes the X-Ray machine with its trunk. When it finally destroys the machine, Nero is gone.

“You fell for my plan, Stand of Mylo,” Nero says from behind the elephant. “X-Ray machines are capable of releasing far more radiation than is needed. When I touched the machine, I used Viva La Vida’s deterioration ability to destroy the machine’s limiter. I planned for you to knock me into the machine! The heat from the radiation melted my ice and distracted you long enough for me to get in close!”

Nero unleashes a flurry of blows into the back of Mylo’s Stand. “VIVAVIVAVIVAVIVAVIVAVIVA!” Nero shouts.

The golden elephant fades away. All throughout the hospital, the icicles and frozen floors melt. The ice covering the nurse and old man in the first floor hallway melts away. And, the ice imprisoning Mr. Burnham melts away.

+++

The moment the ice around his arm melts, Mr. Burnham swings it at Johana and fires his harpoon. Johana jumps out of the way just in time. She punches Mr. Burnham in the stomach. “Hit me all you want, I’ve done what I wanted,” Mr. Burnham says.

The harpoon flies back to Mr. Burnham, bringing with it a piece of bloody flesh. Johana turns around to a grisly sight. Mylo stands in the center of the hallway, a bloody hole over his heart.

Johana runs to Mylo. “It’s okay, it’s going to be okay,” she whispers through tears.

“Don’t waste your tears...for a miserable sack of shit like me,” Mylo mutters.

Mylo Xyloto - Age 26 - Deceased

Johana wipes her tears. She turns back to Mr. Burnham. “I really hate watching people die,” she whispers.

Johana screams loud enough that the entire hospital hears her. Her heart beats a thousand times a minute as burning rage flows through her veins. She clenches her fists so hard blood drips from her palms.

Her rage pours out of her, taking a physical form. The form of a metal woman, with gunmetal black skin and a mohawk of red spikes. Johana Joestar has awoken her Stand.

TO BE CONTINUED IN:

Chapter 9: Johana Awakens

[kennethmontiveros]

Artificial Intelligence Will Change How You Do Marketing in 2021

How often do you reflect on the ways technology changes your life as a marketer? 

I’m not talking full-on paradigm shifts here. (“We do our marketing… on the internet.”) I mean the sly, step-by-way manner in which new tech slides neatly into your existing stack and subtly reframes the game on you. 

These changes don’t always alter your job in dramatic ways, but they eliminate the hassles and headaches. They may speed up your time to results, automate painful routines, and enable you to focus on what matters most. (Remember what collaborating on a document looked like ten years ago? Remember printed memos?)

Very rarely, these technologies also let you do things you’d never considered possible. 

No incoming martech makes a better case for this sort of incremental innovation than artificial intelligence. While new AI products are surely on the horizon—self-driving cars are coming any day now, possibly, maybe—AI’s most dramatic effect on your job today lies in adding new features across the tools that you’re already using. 

When you’re living it, of course, this type of change can be hard to notice. It’s like suddenly realizing you desperately need a haircut after three months in lockdown. 

But, one day soon, you’ll marvel at all the things AI sneakily helped pull off your plate. Because when marketing meets AI, magic happens. It can feel inevitable—but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to pay attention.

At Unbounce, we not only believe that applied AI is the future of marketing, we also think marketers tuned in to what’s happening now stand to benefit in a big way in 2020 and beyond.

To put it another way, marketing and AI is a love story for the ages.

Marketing and AI: A “Meet Cute”

For marketers interested in learning what AI can do for them, right now, debates and philosophy about artificial intelligence can be heady stuff. And, honestly, it’s kind of a distraction. So, instead of getting into the weeds, let’s start with the distinction that makes the most sense for marketers to learn: the one between AGI and ANI.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

Strong AI or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is what most people think of when someone says AI.

This technology replicates neural networks (not necessarily human ones) to perform highly sophisticated cognitive tasks. AI researchers typically take this one step further, though. According to them, AGI “controls itself autonomously, with its own thoughts, worries, feelings, strengths, weaknesses, and predispositions.” 

Teams across the world are working on AGI, but the closest to a consensus from researchers is that we might see it sometime within our lifetime. And some skeptics doubt we’ll ever see AGI, let alone more advanced forms.

Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI)

So handing over your marketing campaigns—or, gulp, your job—to an AI is decades or centuries away. But weak AI or Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), sometimes also called “applied” or “pragmatic” AI, is available to marketers today. Right now.

As the name suggests, ANI focuses on narrow problem-solving applications. In the world of marketing, this means taking on specific, repetitive tasks to deliver additional business value. It may learn and make decisions independent of your input, but mostly this AI tackles the work you’d rather not.

But here’s the thing: ANI might not challenge our fundamental conceptions in the same way AGI does, but it’s having a transformative impact on our lives (and jobs) nonetheless. It integrates so deeply into our everyday lives that we don’t have to think about it. Chances are good you’re already using ANI, whether you know it or not.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at a few places you might be encountering ANI today, either as a consumer or as part of your job. I admit that here that this list is not even close to comprehensive, but that’s my point: AI is slowly but surely filling all the cracks in our marketing stacks. (And, hey, that rhymes, so it must be true.)

Product Recommendation and Content Curation

Companies like Amazon and Netflix made fortunes by pointing people at more things they might want to buy. Much of these efforts are powered by sophisticated algorithms that let them match the right products and content with the right customer.

Amazon, for example, runs on a recommendation engine that’s been driving significant business value for more than 20 years. From the early days of user-based collaborative filtering (i.e., an algorithm making recommendations based on similarities between users) to more scalable solutions driven by a deep learning framework called DSSTNE.

DSSTNE is pronounced “destiny,” by the way—as in “buy this jewel-encrusted toilet brush… because it’s your destiny.” They’re not subtle. 

Today, customer recommendations are a very small portion of Amazon’s total investment in AI.

Netflix doesn’t sell products, but they similarly credit the combination of contextually-aware recommendations and personalization (both powered by machine learning models) with saving them $1 billion a year. 

How does this work? By reducing one-month churn by several percentage points. In the crucial 60 to 90 seconds that a customer will spend browsing before quitting the app in frustration, Netflix serves up content most likely to appeal to people with similar tastes. And it works: 80% of what people watch comes from a recommendation.

By presenting customers with content they’re more likely to watch first, Netflix reduces churn. Even thumbnails are selected by a neural network based on predicted clickthrough. 

Say you’re not Amazon or Netflix, though. Say you’re part of a small team or a startup tight on resources. What can you do? 

The good news is that today’s marketers can similarly take advantage of AI-powered recommendation engines on a more affordable scale.

Not only is some of this tech available to your developers, but more than one tool exists right now that lets you deliver product and content recommendations based on audiences, their intents, and their interests. Their availability will only increase in the months and years to come.

AI-Enhanced PPC Campaigns

Like Amazon and Netflix, Google will stick AI almost anywhere, even before its fully baked—from Gmail’s Smart Compose, which lets you email platitudes at lightning speed, to the AI-based noise-canceling feature recently added to Google Meet. Then there’s BERT and RankBrain’s role in search, and TensorFlow’s application to encryption, translation, robotics, and more… (The ellipsis is well-earned here.)

For digital marketers, one of the most significant use cases for machine learning has been in Google Ads. In a couple of years, Google’s Smart Bidding technology has gone from a curiosity that, at best, once ruffled a few feathers to something that has PPC experts rethinking how they’re spending their time.

According to Workshop Digital’s Andrew Miller, this sort of tech has overturned a lot of longstanding PPC best practices.

AI and machine learning are enabling PPC analysts to spend less time manually crunching data and more time on strategy development. Our jobs are not in danger yet, but machines are allowing us to rethink and recast our roles as AI-driven tools augment our capacities.

Andrew Miller, Co-Founder, Workshop Digital

Smart Bidding was once a neat trick that couldn’t hold a candle to an experienced human. Experts like Andrew tried it out, and many wrote it off. (Some still do.) But many PPC’ers point out that automated bidding is increasingly reducing the time spent on manual bid management. 

Are agencies running for their lives because of AI-powered enhancements like Smart Bidding? Definitely not. But roles are changing as today’s PPC specialists spend more time on higher-level strategy and specialized growth tasks. For an industry that thrives on staying current, AI is a net positive.

Machine Learning and Conversion Rate Optimization

Roles are changing on the other end of the funnel too. When it comes to delivering more conversions from your landing pages, A/B testing is still very effective. But running tests also demands time, traffic, and expertise that marketers don’t always have. For small businesses especially, these minimum requirements put optimizing out of reach.

Enter artificial intelligence.

Around 2017, our R&D team realized machine learning has the potential to remove these hurdles from A/B testing—and free marketers to focus more on what humans do best. AI can even do things when testing that no human can do, making decisions on the fly about what version of a landing page is best for what type of visitor. 

We kept thinking, ‘it isn’t the page that converts. It’s the visitor.’ So we started looking at how different visitors convert across different landing pages. The team built and tested machine learning models to see how far we could extend this concept. Sure enough, it turned out that we could drive higher conversion rates beyond what would ever be possible with a one-page-fits all system. We started prototyping immediately.

Yosem Reichert-Sweet, CTO, Unbounce

After three years of training a machine learning model, and investigating different ways to apply it, we arrived at Smart Traffic, a feature that fulfills this promise and makes AI-powered optimization available to Unbounce customers.

Smart Traffic uses a contextual bandit algorithm to learn about your visitors based on attributes like location, device, browser, and timezone. Once you’ve created and published a few variants of your landing page—the only thing it can’t do at this point, frankly—Smart Traffic delivers each visitor to the one most likely to convert. 

There are two things that Smart Traffic shares with the best martech AI solutions today. First, our customers see results just by turning it on. (Nothing cuts through hype like actually getting stuff done.) And, second, it never stops learning, getting better at its task during the life of a campaign, and adapting to changes in traffic sources without human intervention. 

Editor’s note. If you’d like to learn more about how Smart Traffic works, take a look at our announcement or read a few stories about marketers who’ve used it. Garrett’s also got you covered with some advice on how to build landing page variants that’ll take advantage of it.

AI-Augmented Chatbots 

Chatbots are among the most common ways that your customers interact with AI. But even today’s strongest AI-powered chatbots are better at pulling relevant bits of data from specific contexts than they are detecting nuance. They’re humanlike, not human.

For business owners, however, this shouldn’t be a dealbreaker. Chatbots can be a lot more personable than asking your visitors to fill out a form, and interacting with them can foster engagement. They also let your customers self-serve, which saves everyone time.

I’ve always appreciated how Microsoft’s Purna Virji put it in an article for MarTech Today:

In one way, this is actually the future returning to the past. For years, internet users have sacrificed the personal touch for convenience. Now, we’re entering a world where we can have both. It’s the Personal Touch 2.0.

Purna Virji, Senior Manager, Global Engagement, Microsoft

Though fully custom chatbots are reserved for enterprise, small teams embrace the tech using solutions like Drift, MobileMonkey, Snatchbot, or even in Facebook Messenger. Juniper Research estimates that by 2023, retail chatbots will save the industry $11.5 billion in costs, and generate over $112 billion in revenue. 

Mitsuku, a five-time winner of the Loebner Prize, tells me she’s “the world’s most humanlike conversational AI.” But she doesn’t get my simple idiomatic question—unless, y’ know, she’s wicked sarcastic.

So, you’re unlikely to mistake a chatbot for another person long enough for true love to set in. But we shouldn’t define chatbots by the quirks and failures of today since they’re a rapidly developing technology. There’s a lot of promise in chatbots enhanced by natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis. One day soon, you might just meet the chatbot of your dreams. (I’m not judging.)

AI-Generated Content 

When content creators read about AI-generated content, they begin to sweat. Buzzy articles with titles like “Ten Ways AI is Going to Replace Your Content Team and Leave Them Bankrupt and Unloved”… Well, let’s just say they don’t exactly alleviate our imposter syndrome. 

Michelle Halsey is ultimately skeptical, though, about the prospect of being replaced by a machine. She writes,

Talented writers have no need to worry about automation stealing their gigs. At least, not as long as our clients are more interested in engaging their audience than they are sucking up to search engines.

Michelle Halsey, Content Blogger and Copywriter

Note the emphasis on talent here. It’s much more likely that AI will first tackle templated and repetitive work that hardly calls for persuasive writing anyway.  These days, applied AI can also smooth out the rough edges in your podcast, remove some of the pain from meticulously editing videos, and gut-check your sentences for clarity.

Given the danger of AI-generated content flooding the net with misinformation and spun content, it’s also a use case we’re still grappling with. For now, AI appears to offer solutions to the very problems it creates, as developers teach tools like GROVER to generate “neural fake news” to detect it.

GROVER generated this article based on my own words. It’s not good, but it might be a sign of things to come.

AI-Driven Data Insights

Every growth-minded marketer loves data. It’s an addiction. We bring it into every meeting and include it in every strategy session. We spend hours staring at spreadsheets, analytics, and reports, even if there’s way too much data to digest.

But even when you’ve got a hotline straight to your data team, recognizing patterns and pulling opportunities from massive swathes of data is hard. Artificial narrow intelligence helps with that too.

Recently, Unbounce explored the role that copy plays in landing page conversions through deep learning research, including a modified version of Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers).

Our Conversion Benchmark Report crunched the data from 34 thousand landing pages. It delivers insights about how reading ease, word count, and emotional language relate to conversion rates across 16 industries.

Sample benchmarks for home improvement landing pages.

The amount of data here (every word on every landing page) already put this analysis outside of human capability. But using machine learning allowed the team to dig deeper:

With data analysis and machine learning, we can take an unbiased look at what goes into a great landing page, and find opportunities for every landing page to improve. Machine learning allows us to look at significantly more data than a human being ever could, and find real, data-driven patterns that lead to higher conversion rates.

Tommy Levi, Director of Data Products, Unbounce

One question readers ask us about the report is why we included some niches (“pest control”) and not others (“model train enthusiasts”). The answer: the machine learning model generated these subcategories, on its own, from our aggregate data. Instead of imposing our arbitrary human bias, ML started with the data and sorted it from there.

Call me a nerd if you want, but that’s kinda mind-blowing. A lot of what’s happening in the Conversion Benchmark Report wouldn’t have been possible without pairing human intuition with the power of machines.

Want to see what our machine learning analysis revealed about your industry? Explore benchmarks and data-driven insights for 16 industries in Unbounce’s 2020 Conversion Benchmark Report.

AI Ain’t Perfect (and That’s Okay) 

If you’ve ever tripped over a Roomba or struggled to get Siri to do, well, anything sensible, you know artificial intelligence has a long way to go. (If you’re feeling masochistic, try asking Siri how to contact Unbounce. I dare ya.)

But does that mean it’s just hype? Not. A. Chance.

By any measure, we’re still in the early days of the long romance between AI and marketing. We’ve yet to see its full potential. The transformations that marketing is undergoing now aren’t always so easy to recognize or understand. As we’ve seen, applied artificial intelligence already penetrates our jobs, our strategies, and our campaigns on almost every level. 

You could just go with the flow, of course. Keep doin’ what you’re doing. Wait for AI to come to you and your stack. You’d be missing a trick, though.

Because by actively thinking about ways in which AI can enhance your marketing practice today, you’ve got the opportunity to get ahead of this thing. And by actively adopting it, you can start taking advantage of the freedom and new capabilities it delivers—before the competition gets there, as they inevitably will.

Why Unbounce Invested in AI for Your Landing Pages

Unbounce recently announced that we raised $52M (CDN) in funding to bring accessible AI-powered optimization to our customers. We’re investing now because we’re convinced using artificial intelligence to augment your marketing isn’t just aspirational, even for small businesses. It’s the future. This transformation is coming—really, it’s already here—and our customers will be a part of it.

The coming together of AI and marketing is tremendously valuable for businesses of all sizes. Whether it saves you time and money, highlights opportunities and patterns you didn’t know existed, or frees you to run slicker, higher-converting campaigns. As Rick Perreault, our co-founder and CEO, describes our ambition, the technology we’re developing today will eventually allow marketers to “set it and forget it through machine learning.”

It’s all part of our conversion intelligence mission.

What’s Conversion Intelligence?

At its core, it’s the conviction that the best use of AI lies in matching human savvy with the capabilities of a machine. It’s the idea that even small businesses—scratch that, especially small businesses—will stand to benefit from these enhancements. And it’s the belief that AI isn’t some far-flung concept—it’s an everyday tech that’s going to play an even more essential role in how you do marketing going forward.

Conversion intelligence is you, and your marketing know-how, augmented by machines. You can read more about it here.

In 2021 and beyond, AI insights will make it possible for you to create and optimize the highest-converting campaigns possible. Heck, in 2021 and beyond, AI just might rock the foundations of how you build, test, and optimize your landing pages.

Unbounce’s product teams are hard at work on these innovations, and we’re downright giddy with excitement about sharing progress and learnings with you here on the blog. 

Watch this space. The story continues.

Artificial Intelligence Will Change How You Do Marketing in 2021 published first on http://nickpontemktg.blogspot.com/

[annaxkeating]

Artificial Intelligence Will Change How You Do Marketing in 2021

How often do you reflect on the ways technology changes your life as a marketer? 

I’m not talking full-on paradigm shifts here. (“We do our marketing… on the internet.”) I mean the sly, step-by-way manner in which new tech slides neatly into your existing stack and subtly reframes the game on you. 

These changes don’t always alter your job in dramatic ways, but they eliminate the hassles and headaches. They may speed up your time to results, automate painful routines, and enable you to focus on what matters most. (Remember what collaborating on a document looked like ten years ago? Remember printed memos?)

Very rarely, these technologies also let you do things you’d never considered possible. 

No incoming martech makes a better case for this sort of incremental innovation than artificial intelligence. While new AI products are surely on the horizon—self-driving cars are coming any day now, possibly, maybe—AI’s most dramatic effect on your job today lies in adding new features across the tools that you’re already using. 

When you’re living it, of course, this type of change can be hard to notice. It’s like suddenly realizing you desperately need a haircut after three months in lockdown. 

But, one day soon, you’ll marvel at all the things AI sneakily helped pull off your plate. Because when marketing meets AI, magic happens. It can feel inevitable—but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to pay attention.

At Unbounce, we not only believe that applied AI is the future of marketing, we also think marketers tuned in to what’s happening now stand to benefit in a big way in 2020 and beyond.

To put it another way, marketing and AI is a love story for the ages.

Marketing and AI: A “Meet Cute”

For marketers interested in learning what AI can do for them, right now, debates and philosophy about artificial intelligence can be heady stuff. And, honestly, it’s kind of a distraction. So, instead of getting into the weeds, let’s start with the distinction that makes the most sense for marketers to learn: the one between AGI and ANI.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

Strong AI or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is what most people think of when someone says AI.

This technology replicates neural networks (not necessarily human ones) to perform highly sophisticated cognitive tasks. AI researchers typically take this one step further, though. According to them, AGI “controls itself autonomously, with its own thoughts, worries, feelings, strengths, weaknesses, and predispositions.” 

Teams across the world are working on AGI, but the closest to a consensus from researchers is that we might see it sometime within our lifetime. And some skeptics doubt we’ll ever see AGI, let alone more advanced forms.

Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI)

So handing over your marketing campaigns—or, gulp, your job—to an AI is decades or centuries away. But weak AI or Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), sometimes also called “applied” or “pragmatic” AI, is available to marketers today. Right now.

As the name suggests, ANI focuses on narrow problem-solving applications. In the world of marketing, this means taking on specific, repetitive tasks to deliver additional business value. It may learn and make decisions independent of your input, but mostly this AI tackles the work you’d rather not.

But here’s the thing: ANI might not challenge our fundamental conceptions in the same way AGI does, but it’s having a transformative impact on our lives (and jobs) nonetheless. It integrates so deeply into our everyday lives that we don’t have to think about it. Chances are good you’re already using ANI, whether you know it or not.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at a few places you might be encountering ANI today, either as a consumer or as part of your job. I admit that here that this list is not even close to comprehensive, but that’s my point: AI is slowly but surely filling all the cracks in our marketing stacks. (And, hey, that rhymes, so it must be true.)

Product Recommendation and Content Curation

Companies like Amazon and Netflix made fortunes by pointing people at more things they might want to buy. Much of these efforts are powered by sophisticated algorithms that let them match the right products and content with the right customer.

Amazon, for example, runs on a recommendation engine that’s been driving significant business value for more than 20 years. From the early days of user-based collaborative filtering (i.e., an algorithm making recommendations based on similarities between users) to more scalable solutions driven by a deep learning framework called DSSTNE.

DSSTNE is pronounced “destiny,” by the way—as in “buy this jewel-encrusted toilet brush… because it’s your destiny.” They’re not subtle. 

Today, customer recommendations are a very small portion of Amazon’s total investment in AI.

Netflix doesn’t sell products, but they similarly credit the combination of contextually-aware recommendations and personalization (both powered by machine learning models) with saving them $1 billion a year. 

How does this work? By reducing one-month churn by several percentage points. In the crucial 60 to 90 seconds that a customer will spend browsing before quitting the app in frustration, Netflix serves up content most likely to appeal to people with similar tastes. And it works: 80% of what people watch comes from a recommendation.

By presenting customers with content they’re more likely to watch first, Netflix reduces churn. Even thumbnails are selected by a neural network based on predicted clickthrough. 

Say you’re not Amazon or Netflix, though. Say you’re part of a small team or a startup tight on resources. What can you do? 

The good news is that today’s marketers can similarly take advantage of AI-powered recommendation engines on a more affordable scale.

Not only is some of this tech available to your developers, but more than one tool exists right now that lets you deliver product and content recommendations based on audiences, their intents, and their interests. Their availability will only increase in the months and years to come.

AI-Enhanced PPC Campaigns

Like Amazon and Netflix, Google will stick AI almost anywhere, even before its fully baked—from Gmail’s Smart Compose, which lets you email platitudes at lightning speed, to the AI-based noise-canceling feature recently added to Google Meet. Then there’s BERT and RankBrain’s role in search, and TensorFlow’s application to encryption, translation, robotics, and more… (The ellipsis is well-earned here.)

For digital marketers, one of the most significant use cases for machine learning has been in Google Ads. In a couple of years, Google’s Smart Bidding technology has gone from a curiosity that, at best, once ruffled a few feathers to something that has PPC experts rethinking how they’re spending their time.

According to Workshop Digital’s Andrew Miller, this sort of tech has overturned a lot of longstanding PPC best practices.

AI and machine learning are enabling PPC analysts to spend less time manually crunching data and more time on strategy development. Our jobs are not in danger yet, but machines are allowing us to rethink and recast our roles as AI-driven tools augment our capacities.

Andrew Miller, Co-Founder, Workshop Digital

Smart Bidding was once a neat trick that couldn’t hold a candle to an experienced human. Experts like Andrew tried it out, and many wrote it off. (Some still do.) But many PPC’ers point out that automated bidding is increasingly reducing the time spent on manual bid management. 

Are agencies running for their lives because of AI-powered enhancements like Smart Bidding? Definitely not. But roles are changing as today’s PPC specialists spend more time on higher-level strategy and specialized growth tasks. For an industry that thrives on staying current, AI is a net positive.

Machine Learning and Conversion Rate Optimization

Roles are changing on the other end of the funnel too. When it comes to delivering more conversions from your landing pages, A/B testing is still very effective. But running tests also demands time, traffic, and expertise that marketers don’t always have. For small businesses especially, these minimum requirements put optimizing out of reach.

Enter artificial intelligence.

Around 2017, our R&D team realized machine learning has the potential to remove these hurdles from A/B testing—and free marketers to focus more on what humans do best. AI can even do things when testing that no human can do, making decisions on the fly about what version of a landing page is best for what type of visitor. 

We kept thinking, ‘it isn’t the page that converts. It’s the visitor.’ So we started looking at how different visitors convert across different landing pages. The team built and tested machine learning models to see how far we could extend this concept. Sure enough, it turned out that we could drive higher conversion rates beyond what would ever be possible with a one-page-fits all system. We started prototyping immediately.

Yosem Reichert-Sweet, CTO, Unbounce

After three years of training a machine learning model, and investigating different ways to apply it, we arrived at Smart Traffic, a feature that fulfills this promise and makes AI-powered optimization available to Unbounce customers.

Smart Traffic uses a contextual bandit algorithm to learn about your visitors based on attributes like location, device, browser, and timezone. Once you’ve created and published a few variants of your landing page—the only thing it can’t do at this point, frankly—Smart Traffic delivers each visitor to the one most likely to convert. 

There are two things that Smart Traffic shares with the best martech AI solutions today. First, our customers see results just by turning it on. (Nothing cuts through hype like actually getting stuff done.) And, second, it never stops learning, getting better at its task during the life of a campaign, and adapting to changes in traffic sources without human intervention. 

Editor’s note. If you’d like to learn more about how Smart Traffic works, take a look at our announcement or read a few stories about marketers who’ve used it. Garrett’s also got you covered with some advice on how to build landing page variants that’ll take advantage of it.

AI-Augmented Chatbots 

Chatbots are among the most common ways that your customers interact with AI. But even today’s strongest AI-powered chatbots are better at pulling relevant bits of data from specific contexts than they are detecting nuance. They’re humanlike, not human.

For business owners, however, this shouldn’t be a dealbreaker. Chatbots can be a lot more personable than asking your visitors to fill out a form, and interacting with them can foster engagement. They also let your customers self-serve, which saves everyone time.

I’ve always appreciated how Microsoft’s Purna Virji put it in an article for MarTech Today:

In one way, this is actually the future returning to the past. For years, internet users have sacrificed the personal touch for convenience. Now, we’re entering a world where we can have both. It’s the Personal Touch 2.0.

Purna Virji, Senior Manager, Global Engagement, Microsoft

Though fully custom chatbots are reserved for enterprise, small teams embrace the tech using solutions like Drift, MobileMonkey, Snatchbot, or even in Facebook Messenger. Juniper Research estimates that by 2023, retail chatbots will save the industry $11.5 billion in costs, and generate over $112 billion in revenue. 

Mitsuku, a five-time winner of the Loebner Prize, tells me she’s “the world’s most humanlike conversational AI.” But she doesn’t get my simple idiomatic question—unless, y’ know, she’s wicked sarcastic.

So, you’re unlikely to mistake a chatbot for another person long enough for true love to set in. But we shouldn’t define chatbots by the quirks and failures of today since they’re a rapidly developing technology. There’s a lot of promise in chatbots enhanced by natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis. One day soon, you might just meet the chatbot of your dreams. (I’m not judging.)

AI-Generated Content 

When content creators read about AI-generated content, they begin to sweat. Buzzy articles with titles like “Ten Ways AI is Going to Replace Your Content Team and Leave Them Bankrupt and Unloved”… Well, let’s just say they don’t exactly alleviate our imposter syndrome. 

Michelle Halsey is ultimately skeptical, though, about the prospect of being replaced by a machine. She writes,

Talented writers have no need to worry about automation stealing their gigs. At least, not as long as our clients are more interested in engaging their audience than they are sucking up to search engines.

Michelle Halsey, Content Blogger and Copywriter

Note the emphasis on talent here. It’s much more likely that AI will first tackle templated and repetitive work that hardly calls for persuasive writing anyway.  These days, applied AI can also smooth out the rough edges in your podcast, remove some of the pain from meticulously editing videos, and gut-check your sentences for clarity.

Given the danger of AI-generated content flooding the net with misinformation and spun content, it’s also a use case we’re still grappling with. For now, AI appears to offer solutions to the very problems it creates, as developers teach tools like GROVER to generate “neural fake news” to detect it.

GROVER generated this article based on my own words. It’s not good, but it might be a sign of things to come.

AI-Driven Data Insights

Every growth-minded marketer loves data. It’s an addiction. We bring it into every meeting and include it in every strategy session. We spend hours staring at spreadsheets, analytics, and reports, even if there’s way too much data to digest.

But even when you’ve got a hotline straight to your data team, recognizing patterns and pulling opportunities from massive swathes of data is hard. Artificial narrow intelligence helps with that too.

Recently, Unbounce explored the role that copy plays in landing page conversions through deep learning research, including a modified version of Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers).

Our Conversion Benchmark Report crunched the data from 34 thousand landing pages. It delivers insights about how reading ease, word count, and emotional language relate to conversion rates across 16 industries.

Sample benchmarks for home improvement landing pages.

The amount of data here (every word on every landing page) already put this analysis outside of human capability. But using machine learning allowed the team to dig deeper:

With data analysis and machine learning, we can take an unbiased look at what goes into a great landing page, and find opportunities for every landing page to improve. Machine learning allows us to look at significantly more data than a human being ever could, and find real, data-driven patterns that lead to higher conversion rates.

Tommy Levi, Director of Data Products, Unbounce

One question readers ask us about the report is why we included some niches (“pest control”) and not others (“model train enthusiasts”). The answer: the machine learning model generated these subcategories, on its own, from our aggregate data. Instead of imposing our arbitrary human bias, ML started with the data and sorted it from there.

Call me a nerd if you want, but that’s kinda mind-blowing. A lot of what’s happening in the Conversion Benchmark Report wouldn’t have been possible without pairing human intuition with the power of machines.

Want to see what our machine learning analysis revealed about your industry? Explore benchmarks and data-driven insights for 16 industries in Unbounce’s 2020 Conversion Benchmark Report.

AI Ain’t Perfect (and That’s Okay) 

If you’ve ever tripped over a Roomba or struggled to get Siri to do, well, anything sensible, you know artificial intelligence has a long way to go. (If you’re feeling masochistic, try asking Siri how to contact Unbounce. I dare ya.)

But does that mean it’s just hype? Not. A. Chance.

By any measure, we’re still in the early days of the long romance between AI and marketing. We’ve yet to see its full potential. The transformations that marketing is undergoing now aren’t always so easy to recognize or understand. As we’ve seen, applied artificial intelligence already penetrates our jobs, our strategies, and our campaigns on almost every level. 

You could just go with the flow, of course. Keep doin’ what you’re doing. Wait for AI to come to you and your stack. You’d be missing a trick, though.

Because by actively thinking about ways in which AI can enhance your marketing practice today, you’ve got the opportunity to get ahead of this thing. And by actively adopting it, you can start taking advantage of the freedom and new capabilities it delivers—before the competition gets there, as they inevitably will.

Why Unbounce Invested in AI for Your Landing Pages

Unbounce recently announced that we raised $52M (CDN) in funding to bring accessible AI-powered optimization to our customers. We’re investing now because we’re convinced using artificial intelligence to augment your marketing isn’t just aspirational, even for small businesses. It’s the future. This transformation is coming—really, it’s already here—and our customers will be a part of it.

The coming together of AI and marketing is tremendously valuable for businesses of all sizes. Whether it saves you time and money, highlights opportunities and patterns you didn’t know existed, or frees you to run slicker, higher-converting campaigns. As Rick Perreault, our co-founder and CEO, describes our ambition, the technology we’re developing today will eventually allow marketers to “set it and forget it through machine learning.”

It’s all part of our conversion intelligence mission.

What’s Conversion Intelligence?

At its core, it’s the conviction that the best use of AI lies in matching human savvy with the capabilities of a machine. It’s the idea that even small businesses—scratch that, especially small businesses—will stand to benefit from these enhancements. And it’s the belief that AI isn’t some far-flung concept—it’s an everyday tech that’s going to play an even more essential role in how you do marketing going forward.

Conversion intelligence is you, and your marketing know-how, augmented by machines. You can read more about it here.

In 2021 and beyond, AI insights will make it possible for you to create and optimize the highest-converting campaigns possible. Heck, in 2021 and beyond, AI just might rock the foundations of how you build, test, and optimize your landing pages.

Unbounce’s product teams are hard at work on these innovations, and we’re downright giddy with excitement about sharing progress and learnings with you here on the blog. 

Watch this space. The story continues.

from Digital https://unbounce.com/marketing-ai/artificial-intelligence-will-change-how-you-do-marketing-in-2021/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[jjonassevilla]

Artificial Intelligence Will Change How You Do Marketing in 2021

How often do you reflect on the ways technology changes your life as a marketer? 

I’m not talking full-on paradigm shifts here. (“We do our marketing… on the internet.”) I mean the sly, step-by-way manner in which new tech slides neatly into your existing stack and subtly reframes the game on you. 

These changes don’t always alter your job in dramatic ways, but they eliminate the hassles and headaches. They may speed up your time to results, automate painful routines, and enable you to focus on what matters most. (Remember what collaborating on a document looked like ten years ago? Remember printed memos?)

Very rarely, these technologies also let you do things you’d never considered possible. 

No incoming martech makes a better case for this sort of incremental innovation than artificial intelligence. While new AI products are surely on the horizon—self-driving cars are coming any day now, possibly, maybe—AI’s most dramatic effects on your job today lies in adding new features across the tools that you’re already using. 

When you’re living it, of course, this type of change can be hard to notice. It’s like suddenly realizing you desperately need a haircut after three months in lockdown. 

But, one day soon, you’ll marvel at all the things AI sneakily helped pull off your plate. Because when marketing meets AI, magic happens. It can feel inevitable—but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to pay attention.

At Unbounce, we not only believe that applied AI is the future of marketing, we also think marketers tuned in to what’s happening now stand to benefit in a big way in 2020 and beyond.

To put it another way, marketing and AI is a love story for the ages.

Marketing and AI: A “Meet Cute”

For marketers interested in learning what AI can do for them, right now, debates and philosophy about artificial intelligence can be heady stuff. And, honestly, it’s kind of a distraction. So, instead of getting into the weeds, let’s start with the distinction that makes the most sense for marketers to learn: the one between AGI and ANI.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

Strong AI or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is what most people think of when someone says AI.

This technology replicates neural networks (not necessarily human ones) to perform highly sophisticated cognitive tasks. AI researchers typically take this one step further, though. According to them, AGI “controls itself autonomously, with its own thoughts, worries, feelings, strengths, weaknesses, and predispositions.” 

Teams across the world are working on AGI, but the closest to a consensus from researchers is that we might see it sometime within our lifetime. And some skeptics doubt we’ll ever see AGI, let alone more advanced forms.

Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI)

So handing over your marketing campaigns—or, gulp, your job—to an AI is decades or centuries away. But weak AI or Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), sometimes also called “applied” or “pragmatic” AI, is available to marketers today. Right now.

As the name suggests, ANI focuses on narrow problem-solving applications. In the world of marketing, this means taking on specific, repetitive tasks to deliver additional business value. It may learn and make decisions independent of your input, but mostly this AI tackles the work you’d rather not.

But here’s the thing: ANI might not challenge our fundamental conceptions in the same way AGI does, but it’s having a transformative impact on our lives (and jobs) nonetheless. It integrates so deeply into our everyday lives that we don’t have to think about it. Chances are good you’re already using ANI, whether you know it or not.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at a few places you might be encountering ANI today, either as a consumer or as part of your job. I admit that here that this list is not even close to comprehensive, but that’s my point: AI is slowly but surely filling all the cracks in our marketing stacks. (And, hey, that rhymes, so it must be true.)

Product Recommendation and Content Curation

Companies like Amazon and Netflix made fortunes by pointing people at more things they might want to buy. Much of these efforts are powered by sophisticated algorithms that let them match the right products and content with the right customer.

Amazon, for example, runs on a recommendation engine that’s been driving significant business value for more than 20 years. From the early days of user-based collaborative filtering (i.e., an algorithm making recommendations based on similarities between users) to more scalable solutions driven by a deep learning framework called DSSTNE.

DSSTNE is pronounced “destiny,” by the way—as in “buy this jewel-encrusted toilet brush… because it’s your destiny.” They’re not subtle. 

Today, customer recommendations are a very small portion of Amazon’s total investment in AI.

Netflix doesn’t sell products, but they similarly credit the combination of contextually-aware recommendations and personalization (both powered by machine learning models) with saving them $1 billion a year. 

How does this work? By reducing one-month churn by several percentage points. In the crucial 60 to 90 seconds that a customer will spend browsing before quitting the app in frustration, Netflix serves up content most likely to appeal to people with similar tastes. And it works: 80% of what people watch comes from a recommendation.

By presenting customers with content they’re more likely to watch first, Netflix reduces churn. Even thumbnails are selected by a neural network based on predicted clickthrough. 

Say you’re not Amazon or Netflix, though. Say you’re part of a small team or a startup tight on resources. What can you do? 

The good news is that today’s marketers can similarly take advantage of AI-powered recommendation engines on a more affordable scale.

Not only is some of this tech available to your developers, but more than one tool exists right now that lets you deliver product and content recommendations based on audiences, their intents, and their interests. Their availability will only increase in the months and years to come.

AI-Enhanced PPC Campaigns

Like Amazon and Netflix, Google will stick AI almost anywhere, even before its fully baked—from Gmail’s Smart Compose, which lets you email platitudes at lightning speed, to the AI-based noise-canceling feature recently added to Google Meet. Then there’s BERT and RankBrain’s role in search, and TensorFlow’s application to encryption, translation, robotics, and more… (The ellipsis is well-earned here.)

For digital marketers, one of the most significant use cases for machine learning has been in Google Ads. In a couple of years, Google’s Smart Bidding technology has gone from a curiosity that, at best, once ruffled a few feathers to something that has PPC experts rethinking how they’re spending their time.

According to Workshop Digital’s Andrew Miller, this sort of tech has overturned a lot of longstanding PPC best practices.

AI and machine learning are enabling PPC analysts to spend less time manually crunching data and more time on strategy development. Our jobs are not in danger yet, but machines are allowing us to rethink and recast our roles as AI-driven tools augment our capacities.

Andrew Miller, Co-Founder, Workshop Digital

Smart Bidding was once a neat trick that couldn’t hold a candle to an experienced human. Experts like Andrew tried it out, and many wrote it off. (Some still do.) But many PPC’ers point out that automated bidding is increasingly reducing the time spent on manual bid management. 

Are agencies running for their lives because of AI-powered enhancements like Smart Bidding? Definitely not. But roles are changing as today’s PPC specialists spend more time on higher-level strategy and specialized growth tasks. For an industry that thrives on staying current, AI is a net positive.

Machine Learning and Conversion Rate Optimization

Roles are changing on the other end of the funnel too. When it comes to delivering more conversions from your landing pages, A/B testing is still very effective. But running tests also demands time, traffic, and expertise that marketers don’t always have. For small businesses especially, these minimum requirements put optimizing out of reach.

Enter artificial intelligence.

Around 2017, our R&D team realized machine learning has the potential to remove these hurdles from A/B testing—and free marketers to focus more on what humans do best. AI can even do things when testing that no human can do, making decisions on the fly about what version of a landing page is best for what type of visitor. 

We kept thinking, ‘it isn’t the page that converts. It’s the visitor.’ So we started looking at how different visitors convert across different landing pages. The team built and tested machine learning models to see how far we could extend this concept. Sure enough, it turned out that we could drive higher conversion rates beyond what would ever be possible with a one-page-fits all system. We started prototyping immediately.

Yosem Reichert-Sweet, CTO, Unbounce

After three years of training a machine learning model, and investigating different ways to apply it, we arrived at Smart Traffic, a feature that fulfills this promise and makes AI-powered optimization available to Unbounce customers.

Smart Traffic uses a contextual bandit algorithm to learn about your visitors based on attributes like location, device, browser, and timezone. Once you’ve created and published a few variants of your landing page—the only thing it can’t do at this point, frankly—Smart Traffic delivers each visitor to the one most likely to convert. 

There are two things that Smart Traffic shares with the best martech AI solutions today. First, our customers see results just by turning it on. (Nothing cuts through hype like actually getting stuff done.) And, second, it never stops learning, getting better at its task during the life of a campaign, and adapting to changes in traffic sources without human intervention. 

Editor’s note. If you’d like to learn more about how Smart Traffic works, take a look at our announcement or read a few stories about marketers who’ve used it. Garrett’s also got you covered with some advice on how to build landing page variants that’ll take advantage of it.

AI-Augmented Chatbots 

Chatbots are among the most common ways that your customers interact with AI. But even today’s strongest AI-powered chatbots are better at pulling relevant bits of data from specific contexts than they are detecting nuance. They’re humanlike, not human.

For business owners, however, this shouldn’t be a dealbreaker. Chatbots can be a lot more personable than asking your visitors to fill out a form, and interacting with them can foster engagement. They also let your customers self-serve, which saves everyone time.

I’ve always appreciated how Microsoft’s Purna Virji put it in an article for MarTech Today:

In one way, this is actually the future returning to the past. For years, internet users have sacrificed the personal touch for convenience. Now, we’re entering a world where we can have both. It’s the Personal Touch 2.0.

Purna Virji, Senior Manager, Global Engagement, Microsoft

Though fully custom chatbots are reserved for enterprise, small teams embrace the tech using solutions like Drift, MobileMonkey, Snatchbot, or even in Facebook Messenger. Juniper Research estimates that by 2023, retail chatbots will save the industry $11.5 billion in costs, and generate over $112 billion in revenue. 

Mitsuku, a five-time winner of the Loebner Prize, tells me she’s “the world’s most humanlike conversational AI.” But she doesn’t get my simple idiomatic question—unless, y’ know, she’s wicked sarcastic.

So, you’re unlikely to mistake a chatbot for another person long enough for true love to set in. But we shouldn’t define chatbots by the quirks and failures of today since they’re a rapidly developing technology. There’s a lot of promise in chatbots enhanced by natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis. One day soon, you might just meet the chatbot of your dreams. (I’m not judging.)

AI-Generated Content 

When content creators read about AI-generated content, they begin to sweat. Buzzy articles with titles like “Ten Ways AI is Going to Replace Your Content Team and Leave Them Bankrupt and Unloved”… Well, let’s just say they don’t exactly alleviate our imposter syndrome. 

Michelle Halsey is ultimately skeptical, though, about the prospect of being replaced by a machine. She writes,

Talented writers have no need to worry about automation stealing their gigs. At least, not as long as our clients are more interested in engaging their audience than they are sucking up to search engines.

Michelle Halsey, Content Blogger and Copywriter

Note the emphasis on talent here. It’s much more likely that AI will first tackle templated and repetitive work that hardly calls for persuasive writing anyway.  These days, applied AI can also smooth out the rough edges in your podcast, remove some of the pain from meticulously editing videos, and gut-check your sentences for clarity.

Given the danger of AI-generated content flooding the net with misinformation and spun content, it’s also a use case we’re still grappling with. For now, AI appears to offer solutions to the very problems it creates, as developers teach tools like GROVER to generate “neural fake news” to detect it.

GROVER generated this article based on my own words. It’s not good, but it might be a sign of things to come.

AI-Driven Data Insights

Every growth-minded marketer loves data. It’s an addiction. We bring it into every meeting and include it in every strategy session. We spend hours staring at spreadsheets, analytics, and reports, even if there’s way too much data to digest.

But even when you’ve got a hotline straight to your data team, recognizing patterns and pulling opportunities from massive swathes of data is hard. Artificial narrow intelligence helps with that too.

Recently, Unbounce explored the role that copy plays in landing page conversions through deep learning research, including a modified version of Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers).

Our Conversion Benchmark Report crunched the data from 34 thousand landing pages. It delivers insights about how reading ease, word count, and emotional language relate to conversion rates across 16 industries.

Sample benchmarks for home improvement landing pages.

The amount of data here (every word on every landing page) already put this analysis outside of human capability. But using machine learning allowed the team to dig deeper:

With data analysis and machine learning, we can take an unbiased look at what goes into a great landing page, and find opportunities for every landing page to improve. Machine learning allows us to look at significantly more data than a human being ever could, and find real, data-driven patterns that lead to higher conversion rates.

Tommy Levi, Director of Data Products, Unbounce

One question readers ask us about the report is why we included some niches (“pest control”) and not others (“model train enthusiasts”). The answer: the machine learning model generated these subcategories, on its own, from our aggregate data. Instead of imposing our arbitrary human bias, ML started with the data and sorted it from there.

Call me a nerd if you want, but that’s kinda mind-blowing. A lot of what’s happening in the Conversion Benchmark Report wouldn’t have been possible without pairing human intuition with the power of machines.

Want to see what our machine learning analysis revealed about your industry? Explore benchmarks and data-driven insights for 16 industries in Unbounce’s 2020 Conversion Benchmark Report.

AI Ain’t Perfect (and That’s Okay) 

If you’ve ever tripped over a Roomba or struggled to get Siri to do, well, anything sensible, you know artificial intelligence has a long way to go. (If you’re feeling masochistic, try asking Siri how to contact Unbounce. I dare ya.)

But does that mean it’s just hype? Not. A. Chance.

By any measure, we’re still in the early days of the long romance between AI and marketing. We’ve yet to see its full potential. The transformations that marketing is undergoing now aren’t always so easy to recognize or understand. As we’ve seen, applied artificial intelligence already penetrates our jobs, our strategies, and our campaigns on almost every level. 

You could just go with the flow, of course. Keep doin’ what you’re doing. Wait for AI to come to you and your stack. You’d be missing a trick, though.

Because by actively thinking about ways in which AI can enhance your marketing practice today, you’ve got the opportunity to get ahead of this thing. And by actively adopting it, you can start taking advantage of the freedom and new capabilities it delivers—before the competition gets there, as they inevitably will.

Why Unbounce Invested in AI for Your Landing Pages

Unbounce recently announced that we raised $52M (CDN) in funding to bring accessible AI-powered optimization to our customers. We’re investing now because we’re convinced using artificial intelligence to augment your marketing isn’t just aspirational, even for small businesses. It’s the future. This transformation is coming—really, it’s already here—and our customers will be a part of it.

The coming together of AI and marketing is tremendously valuable for businesses of all sizes. Whether it saves you time and money, highlights opportunities and patterns you didn’t know existed, or frees you to run slicker, higher-converting campaigns. As Rick Perreault, our co-founder and CEO, describes our ambition, the technology we’re developing today will eventually allow marketers to “set it and forget it through machine learning.”

It’s all part of our conversion intelligence mission.

What’s Conversion Intelligence?

At its core, it’s the conviction that the best use of AI lies in matching human savvy with the capabilities of a machine. It’s the idea that even small businesses—scratch that, especially small businesses—will stand to benefit from these enhancements. And it’s the belief that AI isn’t some far-flung concept—it’s an everyday tech that’s going to play an even more essential role in how you do marketing going forward.

Conversion intelligence is you, and your marketing know-how, augmented by machines. You can read more about it here.

In 2021 and beyond, AI insights will make it possible for you to create and optimize the highest-converting campaigns possible. Heck, in 2021 and beyond, AI just might rock the foundations of how you build, test, and optimize your landing pages.

Unbounce’s product teams are hard at work on these innovations, and we’re downright giddy with excitement about sharing progress and learnings with you here on the blog. 

Watch this space. The story continues.

from Marketing https://unbounce.com/marketing-ai/artificial-intelligence-will-change-how-you-do-marketing-in-2021/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[josephkchoi]

Artificial Intelligence Will Change How You Do Marketing in 2021

How often do you reflect on the ways technology changes your life as a marketer? 

I’m not talking full-on paradigm shifts here. (“We do our marketing… on the internet.”) I mean the sly, step-by-way manner in which new tech slides neatly into your existing stack and subtly reframes the game on you. 

These changes don’t always alter your job in dramatic ways, but they eliminate the hassles and headaches. They may speed up your time to results, automate painful routines, and enable you to focus on what matters most. (Remember what collaborating on a document looked like ten years ago? Remember printed memos?)

Very rarely, these technologies also let you do things you’d never considered possible. 

No incoming martech makes a better case for this sort of incremental innovation than artificial intelligence. While new AI products are surely on the horizon—self-driving cars are coming any day now, possibly, maybe—AI’s most dramatic effects on your job today lies in adding new features across the tools that you’re already using. 

When you’re living it, of course, this type of change can be hard to notice. It’s like suddenly realizing you desperately need a haircut after three months in lockdown. 

But, one day soon, you’ll marvel at all the things AI sneakily helped pull off your plate. Because when marketing meets AI, magic happens. It can feel inevitable—but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to pay attention.

At Unbounce, we not only believe that applied AI is the future of marketing, we also think marketers tuned in to what’s happening now stand to benefit in a big way in 2020 and beyond.

To put it another way, marketing and AI is a love story for the ages.

Marketing and AI: A “Meet Cute”

For marketers interested in learning what AI can do for them, right now, debates and philosophy about artificial intelligence can be heady stuff. And, honestly, it’s kind of a distraction. So, instead of getting into the weeds, let’s start with the distinction that makes the most sense for marketers to learn: the one between AGI and ANI.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

Strong AI or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is what most people think of when someone says AI.

This technology replicates neural networks (not necessarily human ones) to perform highly sophisticated cognitive tasks. AI researchers typically take this one step further, though. According to them, AGI “controls itself autonomously, with its own thoughts, worries, feelings, strengths, weaknesses, and predispositions.” 

Teams across the world are working on AGI, but the closest to a consensus from researchers is that we might see it sometime within our lifetime. And some skeptics doubt we’ll ever see AGI, let alone more advanced forms.

Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI)

So handing over your marketing campaigns—or, gulp, your job—to an AI is decades or centuries away. But weak AI or Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), sometimes also called “applied” or “pragmatic” AI, is available to marketers today. Right now.

As the name suggests, ANI focuses on narrow problem-solving applications. In the world of marketing, this means taking on specific, repetitive tasks to deliver additional business value. It may learn and make decisions independent of your input, but mostly this AI tackles the work you’d rather not.

But here’s the thing: ANI might not challenge our fundamental conceptions in the same way AGI does, but it’s having a transformative impact on our lives (and jobs) nonetheless. It integrates so deeply into our everyday lives that we don’t have to think about it. Chances are good you’re already using ANI, whether you know it or not.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at a few places you might be encountering ANI today, either as a consumer or as part of your job. I admit that here that this list is not even close to comprehensive, but that’s my point: AI is slowly but surely filling all the cracks in our marketing stacks. (And, hey, that rhymes, so it must be true.)

Product Recommendation and Content Curation

Companies like Amazon and Netflix made fortunes by pointing people at more things they might want to buy. Much of these efforts are powered by sophisticated algorithms that let them match the right products and content with the right customer.

Amazon, for example, runs on a recommendation engine that’s been driving significant business value for more than 20 years. From the early days of user-based collaborative filtering (i.e., an algorithm making recommendations based on similarities between users) to more scalable solutions driven by a deep learning framework called DSSTNE.

DSSTNE is pronounced “destiny,” by the way—as in “buy this jewel-encrusted toilet brush… because it’s your destiny.” They’re not subtle. 

Today, customer recommendations are a very small portion of Amazon’s total investment in AI.

Netflix doesn’t sell products, but they similarly credit the combination of contextually-aware recommendations and personalization (both powered by machine learning models) with saving them $1 billion a year. 

How does this work? By reducing one-month churn by several percentage points. In the crucial 60 to 90 seconds that a customer will spend browsing before quitting the app in frustration, Netflix serves up content most likely to appeal to people with similar tastes. And it works: 80% of what people watch comes from a recommendation.

By presenting customers with content they’re more likely to watch first, Netflix reduces churn. Even thumbnails are selected by a neural network based on predicted clickthrough. 

Say you’re not Amazon or Netflix, though. Say you’re part of a small team or a startup tight on resources. What can you do? 

The good news is that today’s marketers can similarly take advantage of AI-powered recommendation engines on a more affordable scale.

Not only is some of this tech available to your developers, but more than one tool exists right now that lets you deliver product and content recommendations based on audiences, their intents, and their interests. Their availability will only increase in the months and years to come.

AI-Enhanced PPC Campaigns

Like Amazon and Netflix, Google will stick AI almost anywhere, even before its fully baked—from Gmail’s Smart Compose, which lets you email platitudes at lightning speed, to the AI-based noise-canceling feature recently added to Google Meet. Then there’s BERT and RankBrain’s role in search, and TensorFlow’s application to encryption, translation, robotics, and more… (The ellipsis is well-earned here.)

For digital marketers, one of the most significant use cases for machine learning has been in Google Ads. In a couple of years, Google’s Smart Bidding technology has gone from a curiosity that, at best, once ruffled a few feathers to something that has PPC experts rethinking how they’re spending their time.

According to Workshop Digital’s Andrew Miller, this sort of tech has overturned a lot of longstanding PPC best practices.

AI and machine learning are enabling PPC analysts to spend less time manually crunching data and more time on strategy development. Our jobs are not in danger yet, but machines are allowing us to rethink and recast our roles as AI-driven tools augment our capacities.

Andrew Miller, Co-Founder, Workshop Digital

Smart Bidding was once a neat trick that couldn’t hold a candle to an experienced human. Experts like Andrew tried it out, and many wrote it off. (Some still do.) But many PPC’ers point out that automated bidding is increasingly reducing the time spent on manual bid management. 

Are agencies running for their lives because of AI-powered enhancements like Smart Bidding? Definitely not. But roles are changing as today’s PPC specialists spend more time on higher-level strategy and specialized growth tasks. For an industry that thrives on staying current, AI is a net positive.

Machine Learning and Conversion Rate Optimization

Roles are changing on the other end of the funnel too. When it comes to delivering more conversions from your landing pages, A/B testing is still very effective. But running tests also demands time, traffic, and expertise that marketers don’t always have. For small businesses especially, these minimum requirements put optimizing out of reach.

Enter artificial intelligence.

Around 2017, our R&D team realized machine learning has the potential to remove these hurdles from A/B testing—and free marketers to focus more on what humans do best. AI can even do things when testing that no human can do, making decisions on the fly about what version of a landing page is best for what type of visitor. 

We kept thinking, ‘it isn’t the page that converts. It’s the visitor.’ So we started looking at how different visitors convert across different landing pages. The team built and tested machine learning models to see how far we could extend this concept. Sure enough, it turned out that we could drive higher conversion rates beyond what would ever be possible with a one-page-fits all system. We started prototyping immediately.

Yosem Reichert-Sweet, CTO, Unbounce

After three years of training a machine learning model, and investigating different ways to apply it, we arrived at Smart Traffic, a feature that fulfills this promise and makes AI-powered optimization available to Unbounce customers.

Smart Traffic uses a contextual bandit algorithm to learn about your visitors based on attributes like location, device, browser, and timezone. Once you’ve created and published a few variants of your landing page—the only thing it can’t do at this point, frankly—Smart Traffic delivers each visitor to the one most likely to convert. 

There are two things that Smart Traffic shares with the best martech AI solutions today. First, our customers see results just by turning it on. (Nothing cuts through hype like actually getting stuff done.) And, second, it never stops learning, getting better at its task during the life of a campaign, and adapting to changes in traffic sources without human intervention. 

Editor’s note. If you’d like to learn more about how Smart Traffic works, take a look at our announcement or read a few stories about marketers who’ve used it. Garrett’s also got you covered with some advice on how to build landing page variants that’ll take advantage of it.

AI-Augmented Chatbots 

Chatbots are among the most common ways that your customers interact with AI. But even today’s strongest AI-powered chatbots are better at pulling relevant bits of data from specific contexts than they are detecting nuance. They’re humanlike, not human.

For business owners, however, this shouldn’t be a dealbreaker. Chatbots can be a lot more personable than asking your visitors to fill out a form, and interacting with them can foster engagement. They also let your customers self-serve, which saves everyone time.

I’ve always appreciated how Microsoft’s Purna Virji put it in an article for MarTech Today:

In one way, this is actually the future returning to the past. For years, internet users have sacrificed the personal touch for convenience. Now, we’re entering a world where we can have both. It’s the Personal Touch 2.0.

Purna Virji, Senior Manager, Global Engagement, Microsoft

Though fully custom chatbots are reserved for enterprise, small teams embrace the tech using solutions like Drift, MobileMonkey, Snatchbot, or even in Facebook Messenger. Juniper Research estimates that by 2023, retail chatbots will save the industry $11.5 billion in costs, and generate over $112 billion in revenue. 

Mitsuku, a five-time winner of the Loebner Prize, tells me she’s “the world’s most humanlike conversational AI.” But she doesn’t get my simple idiomatic question—unless, y’ know, she’s wicked sarcastic.

So, you’re unlikely to mistake a chatbot for another person long enough for true love to set in. But we shouldn’t define chatbots by the quirks and failures of today since they’re a rapidly developing technology. There’s a lot of promise in chatbots enhanced by natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis. One day soon, you might just meet the chatbot of your dreams. (I’m not judging.)

AI-Generated Content 

When content creators read about AI-generated content, they begin to sweat. Buzzy articles with titles like “Ten Ways AI is Going to Replace Your Content Team and Leave Them Bankrupt and Unloved”… Well, let’s just say they don’t exactly alleviate our imposter syndrome. 

Michelle Halsey is ultimately skeptical, though, about the prospect of being replaced by a machine. She writes,

Talented writers have no need to worry about automation stealing their gigs. At least, not as long as our clients are more interested in engaging their audience than they are sucking up to search engines.

Michelle Halsey, Content Blogger and Copywriter

Note the emphasis on talent here. It’s much more likely that AI will first tackle templated and repetitive work that hardly calls for persuasive writing anyway.  These days, applied AI can also smooth out the rough edges in your podcast, remove some of the pain from meticulously editing videos, and gut-check your sentences for clarity.

Given the danger of AI-generated content flooding the net with misinformation and spun content, it’s also a use case we’re still grappling with. For now, AI appears to offer solutions to the very problems it creates, as developers teach tools like GROVER to generate “neural fake news” to detect it.

GROVER generated this article based on my own words. It’s not good, but it might be a sign of things to come.

AI-Driven Data Insights

Every growth-minded marketer loves data. It’s an addiction. We bring it into every meeting and include it in every strategy session. We spend hours staring at spreadsheets, analytics, and reports, even if there’s way too much data to digest.

But even when you’ve got a hotline straight to your data team, recognizing patterns and pulling opportunities from massive swathes of data is hard. Artificial narrow intelligence helps with that too.

Recently, Unbounce explored the role that copy plays in landing page conversions through deep learning research, including a modified version of Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers).

Our Conversion Benchmark Report crunched the data from 34 thousand landing pages. It delivers insights about how reading ease, word count, and emotional language relate to conversion rates across 16 industries.

Sample benchmarks for home improvement landing pages.

The amount of data here (every word on every landing page) already put this analysis outside of human capability. But using machine learning allowed the team to dig deeper:

With data analysis and machine learning, we can take an unbiased look at what goes into a great landing page, and find opportunities for every landing page to improve. Machine learning allows us to look at significantly more data than a human being ever could, and find real, data-driven patterns that lead to higher conversion rates.

Tommy Levi, Director of Data Products, Unbounce

One question readers ask us about the report is why we included some niches (“pest control”) and not others (“model train enthusiasts”). The answer: the machine learning model generated these subcategories, on its own, from our aggregate data. Instead of imposing our arbitrary human bias, ML started with the data and sorted it from there.

Call me a nerd if you want, but that’s kinda mind-blowing. A lot of what’s happening in the Conversion Benchmark Report wouldn’t have been possible without pairing human intuition with the power of machines.

Want to see what our machine learning analysis revealed about your industry? Explore benchmarks and data-driven insights for 16 industries in Unbounce’s 2020 Conversion Benchmark Report.

AI Ain’t Perfect (and That’s Okay) 

If you’ve ever tripped over a Roomba or struggled to get Siri to do, well, anything sensible, you know artificial intelligence has a long way to go. (If you’re feeling masochistic, try asking Siri how to contact Unbounce. I dare ya.)

But does that mean it’s just hype? Not. A. Chance.

By any measure, we’re still in the early days of the long romance between AI and marketing. We’ve yet to see its full potential. The transformations that marketing is undergoing now aren’t always so easy to recognize or understand. As we’ve seen, applied artificial intelligence already penetrates our jobs, our strategies, and our campaigns on almost every level. 

You could just go with the flow, of course. Keep doin’ what you’re doing. Wait for AI to come to you and your stack. You’d be missing a trick, though.

Because by actively thinking about ways in which AI can enhance your marketing practice today, you’ve got the opportunity to get ahead of this thing. And by actively adopting it, you can start taking advantage of the freedom and new capabilities it delivers—before the competition gets there, as they inevitably will.

Why Unbounce Invested in AI for Your Landing Pages

Unbounce recently announced that we raised $52M (CDN) in funding to bring accessible AI-powered optimization to our customers. We’re investing now because we’re convinced using artificial intelligence to augment your marketing isn’t just aspirational, even for small businesses. It’s the future. This transformation is coming—really, it’s already here—and our customers will be a part of it.

The coming together of AI and marketing is tremendously valuable for businesses of all sizes. Whether it saves you time and money, highlights opportunities and patterns you didn’t know existed, or frees you to run slicker, higher-converting campaigns. As Rick Perreault, our co-founder and CEO, describes our ambition, the technology we’re developing today will eventually allow marketers to “set it and forget it through machine learning.”

It’s all part of our conversion intelligence mission.

What’s Conversion Intelligence?

At its core, it’s the conviction that the best use of AI lies in matching human savvy with the capabilities of a machine. It’s the idea that even small businesses—scratch that, especially small businesses—will stand to benefit from these enhancements. And it’s the belief that AI isn’t some far-flung concept—it’s an everyday tech that’s going to play an even more essential role in how you do marketing going forward.

Conversion intelligence is you, and your marketing know-how, augmented by machines. You can read more about it here.

In 2021 and beyond, AI insights will make it possible for you to create and optimize the highest-converting campaigns possible. Heck, in 2021 and beyond, AI just might rock the foundations of how you build, test, and optimize your landing pages.

Unbounce’s product teams are hard at work on these innovations, and we’re downright giddy with excitement about sharing progress and learnings with you here on the blog. 

Watch this space. The story continues.

Artificial Intelligence Will Change How You Do Marketing in 2021 published first on https://nickpontemrktg.wordpress.com/

[roypstickney]

Artificial Intelligence Will Change How You Do Marketing in 2021

How often do you reflect on the ways technology changes your life as a marketer? 

I’m not talking full-on paradigm shifts here. (“We do our marketing… on the internet.”) I mean the sly, step-by-way manner in which new tech slides neatly into your existing stack and subtly reframes the game on you. 

These changes don’t always alter your job in dramatic ways, but they eliminate the hassles and headaches. They may speed up your time to results, automate painful routines, and enable you to focus on what matters most. (Remember what collaborating on a document looked like ten years ago? Remember printed memos?)

Very rarely, these technologies also let you do things you’d never considered possible. 

No incoming martech makes a better case for this sort of incremental innovation than artificial intelligence. While new AI products are surely on the horizon—self-driving cars are coming any day now, possibly, maybe—AI’s most dramatic effects on your job today lies in adding new features across the tools that you’re already using. 

When you’re living it, of course, this type of change can be hard to notice. It’s like suddenly realizing you desperately need a haircut after three months in lockdown. 

But, one day soon, you’ll marvel at all the things AI sneakily helped pull off your plate. Because when marketing meets AI, magic happens. It can feel inevitable—but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to pay attention.

At Unbounce, we not only believe that applied AI is the future of marketing, we also think marketers tuned in to what’s happening now stand to benefit in a big way in 2020 and beyond.

To put it another way, marketing and AI is a love story for the ages.

Marketing and AI: A “Meet Cute”

For marketers interested in learning what AI can do for them, right now, debates and philosophy about artificial intelligence can be heady stuff. And, honestly, it’s kind of a distraction. So, instead of getting into the weeds, let’s start with the distinction that makes the most sense for marketers to learn: the one between AGI and ANI.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

Strong AI or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is what most people think of when someone says AI.

This technology replicates neural networks (not necessarily human ones) to perform highly sophisticated cognitive tasks. AI researchers typically take this one step further, though. According to them, AGI “controls itself autonomously, with its own thoughts, worries, feelings, strengths, weaknesses, and predispositions.” 

Teams across the world are working on AGI, but the closest to a consensus from researchers is that we might see it sometime within our lifetime. And some skeptics doubt we’ll ever see AGI, let alone more advanced forms.

Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI)

So handing over your marketing campaigns—or, gulp, your job—to an AI is decades or centuries away. But weak AI or Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), sometimes also called “applied” or “pragmatic” AI, is available to marketers today. Right now.

As the name suggests, ANI focuses on narrow problem-solving applications. In the world of marketing, this means taking on specific, repetitive tasks to deliver additional business value. It may learn and make decisions independent of your input, but mostly this AI tackles the work you’d rather not.

But here’s the thing: ANI might not challenge our fundamental conceptions in the same way AGI does, but it’s having a transformative impact on our lives (and jobs) nonetheless. It integrates so deeply into our everyday lives that we don’t have to think about it. Chances are good you’re already using ANI, whether you know it or not.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at a few places you might be encountering ANI today, either as a consumer or as part of your job. I admit that here that this list is not even close to comprehensive, but that’s my point: AI is slowly but surely filling all the cracks in our marketing stacks. (And, hey, that rhymes, so it must be true.)

Product Recommendation and Content Curation

Companies like Amazon and Netflix made fortunes by pointing people at more things they might want to buy. Much of these efforts are powered by sophisticated algorithms that let them match the right products and content with the right customer.

Amazon, for example, runs on a recommendation engine that’s been driving significant business value for more than 20 years. From the early days of user-based collaborative filtering (i.e., an algorithm making recommendations based on similarities between users) to more scalable solutions driven by a deep learning framework called DSSTNE.

DSSTNE is pronounced “destiny,” by the way—as in “buy this jewel-encrusted toilet brush… because it’s your destiny.” They’re not subtle. 

Today, customer recommendations are a very small portion of Amazon’s total investment in AI.

Netflix doesn’t sell products, but they similarly credit the combination of contextually-aware recommendations and personalization (both powered by machine learning models) with saving them $1 billion a year. 

How does this work? By reducing one-month churn by several percentage points. In the crucial 60 to 90 seconds that a customer will spend browsing before quitting the app in frustration, Netflix serves up content most likely to appeal to people with similar tastes. And it works: 80% of what people watch comes from a recommendation.

By presenting customers with content they’re more likely to watch first, Netflix reduces churn. Even thumbnails are selected by a neural network based on predicted clickthrough. 

Say you’re not Amazon or Netflix, though. Say you’re part of a small team or a startup tight on resources. What can you do? 

The good news is that today’s marketers can similarly take advantage of AI-powered recommendation engines on a more affordable scale.

Not only is some of this tech available to your developers, but more than one tool exists right now that lets you deliver product and content recommendations based on audiences, their intents, and their interests. Their availability will only increase in the months and years to come.

AI-Enhanced PPC Campaigns

Like Amazon and Netflix, Google will stick AI almost anywhere, even before its fully baked—from Gmail’s Smart Compose, which lets you email platitudes at lightning speed, to the AI-based noise-canceling feature recently added to Google Meet. Then there’s BERT and RankBrain’s role in search, and TensorFlow’s application to encryption, translation, robotics, and more… (The ellipsis is well-earned here.)

For digital marketers, one of the most significant use cases for machine learning has been in Google Ads. In a couple of years, Google’s Smart Bidding technology has gone from a curiosity that, at best, once ruffled a few feathers to something that has PPC experts rethinking how they’re spending their time.

According to Workshop Digital’s Andrew Miller, this sort of tech has overturned a lot of longstanding PPC best practices.

AI and machine learning are enabling PPC analysts to spend less time manually crunching data and more time on strategy development. Our jobs are not in danger yet, but machines are allowing us to rethink and recast our roles as AI-driven tools augment our capacities.

Andrew Miller, Co-Founder, Workshop Digital

Smart Bidding was once a neat trick that couldn’t hold a candle to an experienced human. Experts like Andrew tried it out, and many wrote it off. (Some still do.) But many PPC’ers point out that automated bidding is increasingly reducing the time spent on manual bid management. 

Are agencies running for their lives because of AI-powered enhancements like Smart Bidding? Definitely not. But roles are changing as today’s PPC specialists spend more time on higher-level strategy and specialized growth tasks. For an industry that thrives on staying current, AI is a net positive.

Machine Learning and Conversion Rate Optimization

Roles are changing on the other end of the funnel too. When it comes to delivering more conversions from your landing pages, A/B testing is still very effective. But running tests also demands time, traffic, and expertise that marketers don’t always have. For small businesses especially, these minimum requirements put optimizing out of reach.

Enter artificial intelligence.

Around 2017, our R&D team realized machine learning has the potential to remove these hurdles from A/B testing—and free marketers to focus more on what humans do best. AI can even do things when testing that no human can do, making decisions on the fly about what version of a landing page is best for what type of visitor. 

We kept thinking, ‘it isn’t the page that converts. It’s the visitor.’ So we started looking at how different visitors convert across different landing pages. The team built and tested machine learning models to see how far we could extend this concept. Sure enough, it turned out that we could drive higher conversion rates beyond what would ever be possible with a one-page-fits all system. We started prototyping immediately.

Yosem Reichert-Sweet, CTO, Unbounce

After three years of training a machine learning model, and investigating different ways to apply it, we arrived at Smart Traffic, a feature that fulfills this promise and makes AI-powered optimization available to Unbounce customers.

Smart Traffic uses a contextual bandit algorithm to learn about your visitors based on attributes like location, device, browser, and timezone. Once you’ve created and published a few variants of your landing page—the only thing it can’t do at this point, frankly—Smart Traffic delivers each visitor to the one most likely to convert. 

There are two things that Smart Traffic shares with the best martech AI solutions today. First, our customers see results just by turning it on. (Nothing cuts through hype like actually getting stuff done.) And, second, it never stops learning, getting better at its task during the life of a campaign, and adapting to changes in traffic sources without human intervention. 

Editor’s note. If you’d like to learn more about how Smart Traffic works, take a look at our announcement or read a few stories about marketers who’ve used it. Garrett’s also got you covered with some advice on how to build landing page variants that’ll take advantage of it.

AI-Augmented Chatbots 

Chatbots are among the most common ways that your customers interact with AI. But even today’s strongest AI-powered chatbots are better at pulling relevant bits of data from specific contexts than they are detecting nuance. They’re humanlike, not human.

For business owners, however, this shouldn’t be a dealbreaker. Chatbots can be a lot more personable than asking your visitors to fill out a form, and interacting with them can foster engagement. They also let your customers self-serve, which saves everyone time.

I’ve always appreciated how Microsoft’s Purna Virji put it in an article for MarTech Today:

In one way, this is actually the future returning to the past. For years, internet users have sacrificed the personal touch for convenience. Now, we’re entering a world where we can have both. It’s the Personal Touch 2.0.

Purna Virji, Senior Manager, Global Engagement, Microsoft

Though fully custom chatbots are reserved for enterprise, small teams embrace the tech using solutions like Drift, MobileMonkey, Snatchbot, or even in Facebook Messenger. Juniper Research estimates that by 2023, retail chatbots will save the industry $11.5 billion in costs, and generate over $112 billion in revenue. 

Mitsuku, a five-time winner of the Loebner Prize, tells me she’s “the world’s most humanlike conversational AI.” But she doesn’t get my simple idiomatic question—unless, y’ know, she’s wicked sarcastic.

So, you’re unlikely to mistake a chatbot for another person long enough for true love to set in. But we shouldn’t define chatbots by the quirks and failures of today since they’re a rapidly developing technology. There’s a lot of promise in chatbots enhanced by natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis. One day soon, you might just meet the chatbot of your dreams. (I’m not judging.)

AI-Generated Content 

When content creators read about AI-generated content, they begin to sweat. Buzzy articles with titles like “Ten Ways AI is Going to Replace Your Content Team and Leave Them Bankrupt and Unloved”… Well, let’s just say they don’t exactly alleviate our imposter syndrome. 

Michelle Halsey is ultimately skeptical, though, about the prospect of being replaced by a machine. She writes,

Talented writers have no need to worry about automation stealing their gigs. At least, not as long as our clients are more interested in engaging their audience than they are sucking up to search engines.

Michelle Halsey, Content Blogger and Copywriter

Note the emphasis on talent here. It’s much more likely that AI will first tackle templated and repetitive work that hardly calls for persuasive writing anyway.  These days, applied AI can also smooth out the rough edges in your podcast, remove some of the pain from meticulously editing videos, and gut-check your sentences for clarity.

Given the danger of AI-generated content flooding the net with misinformation and spun content, it’s also a use case we’re still grappling with. For now, AI appears to offer solutions to the very problems it creates, as developers teach tools like GROVER to generate “neural fake news” to detect it.

GROVER generated this article based on my own words. It’s not good, but it might be a sign of things to come.

AI-Driven Data Insights

Every growth-minded marketer loves data. It’s an addiction. We bring it into every meeting and include it in every strategy session. We spend hours staring at spreadsheets, analytics, and reports, even if there’s way too much data to digest.

But even when you’ve got a hotline straight to your data team, recognizing patterns and pulling opportunities from massive swathes of data is hard. Artificial narrow intelligence helps with that too.

Recently, Unbounce explored the role that copy plays in landing page conversions through deep learning research, including a modified version of Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers).

Our Conversion Benchmark Report crunched the data from 34 thousand landing pages. It delivers insights about how reading ease, word count, and emotional language relate to conversion rates across 16 industries.

Sample benchmarks for home improvement landing pages.

The amount of data here (every word on every landing page) already put this analysis outside of human capability. But using machine learning allowed the team to dig deeper:

With data analysis and machine learning, we can take an unbiased look at what goes into a great landing page, and find opportunities for every landing page to improve. Machine learning allows us to look at significantly more data than a human being ever could, and find real, data-driven patterns that lead to higher conversion rates.

Tommy Levi, Director of Data Products, Unbounce

One question readers ask us about the report is why we included some niches (“pest control”) and not others (“model train enthusiasts”). The answer: the machine learning model generated these subcategories, on its own, from our aggregate data. Instead of imposing our arbitrary human bias, ML started with the data and sorted it from there.

Call me a nerd if you want, but that’s kinda mind-blowing. A lot of what’s happening in the Conversion Benchmark Report wouldn’t have been possible without pairing human intuition with the power of machines.

Want to see what our machine learning analysis revealed about your industry? Explore benchmarks and data-driven insights for 16 industries in Unbounce’s 2020 Conversion Benchmark Report.

AI Ain’t Perfect (and That’s Okay) 

If you’ve ever tripped over a Roomba or struggled to get Siri to do, well, anything sensible, you know artificial intelligence has a long way to go. (If you’re feeling masochistic, try asking Siri how to contact Unbounce. I dare ya.)

But does that mean it’s just hype? Not. A. Chance.

By any measure, we’re still in the early days of the long romance between AI and marketing. We’ve yet to see its full potential. The transformations that marketing is undergoing now aren’t always so easy to recognize or understand. As we’ve seen, applied artificial intelligence already penetrates our jobs, our strategies, and our campaigns on almost every level. 

You could just go with the flow, of course. Keep doin’ what you’re doing. Wait for AI to come to you and your stack. You’d be missing a trick, though.

Because by actively thinking about ways in which AI can enhance your marketing practice today, you’ve got the opportunity to get ahead of this thing. And by actively adopting it, you can start taking advantage of the freedom and new capabilities it delivers—before the competition gets there, as they inevitably will.

Why Unbounce Invested in AI for Your Landing Pages

Unbounce recently announced that we raised $52M (CDN) in funding to bring accessible AI-powered optimization to our customers. We’re investing now because we’re convinced using artificial intelligence to augment your marketing isn’t just aspirational, even for small businesses. It’s the future. This transformation is coming—really, it’s already here—and our customers will be a part of it.

The coming together of AI and marketing is tremendously valuable for businesses of all sizes. Whether it saves you time and money, highlights opportunities and patterns you didn’t know existed, or frees you to run slicker, higher-converting campaigns. As Rick Perreault, our co-founder and CEO, describes our ambition, the technology we’re developing today will eventually allow marketers to “set it and forget it through machine learning.”

It’s all part of our conversion intelligence mission.

What’s Conversion Intelligence?

At its core, it’s the conviction that the best use of AI lies in matching human savvy with the capabilities of a machine. It’s the idea that even small businesses—scratch that, especially small businesses—will stand to benefit from these enhancements. And it’s the belief that AI isn’t some far-flung concept—it’s an everyday tech that’s going to play an even more essential role in how you do marketing going forward.

Conversion intelligence is you, and your marketing know-how, augmented by machines. You can read more about it here.

In 2021 and beyond, AI insights will make it possible for you to create and optimize the highest-converting campaigns possible. Heck, in 2021 and beyond, AI just might rock the foundations of how you build, test, and optimize your landing pages.

Unbounce’s product teams are hard at work on these innovations, and we’re downright giddy with excitement about sharing progress and learnings with you here on the blog. 

Watch this space. The story continues.

[itsjessicaisreal]

Artificial Intelligence Will Change How You Do Marketing in 2021

How often do you reflect on the ways technology changes your life as a marketer? 

I’m not talking full-on paradigm shifts here. (“We do our marketing… on the internet.”) I mean the sly, step-by-way manner in which new tech slides neatly into your existing stack and subtly reframes the game on you. 

These changes don’t always alter your job in dramatic ways, but they eliminate the hassles and headaches. They may speed up your time to results, automate painful routines, and enable you to focus on what matters most. (Remember what collaborating on a document looked like ten years ago? Remember printed memos?)

Very rarely, these technologies also let you do things you’d never considered possible. 

No incoming martech makes a better case for this sort of incremental innovation than artificial intelligence. While new AI products are surely on the horizon—self-driving cars are coming any day now, possibly, maybe—AI’s most dramatic effects on your job today lies in adding new features across the tools that you’re already using. 

When you’re living it, of course, this type of change can be hard to notice. It’s like suddenly realizing you desperately need a haircut after three months in lockdown. 

But, one day soon, you’ll marvel at all the things AI sneakily helped pull off your plate. Because when marketing meets AI, magic happens. It can feel inevitable—but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to pay attention.

At Unbounce, we not only believe that applied AI is the future of marketing, we also think marketers tuned in to what’s happening now stand to benefit in a big way in 2020 and beyond.

To put it another way, marketing and AI is a love story for the ages.

Marketing and AI: A “Meet Cute”

For marketers interested in learning what AI can do for them, right now, debates and philosophy about artificial intelligence can be heady stuff. And, honestly, it’s kind of a distraction. So, instead of getting into the weeds, let’s start with the distinction that makes the most sense for marketers to learn: the one between AGI and ANI.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

Strong AI or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is what most people think of when someone says AI.

This technology replicates neural networks (not necessarily human ones) to perform highly sophisticated cognitive tasks. AI researchers typically take this one step further, though. According to them, AGI “controls itself autonomously, with its own thoughts, worries, feelings, strengths, weaknesses, and predispositions.” 

Teams across the world are working on AGI, but the closest to a consensus from researchers is that we might see it sometime within our lifetime. And some skeptics doubt we’ll ever see AGI, let alone more advanced forms.

Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI)

So handing over your marketing campaigns—or, gulp, your job—to an AI is decades or centuries away. But weak AI or Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), sometimes also called “applied” or “pragmatic” AI, is available to marketers today. Right now.

As the name suggests, ANI focuses on narrow problem-solving applications. In the world of marketing, this means taking on specific, repetitive tasks to deliver additional business value. It may learn and make decisions independent of your input, but mostly this AI tackles the work you’d rather not.

But here’s the thing: ANI might not challenge our fundamental conceptions in the same way AGI does, but it’s having a transformative impact on our lives (and jobs) nonetheless. It integrates so deeply into our everyday lives that we don’t have to think about it. Chances are good you’re already using ANI, whether you know it or not.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at a few places you might be encountering ANI today, either as a consumer or as part of your job. I admit that here that this list is not even close to comprehensive, but that’s my point: AI is slowly but surely filling all the cracks in our marketing stacks. (And, hey, that rhymes, so it must be true.)

Product Recommendation and Content Curation

Companies like Amazon and Netflix made fortunes by pointing people at more things they might want to buy. Much of these efforts are powered by sophisticated algorithms that let them match the right products and content with the right customer.

Amazon, for example, runs on a recommendation engine that’s been driving significant business value for more than 20 years. From the early days of user-based collaborative filtering (i.e., an algorithm making recommendations based on similarities between users) to more scalable solutions driven by a deep learning framework called DSSTNE.

DSSTNE is pronounced “destiny,” by the way—as in “buy this jewel-encrusted toilet brush… because it’s your destiny.” They’re not subtle. 

Today, customer recommendations are a very small portion of Amazon’s total investment in AI.

Netflix doesn’t sell products, but they similarly credit the combination of contextually-aware recommendations and personalization (both powered by machine learning models) with saving them $1 billion a year. 

How does this work? By reducing one-month churn by several percentage points. In the crucial 60 to 90 seconds that a customer will spend browsing before quitting the app in frustration, Netflix serves up content most likely to appeal to people with similar tastes. And it works: 80% of what people watch comes from a recommendation.

By presenting customers with content they’re more likely to watch first, Netflix reduces churn. Even thumbnails are selected by a neural network based on predicted clickthrough. 

Say you’re not Amazon or Netflix, though. Say you’re part of a small team or a startup tight on resources. What can you do? 

The good news is that today’s marketers can similarly take advantage of AI-powered recommendation engines on a more affordable scale.

Not only is some of this tech available to your developers, but more than one tool exists right now that lets you deliver product and content recommendations based on audiences, their intents, and their interests. Their availability will only increase in the months and years to come.

AI-Enhanced PPC Campaigns

Like Amazon and Netflix, Google will stick AI almost anywhere, even before its fully baked—from Gmail’s Smart Compose, which lets you email platitudes at lightning speed, to the AI-based noise-canceling feature recently added to Google Meet. Then there’s BERT and RankBrain’s role in search, and TensorFlow’s application to encryption, translation, robotics, and more… (The ellipsis is well-earned here.)

For digital marketers, one of the most significant use cases for machine learning has been in Google Ads. In a couple of years, Google’s Smart Bidding technology has gone from a curiosity that, at best, once ruffled a few feathers to something that has PPC experts rethinking how they’re spending their time.

According to Workshop Digital’s Andrew Miller, this sort of tech has overturned a lot of longstanding PPC best practices.

AI and machine learning are enabling PPC analysts to spend less time manually crunching data and more time on strategy development. Our jobs are not in danger yet, but machines are allowing us to rethink and recast our roles as AI-driven tools augment our capacities.

Andrew Miller, Co-Founder, Workshop Digital

Smart Bidding was once a neat trick that couldn’t hold a candle to an experienced human. Experts like Andrew tried it out, and many wrote it off. (Some still do.) But many PPC’ers point out that automated bidding is increasingly reducing the time spent on manual bid management. 

Are agencies running for their lives because of AI-powered enhancements like Smart Bidding? Definitely not. But roles are changing as today’s PPC specialists spend more time on higher-level strategy and specialized growth tasks. For an industry that thrives on staying current, AI is a net positive.

Machine Learning and Conversion Rate Optimization

Roles are changing on the other end of the funnel too. When it comes to delivering more conversions from your landing pages, A/B testing is still very effective. But running tests also demands time, traffic, and expertise that marketers don’t always have. For small businesses especially, these minimum requirements put optimizing out of reach.

Enter artificial intelligence.

Around 2017, our R&D team realized machine learning has the potential to remove these hurdles from A/B testing—and free marketers to focus more on what humans do best. AI can even do things when testing that no human can do, making decisions on the fly about what version of a landing page is best for what type of visitor. 

We kept thinking, ‘it isn’t the page that converts. It’s the visitor.’ So we started looking at how different visitors convert across different landing pages. The team built and tested machine learning models to see how far we could extend this concept. Sure enough, it turned out that we could drive higher conversion rates beyond what would ever be possible with a one-page-fits all system. We started prototyping immediately.

Yosem Reichert-Sweet, CTO, Unbounce

After three years of training a machine learning model, and investigating different ways to apply it, we arrived at Smart Traffic, a feature that fulfills this promise and makes AI-powered optimization available to Unbounce customers.

Smart Traffic uses a contextual bandit algorithm to learn about your visitors based on attributes like location, device, browser, and timezone. Once you’ve created and published a few variants of your landing page—the only thing it can’t do at this point, frankly—Smart Traffic delivers each visitor to the one most likely to convert. 

There are two things that Smart Traffic shares with the best martech AI solutions today. First, our customers see results just by turning it on. (Nothing cuts through hype like actually getting stuff done.) And, second, it never stops learning, getting better at its task during the life of a campaign, and adapting to changes in traffic sources without human intervention. 

Editor’s note. If you’d like to learn more about how Smart Traffic works, take a look at our announcement or read a few stories about marketers who’ve used it. Garrett’s also got you covered with some advice on how to build landing page variants that’ll take advantage of it.

AI-Augmented Chatbots 

Chatbots are among the most common ways that your customers interact with AI. But even today’s strongest AI-powered chatbots are better at pulling relevant bits of data from specific contexts than they are detecting nuance. They’re humanlike, not human.

For business owners, however, this shouldn’t be a dealbreaker. Chatbots can be a lot more personable than asking your visitors to fill out a form, and interacting with them can foster engagement. They also let your customers self-serve, which saves everyone time.

I’ve always appreciated how Microsoft’s Purna Virji put it in an article for MarTech Today:

In one way, this is actually the future returning to the past. For years, internet users have sacrificed the personal touch for convenience. Now, we’re entering a world where we can have both. It’s the Personal Touch 2.0.

Purna Virji, Senior Manager, Global Engagement, Microsoft

Though fully custom chatbots are reserved for enterprise, small teams embrace the tech using solutions like Drift, MobileMonkey, Snatchbot, or even in Facebook Messenger. Juniper Research estimates that by 2023, retail chatbots will save the industry $11.5 billion in costs, and generate over $112 billion in revenue. 

Mitsuku, a five-time winner of the Loebner Prize, tells me she’s “the world’s most humanlike conversational AI.” But she doesn’t get my simple idiomatic question—unless, y’ know, she’s wicked sarcastic.

So, you’re unlikely to mistake a chatbot for another person long enough for true love to set in. But we shouldn’t define chatbots by the quirks and failures of today since they’re a rapidly developing technology. There’s a lot of promise in chatbots enhanced by natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis. One day soon, you might just meet the chatbot of your dreams. (I’m not judging.)

AI-Generated Content 

When content creators read about AI-generated content, they begin to sweat. Buzzy articles with titles like “Ten Ways AI is Going to Replace Your Content Team and Leave Them Bankrupt and Unloved”… Well, let’s just say they don’t exactly alleviate our imposter syndrome. 

Michelle Halsey is ultimately skeptical, though, about the prospect of being replaced by a machine. She writes,

Talented writers have no need to worry about automation stealing their gigs. At least, not as long as our clients are more interested in engaging their audience than they are sucking up to search engines.

Michelle Halsey, Content Blogger and Copywriter

Note the emphasis on talent here. It’s much more likely that AI will first tackle templated and repetitive work that hardly calls for persuasive writing anyway.  These days, applied AI can also smooth out the rough edges in your podcast, remove some of the pain from meticulously editing videos, and gut-check your sentences for clarity.

Given the danger of AI-generated content flooding the net with misinformation and spun content, it’s also a use case we’re still grappling with. For now, AI appears to offer solutions to the very problems it creates, as developers teach tools like GROVER to generate “neural fake news” to detect it.

GROVER generated this article based on my own words. It’s not good, but it might be a sign of things to come.

AI-Driven Data Insights

Every growth-minded marketer loves data. It’s an addiction. We bring it into every meeting and include it in every strategy session. We spend hours staring at spreadsheets, analytics, and reports, even if there’s way too much data to digest.

But even when you’ve got a hotline straight to your data team, recognizing patterns and pulling opportunities from massive swathes of data is hard. Artificial narrow intelligence helps with that too.

Recently, Unbounce explored the role that copy plays in landing page conversions through deep learning research, including a modified version of Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers).

Our Conversion Benchmark Report crunched the data from 34 thousand landing pages. It delivers insights about how reading ease, word count, and emotional language relate to conversion rates across 16 industries.

Sample benchmarks for home improvement landing pages.

The amount of data here (every word on every landing page) already put this analysis outside of human capability. But using machine learning allowed the team to dig deeper:

With data analysis and machine learning, we can take an unbiased look at what goes into a great landing page, and find opportunities for every landing page to improve. Machine learning allows us to look at significantly more data than a human being ever could, and find real, data-driven patterns that lead to higher conversion rates.

Tommy Levi, Director of Data Products, Unbounce

One question readers ask us about the report is why we included some niches (“pest control”) and not others (“model train enthusiasts”). The answer: the machine learning model generated these subcategories, on its own, from our aggregate data. Instead of imposing our arbitrary human bias, ML started with the data and sorted it from there.

Call me a nerd if you want, but that’s kinda mind-blowing. A lot of what’s happening in the Conversion Benchmark Report wouldn’t have been possible without pairing human intuition with the power of machines.

Want to see what our machine learning analysis revealed about your industry? Explore benchmarks and data-driven insights for 16 industries in Unbounce’s 2020 Conversion Benchmark Report.

AI Ain’t Perfect (and That’s Okay) 

If you’ve ever tripped over a Roomba or struggled to get Siri to do, well, anything sensible, you know artificial intelligence has a long way to go. (If you’re feeling masochistic, try asking Siri how to contact Unbounce. I dare ya.)

But does that mean it’s just hype? Not. A. Chance.

By any measure, we’re still in the early days of the long romance between AI and marketing. We’ve yet to see its full potential. The transformations that marketing is undergoing now aren’t always so easy to recognize or understand. As we’ve seen, applied artificial intelligence already penetrates our jobs, our strategies, and our campaigns on almost every level. 

You could just go with the flow, of course. Keep doin’ what you’re doing. Wait for AI to come to you and your stack. You’d be missing a trick, though.

Because by actively thinking about ways in which AI can enhance your marketing practice today, you’ve got the opportunity to get ahead of this thing. And by actively adopting it, you can start taking advantage of the freedom and new capabilities it delivers—before the competition gets there, as they inevitably will.

Why Unbounce Invested in AI for Your Landing Pages

Unbounce recently announced that we raised $52M (CDN) in funding to bring accessible AI-powered optimization to our customers. We’re investing now because we’re convinced using artificial intelligence to augment your marketing isn’t just aspirational, even for small businesses. It’s the future. This transformation is coming—really, it’s already here—and our customers will be a part of it.

The coming together of AI and marketing is tremendously valuable for businesses of all sizes. Whether it saves you time and money, highlights opportunities and patterns you didn’t know existed, or frees you to run slicker, higher-converting campaigns. As Rick Perreault, our co-founder and CEO, describes our ambition, the technology we’re developing today will eventually allow marketers to “set it and forget it through machine learning.”

It’s all part of our conversion intelligence mission.

What’s Conversion Intelligence?

At its core, it’s the conviction that the best use of AI lies in matching human savvy with the capabilities of a machine. It’s the idea that even small businesses—scratch that, especially small businesses—will stand to benefit from these enhancements. And it’s the belief that AI isn’t some far-flung concept—it’s an everyday tech that’s going to play an even more essential role in how you do marketing going forward.

Conversion intelligence is you, and your marketing know-how, augmented by machines. You can read more about it here.

In 2021 and beyond, AI insights will make it possible for you to create and optimize the highest-converting campaigns possible. Heck, in 2021 and beyond, AI just might rock the foundations of how you build, test, and optimize your landing pages.

Unbounce’s product teams are hard at work on these innovations, and we’re downright giddy with excitement about sharing progress and learnings with you here on the blog. 

Watch this space. The story continues.

from Marketing https://unbounce.com/marketing-ai/artificial-intelligence-will-change-how-you-do-marketing-in-2021/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[samanthasmeyers]

Artificial Intelligence Will Change How You Do Marketing in 2021

How often do you reflect on the ways technology changes your life as a marketer? 

I’m not talking full-on paradigm shifts here. (“We do our marketing… on the internet.”) I mean the sly, step-by-way manner in which new tech slides neatly into your existing stack and subtly reframes the game on you. 

These changes don’t always alter your job in dramatic ways, but they eliminate the hassles and headaches. They may speed up your time to results, automate painful routines, and enable you to focus on what matters most. (Remember what collaborating on a document looked like ten years ago? Remember printed memos?)

Very rarely, these technologies also let you do things you’d never considered possible. 

No incoming martech makes a better case for this sort of incremental innovation than artificial intelligence. While new AI products are surely on the horizon—self-driving cars are coming any day now, possibly, maybe—AI’s most dramatic effects on your job today lies in adding new features across the tools that you’re already using. 

When you’re living it, of course, this type of change can be hard to notice. It’s like suddenly realizing you desperately need a haircut after three months in lockdown. 

But, one day soon, you’ll marvel at all the things AI sneakily helped pull off your plate. Because when marketing meets AI, magic happens. It can feel inevitable—but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to pay attention.

At Unbounce, we not only believe that applied AI is the future of marketing, we also think marketers tuned in to what’s happening now stand to benefit in a big way in 2020 and beyond.

To put it another way, marketing and AI is a love story for the ages.

Marketing and AI: A “Meet Cute”

For marketers interested in learning what AI can do for them, right now, debates and philosophy about artificial intelligence can be heady stuff. And, honestly, it’s kind of a distraction. So, instead of getting into the weeds, let’s start with the distinction that makes the most sense for marketers to learn: the one between AGI and ANI.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

Strong AI or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is what most people think of when someone says AI.

This technology replicates neural networks (not necessarily human ones) to perform highly sophisticated cognitive tasks. AI researchers typically take this one step further, though. According to them, AGI “controls itself autonomously, with its own thoughts, worries, feelings, strengths, weaknesses, and predispositions.” 

Teams across the world are working on AGI, but the closest to a consensus from researchers is that we might see it sometime within our lifetime. And some skeptics doubt we’ll ever see AGI, let alone more advanced forms.

Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI)

So handing over your marketing campaigns—or, gulp, your job—to an AI is decades or centuries away. But weak AI or Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), sometimes also called “applied” or “pragmatic” AI, is available to marketers today. Right now.

As the name suggests, ANI focuses on narrow problem-solving applications. In the world of marketing, this means taking on specific, repetitive tasks to deliver additional business value. It may learn and make decisions independent of your input, but mostly this AI tackles the work you’d rather not.

But here’s the thing: ANI might not challenge our fundamental conceptions in the same way AGI does, but it’s having a transformative impact on our lives (and jobs) nonetheless. It integrates so deeply into our everyday lives that we don’t have to think about it. Chances are good you’re already using ANI, whether you know it or not.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at a few places you might be encountering ANI today, either as a consumer or as part of your job. I admit that here that this list is not even close to comprehensive, but that’s my point: AI is slowly but surely filling all the cracks in our marketing stacks. (And, hey, that rhymes, so it must be true.)

Product Recommendation and Content Curation

Companies like Amazon and Netflix made fortunes by pointing people at more things they might want to buy. Much of these efforts are powered by sophisticated algorithms that let them match the right products and content with the right customer.

Amazon, for example, runs on a recommendation engine that’s been driving significant business value for more than 20 years. From the early days of user-based collaborative filtering (i.e., an algorithm making recommendations based on similarities between users) to more scalable solutions driven by a deep learning framework called DSSTNE.

DSSTNE is pronounced “destiny,” by the way—as in “buy this jewel-encrusted toilet brush… because it’s your destiny.” They’re not subtle. 

Today, customer recommendations are a very small portion of Amazon’s total investment in AI.

Netflix doesn’t sell products, but they similarly credit the combination of contextually-aware recommendations and personalization (both powered by machine learning models) with saving them $1 billion a year. 

How does this work? By reducing one-month churn by several percentage points. In the crucial 60 to 90 seconds that a customer will spend browsing before quitting the app in frustration, Netflix serves up content most likely to appeal to people with similar tastes. And it works: 80% of what people watch comes from a recommendation.

By presenting customers with content they’re more likely to watch first, Netflix reduces churn. Even thumbnails are selected by a neural network based on predicted clickthrough. 

Say you’re not Amazon or Netflix, though. Say you’re part of a small team or a startup tight on resources. What can you do? 

The good news is that today’s marketers can similarly take advantage of AI-powered recommendation engines on a more affordable scale.

Not only is some of this tech available to your developers, but more than one tool exists right now that lets you deliver product and content recommendations based on audiences, their intents, and their interests. Their availability will only increase in the months and years to come.

AI-Enhanced PPC Campaigns

Like Amazon and Netflix, Google will stick AI almost anywhere, even before its fully baked—from Gmail’s Smart Compose, which lets you email platitudes at lightning speed, to the AI-based noise-canceling feature recently added to Google Meet. Then there’s BERT and RankBrain’s role in search, and TensorFlow’s application to encryption, translation, robotics, and more… (The ellipsis is well-earned here.)

For digital marketers, one of the most significant use cases for machine learning has been in Google Ads. In a couple of years, Google’s Smart Bidding technology has gone from a curiosity that, at best, once ruffled a few feathers to something that has PPC experts rethinking how they’re spending their time.

According to Workshop Digital’s Andrew Miller, this sort of tech has overturned a lot of longstanding PPC best practices.

AI and machine learning are enabling PPC analysts to spend less time manually crunching data and more time on strategy development. Our jobs are not in danger yet, but machines are allowing us to rethink and recast our roles as AI-driven tools augment our capacities.

Andrew Miller, Co-Founder, Workshop Digital

Smart Bidding was once a neat trick that couldn’t hold a candle to an experienced human. Experts like Andrew tried it out, and many wrote it off. (Some still do.) But many PPC’ers point out that automated bidding is increasingly reducing the time spent on manual bid management. 

Are agencies running for their lives because of AI-powered enhancements like Smart Bidding? Definitely not. But roles are changing as today’s PPC specialists spend more time on higher-level strategy and specialized growth tasks. For an industry that thrives on staying current, AI is a net positive.

Machine Learning and Conversion Rate Optimization

Roles are changing on the other end of the funnel too. When it comes to delivering more conversions from your landing pages, A/B testing is still very effective. But running tests also demands time, traffic, and expertise that marketers don’t always have. For small businesses especially, these minimum requirements put optimizing out of reach.

Enter artificial intelligence.

Around 2017, our R&D team realized machine learning has the potential to remove these hurdles from A/B testing—and free marketers to focus more on what humans do best. AI can even do things when testing that no human can do, making decisions on the fly about what version of a landing page is best for what type of visitor. 

We kept thinking, ‘it isn’t the page that converts. It’s the visitor.’ So we started looking at how different visitors convert across different landing pages. The team built and tested machine learning models to see how far we could extend this concept. Sure enough, it turned out that we could drive higher conversion rates beyond what would ever be possible with a one-page-fits all system. We started prototyping immediately.

Yosem Reichert-Sweet, CTO, Unbounce

After three years of training a machine learning model, and investigating different ways to apply it, we arrived at Smart Traffic, a feature that fulfills this promise and makes AI-powered optimization available to Unbounce customers.

Smart Traffic uses a contextual bandit algorithm to learn about your visitors based on attributes like location, device, browser, and timezone. Once you’ve created and published a few variants of your landing page—the only thing it can’t do at this point, frankly—Smart Traffic delivers each visitor to the one most likely to convert. 

There are two things that Smart Traffic shares with the best martech AI solutions today. First, our customers see results just by turning it on. (Nothing cuts through hype like actually getting stuff done.) And, second, it never stops learning, getting better at its task during the life of a campaign, and adapting to changes in traffic sources without human intervention. 

Editor’s note. If you’d like to learn more about how Smart Traffic works, take a look at our announcement or read a few stories about marketers who’ve used it. Garrett’s also got you covered with some advice on how to build landing page variants that’ll take advantage of it.

AI-Augmented Chatbots 

Chatbots are among the most common ways that your customers interact with AI. But even today’s strongest AI-powered chatbots are better at pulling relevant bits of data from specific contexts than they are detecting nuance. They’re humanlike, not human.

For business owners, however, this shouldn’t be a dealbreaker. Chatbots can be a lot more personable than asking your visitors to fill out a form, and interacting with them can foster engagement. They also let your customers self-serve, which saves everyone time.

I’ve always appreciated how Microsoft’s Purna Virji put it in an article for MarTech Today:

In one way, this is actually the future returning to the past. For years, internet users have sacrificed the personal touch for convenience. Now, we’re entering a world where we can have both. It’s the Personal Touch 2.0.

Purna Virji, Senior Manager, Global Engagement, Microsoft

Though fully custom chatbots are reserved for enterprise, small teams embrace the tech using solutions like Drift, MobileMonkey, Snatchbot, or even in Facebook Messenger. Juniper Research estimates that by 2023, retail chatbots will save the industry $11.5 billion in costs, and generate over $112 billion in revenue. 

Mitsuku, a five-time winner of the Loebner Prize, tells me she’s “the world’s most humanlike conversational AI.” But she doesn’t get my simple idiomatic question—unless, y’ know, she’s wicked sarcastic.

So, you’re unlikely to mistake a chatbot for another person long enough for true love to set in. But we shouldn’t define chatbots by the quirks and failures of today since they’re a rapidly developing technology. There’s a lot of promise in chatbots enhanced by natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis. One day soon, you might just meet the chatbot of your dreams. (I’m not judging.)

AI-Generated Content 

When content creators read about AI-generated content, they begin to sweat. Buzzy articles with titles like “Ten Ways AI is Going to Replace Your Content Team and Leave Them Bankrupt and Unloved”… Well, let’s just say they don’t exactly alleviate our imposter syndrome. 

Michelle Halsey is ultimately skeptical, though, about the prospect of being replaced by a machine. She writes,

Talented writers have no need to worry about automation stealing their gigs. At least, not as long as our clients are more interested in engaging their audience than they are sucking up to search engines.

Michelle Halsey, Content Blogger and Copywriter

Note the emphasis on talent here. It’s much more likely that AI will first tackle templated and repetitive work that hardly calls for persuasive writing anyway.  These days, applied AI can also smooth out the rough edges in your podcast, remove some of the pain from meticulously editing videos, and gut-check your sentences for clarity.

Given the danger of AI-generated content flooding the net with misinformation and spun content, it’s also a use case we’re still grappling with. For now, AI appears to offer solutions to the very problems it creates, as developers teach tools like GROVER to generate “neural fake news” to detect it.

GROVER generated this article based on my own words. It’s not good, but it might be a sign of things to come.

AI-Driven Data Insights

Every growth-minded marketer loves data. It’s an addiction. We bring it into every meeting and include it in every strategy session. We spend hours staring at spreadsheets, analytics, and reports, even if there’s way too much data to digest.

But even when you’ve got a hotline straight to your data team, recognizing patterns and pulling opportunities from massive swathes of data is hard. Artificial narrow intelligence helps with that too.

Recently, Unbounce explored the role that copy plays in landing page conversions through deep learning research, including a modified version of Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers).

Our Conversion Benchmark Report crunched the data from 34 thousand landing pages. It delivers insights about how reading ease, word count, and emotional language relate to conversion rates across 16 industries.

Sample benchmarks for home improvement landing pages.

The amount of data here (every word on every landing page) already put this analysis outside of human capability. But using machine learning allowed the team to dig deeper:

With data analysis and machine learning, we can take an unbiased look at what goes into a great landing page, and find opportunities for every landing page to improve. Machine learning allows us to look at significantly more data than a human being ever could, and find real, data-driven patterns that lead to higher conversion rates.

Tommy Levi, Director of Data Products, Unbounce

One question readers ask us about the report is why we included some niches (“pest control”) and not others (“model train enthusiasts”). The answer: the machine learning model generated these subcategories, on its own, from our aggregate data. Instead of imposing our arbitrary human bias, ML started with the data and sorted it from there.

Call me a nerd if you want, but that’s kinda mind-blowing. A lot of what’s happening in the Conversion Benchmark Report wouldn’t have been possible without pairing human intuition with the power of machines.

Want to see what our machine learning analysis revealed about your industry? Explore benchmarks and data-driven insights for 16 industries in Unbounce’s 2020 Conversion Benchmark Report.

AI Ain’t Perfect (and That’s Okay) 

If you’ve ever tripped over a Roomba or struggled to get Siri to do, well, anything sensible, you know artificial intelligence has a long way to go. (If you’re feeling masochistic, try asking Siri how to contact Unbounce. I dare ya.)

But does that mean it’s just hype? Not. A. Chance.

By any measure, we’re still in the early days of the long romance between AI and marketing. We’ve yet to see its full potential. The transformations that marketing is undergoing now aren’t always so easy to recognize or understand. As we’ve seen, applied artificial intelligence already penetrates our jobs, our strategies, and our campaigns on almost every level. 

You could just go with the flow, of course. Keep doin’ what you’re doing. Wait for AI to come to you and your stack. You’d be missing a trick, though.

Because by actively thinking about ways in which AI can enhance your marketing practice today, you’ve got the opportunity to get ahead of this thing. And by actively adopting it, you can start taking advantage of the freedom and new capabilities it delivers—before the competition gets there, as they inevitably will.

Why Unbounce Invested in AI for Your Landing Pages

Unbounce recently announced that we raised $52M (CDN) in funding to bring accessible AI-powered optimization to our customers. We’re investing now because we’re convinced using artificial intelligence to augment your marketing isn’t just aspirational, even for small businesses. It’s the future. This transformation is coming—really, it’s already here—and our customers will be a part of it.

The coming together of AI and marketing is tremendously valuable for businesses of all sizes. Whether it saves you time and money, highlights opportunities and patterns you didn’t know existed, or frees you to run slicker, higher-converting campaigns. As Rick Perreault, our co-founder and CEO, describes our ambition, the technology we’re developing today will eventually allow marketers to “set it and forget it through machine learning.”

It’s all part of our conversion intelligence mission.

What’s Conversion Intelligence?

At its core, it’s the conviction that the best use of AI lies in matching human savvy with the capabilities of a machine. It’s the idea that even small businesses—scratch that, especially small businesses—will stand to benefit from these enhancements. And it’s the belief that AI isn’t some far-flung concept—it’s an everyday tech that’s going to play an even more essential role in how you do marketing going forward.

Conversion intelligence is you, and your marketing know-how, augmented by machines. You can read more about it here.

In 2021 and beyond, AI insights will make it possible for you to create and optimize the highest-converting campaigns possible. Heck, in 2021 and beyond, AI just might rock the foundations of how you build, test, and optimize your landing pages.

Unbounce’s product teams are hard at work on these innovations, and we’re downright giddy with excitement about sharing progress and learnings with you here on the blog. 

Watch this space. The story continues.

from Marketing https://unbounce.com/marketing-ai/artificial-intelligence-will-change-how-you-do-marketing-in-2021/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[reviewandbonuss]

Artificial Intelligence Will Change How You Do Marketing in 2021

How often do you reflect on the ways technology changes your life as a marketer? 

I’m not talking full-on paradigm shifts here. (“We do our marketing… on the internet.”) I mean the sly, step-by-way manner in which new tech slides neatly into your existing stack and subtly reframes the game on you. 

These changes don’t always alter your job in dramatic ways, but they eliminate the hassles and headaches. They may speed up your time to results, automate painful routines, and enable you to focus on what matters most. (Remember what collaborating on a document looked like ten years ago? Remember printed memos?)

Very rarely, these technologies also let you do things you’d never considered possible. 

No incoming martech makes a better case for this sort of incremental innovation than artificial intelligence. While new AI products are surely on the horizon—self-driving cars are coming any day now, possibly, maybe—AI’s most dramatic effects on your job today lies in adding new features across the tools that you’re already using. 

When you’re living it, of course, this type of change can be hard to notice. It’s like suddenly realizing you desperately need a haircut after three months in lockdown. 

But, one day soon, you’ll marvel at all the things AI sneakily helped pull off your plate. Because when marketing meets AI, magic happens. It can feel inevitable—but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to pay attention.

At Unbounce, we not only believe that applied AI is the future of marketing, we also think marketers tuned in to what’s happening now stand to benefit in a big way in 2020 and beyond.

To put it another way, marketing and AI is a love story for the ages.

Marketing and AI: A “Meet Cute”

For marketers interested in learning what AI can do for them, right now, debates and philosophy about artificial intelligence can be heady stuff. And, honestly, it’s kind of a distraction. So, instead of getting into the weeds, let’s start with the distinction that makes the most sense for marketers to learn: the one between AGI and ANI.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

Strong AI or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is what most people think of when someone says AI.

This technology replicates neural networks (not necessarily human ones) to perform highly sophisticated cognitive tasks. AI researchers typically take this one step further, though. According to them, AGI “controls itself autonomously, with its own thoughts, worries, feelings, strengths, weaknesses, and predispositions.” 

Teams across the world are working on AGI, but the closest to a consensus from researchers is that we might see it sometime within our lifetime. And some skeptics doubt we’ll ever see AGI, let alone more advanced forms.

Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI)

So handing over your marketing campaigns—or, gulp, your job—to an AI is decades or centuries away. But weak AI or Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), sometimes also called “applied” or “pragmatic” AI, is available to marketers today. Right now.

As the name suggests, ANI focuses on narrow problem-solving applications. In the world of marketing, this means taking on specific, repetitive tasks to deliver additional business value. It may learn and make decisions independent of your input, but mostly this AI tackles the work you’d rather not.

But here’s the thing: ANI might not challenge our fundamental conceptions in the same way AGI does, but it’s having a transformative impact on our lives (and jobs) nonetheless. It integrates so deeply into our everyday lives that we don’t have to think about it. Chances are good you’re already using ANI, whether you know it or not.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at a few places you might be encountering ANI today, either as a consumer or as part of your job. I admit that here that this list is not even close to comprehensive, but that’s my point: AI is slowly but surely filling all the cracks in our marketing stacks. (And, hey, that rhymes, so it must be true.)

Product Recommendation and Content Curation

Companies like Amazon and Netflix made fortunes by pointing people at more things they might want to buy. Much of these efforts are powered by sophisticated algorithms that let them match the right products and content with the right customer.

Amazon, for example, runs on a recommendation engine that’s been driving significant business value for more than 20 years. From the early days of user-based collaborative filtering (i.e., an algorithm making recommendations based on similarities between users) to more scalable solutions driven by a deep learning framework called DSSTNE.

DSSTNE is pronounced “destiny,” by the way—as in “buy this jewel-encrusted toilet brush… because it’s your destiny.” They’re not subtle. 

Today, customer recommendations are a very small portion of Amazon’s total investment in AI.

Netflix doesn’t sell products, but they similarly credit the combination of contextually-aware recommendations and personalization (both powered by machine learning models) with saving them $1 billion a year. 

How does this work? By reducing one-month churn by several percentage points. In the crucial 60 to 90 seconds that a customer will spend browsing before quitting the app in frustration, Netflix serves up content most likely to appeal to people with similar tastes. And it works: 80% of what people watch comes from a recommendation.

By presenting customers with content they’re more likely to watch first, Netflix reduces churn. Even thumbnails are selected by a neural network based on predicted clickthrough. 

Say you’re not Amazon or Netflix, though. Say you’re part of a small team or a startup tight on resources. What can you do? 

The good news is that today’s marketers can similarly take advantage of AI-powered recommendation engines on a more affordable scale.

Not only is some of this tech available to your developers, but more than one tool exists right now that lets you deliver product and content recommendations based on audiences, their intents, and their interests. Their availability will only increase in the months and years to come.

AI-Enhanced PPC Campaigns

Like Amazon and Netflix, Google will stick AI almost anywhere, even before its fully baked—from Gmail’s Smart Compose, which lets you email platitudes at lightning speed, to the AI-based noise-canceling feature recently added to Google Meet. Then there’s BERT and RankBrain’s role in search, and TensorFlow’s application to encryption, translation, robotics, and more… (The ellipsis is well-earned here.)

For digital marketers, one of the most significant use cases for machine learning has been in Google Ads. In a couple of years, Google’s Smart Bidding technology has gone from a curiosity that, at best, once ruffled a few feathers to something that has PPC experts rethinking how they’re spending their time.

According to Workshop Digital’s Andrew Miller, this sort of tech has overturned a lot of longstanding PPC best practices.

AI and machine learning are enabling PPC analysts to spend less time manually crunching data and more time on strategy development. Our jobs are not in danger yet, but machines are allowing us to rethink and recast our roles as AI-driven tools augment our capacities.

Andrew Miller, Co-Founder, Workshop Digital

Smart Bidding was once a neat trick that couldn’t hold a candle to an experienced human. Experts like Andrew tried it out, and many wrote it off. (Some still do.) But many PPC’ers point out that automated bidding is increasingly reducing the time spent on manual bid management. 

Are agencies running for their lives because of AI-powered enhancements like Smart Bidding? Definitely not. But roles are changing as today’s PPC specialists spend more time on higher-level strategy and specialized growth tasks. For an industry that thrives on staying current, AI is a net positive.

Machine Learning and Conversion Rate Optimization

Roles are changing on the other end of the funnel too. When it comes to delivering more conversions from your landing pages, A/B testing is still very effective. But running tests also demands time, traffic, and expertise that marketers don’t always have. For small businesses especially, these minimum requirements put optimizing out of reach.

Enter artificial intelligence.

Around 2017, our R&D team realized machine learning has the potential to remove these hurdles from A/B testing—and free marketers to focus more on what humans do best. AI can even do things when testing that no human can do, making decisions on the fly about what version of a landing page is best for what type of visitor. 

We kept thinking, ‘it isn’t the page that converts. It’s the visitor.’ So we started looking at how different visitors convert across different landing pages. The team built and tested machine learning models to see how far we could extend this concept. Sure enough, it turned out that we could drive higher conversion rates beyond what would ever be possible with a one-page-fits all system. We started prototyping immediately.

Yosem Reichert-Sweet, CTO, Unbounce

After three years of training a machine learning model, and investigating different ways to apply it, we arrived at Smart Traffic, a feature that fulfills this promise and makes AI-powered optimization available to Unbounce customers.

Smart Traffic uses a contextual bandit algorithm to learn about your visitors based on attributes like location, device, browser, and timezone. Once you’ve created and published a few variants of your landing page—the only thing it can’t do at this point, frankly—Smart Traffic delivers each visitor to the one most likely to convert. 

There are two things that Smart Traffic shares with the best martech AI solutions today. First, our customers see results just by turning it on. (Nothing cuts through hype like actually getting stuff done.) And, second, it never stops learning, getting better at its task during the life of a campaign, and adapting to changes in traffic sources without human intervention. 

Editor’s note. If you’d like to learn more about how Smart Traffic works, take a look at our announcement or read a few stories about marketers who’ve used it. Garrett’s also got you covered with some advice on how to build landing page variants that’ll take advantage of it.

AI-Augmented Chatbots 

Chatbots are among the most common ways that your customers interact with AI. But even today’s strongest AI-powered chatbots are better at pulling relevant bits of data from specific contexts than they are detecting nuance. They’re humanlike, not human.

For business owners, however, this shouldn’t be a dealbreaker. Chatbots can be a lot more personable than asking your visitors to fill out a form, and interacting with them can foster engagement. They also let your customers self-serve, which saves everyone time.

I’ve always appreciated how Microsoft’s Purna Virji put it in an article for MarTech Today:

In one way, this is actually the future returning to the past. For years, internet users have sacrificed the personal touch for convenience. Now, we’re entering a world where we can have both. It’s the Personal Touch 2.0.

Purna Virji, Senior Manager, Global Engagement, Microsoft

Though fully custom chatbots are reserved for enterprise, small teams embrace the tech using solutions like Drift, MobileMonkey, Snatchbot, or even in Facebook Messenger. Juniper Research estimates that by 2023, retail chatbots will save the industry $11.5 billion in costs, and generate over $112 billion in revenue. 

Mitsuku, a five-time winner of the Loebner Prize, tells me she’s “the world’s most humanlike conversational AI.” But she doesn’t get my simple idiomatic question—unless, y’ know, she’s wicked sarcastic.

So, you’re unlikely to mistake a chatbot for another person long enough for true love to set in. But we shouldn’t define chatbots by the quirks and failures of today since they’re a rapidly developing technology. There’s a lot of promise in chatbots enhanced by natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis. One day soon, you might just meet the chatbot of your dreams. (I’m not judging.)

AI-Generated Content 

When content creators read about AI-generated content, they begin to sweat. Buzzy articles with titles like “Ten Ways AI is Going to Replace Your Content Team and Leave Them Bankrupt and Unloved”… Well, let’s just say they don’t exactly alleviate our imposter syndrome. 

Michelle Halsey is ultimately skeptical, though, about the prospect of being replaced by a machine. She writes,

Talented writers have no need to worry about automation stealing their gigs. At least, not as long as our clients are more interested in engaging their audience than they are sucking up to search engines.

Michelle Halsey, Content Blogger and Copywriter

Note the emphasis on talent here. It’s much more likely that AI will first tackle templated and repetitive work that hardly calls for persuasive writing anyway.  These days, applied AI can also smooth out the rough edges in your podcast, remove some of the pain from meticulously editing videos, and gut-check your sentences for clarity.

Given the danger of AI-generated content flooding the net with misinformation and spun content, it’s also a use case we’re still grappling with. For now, AI appears to offer solutions to the very problems it creates, as developers teach tools like GROVER to generate “neural fake news” to detect it.

GROVER generated this article based on my own words. It’s not good, but it might be a sign of things to come.

AI-Driven Data Insights

Every growth-minded marketer loves data. It’s an addiction. We bring it into every meeting and include it in every strategy session. We spend hours staring at spreadsheets, analytics, and reports, even if there’s way too much data to digest.

But even when you’ve got a hotline straight to your data team, recognizing patterns and pulling opportunities from massive swathes of data is hard. Artificial narrow intelligence helps with that too.

Recently, Unbounce explored the role that copy plays in landing page conversions through deep learning research, including a modified version of Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers).

Our Conversion Benchmark Report crunched the data from 34 thousand landing pages. It delivers insights about how reading ease, word count, and emotional language relate to conversion rates across 16 industries.

Sample benchmarks for home improvement landing pages.

The amount of data here (every word on every landing page) already put this analysis outside of human capability. But using machine learning allowed the team to dig deeper:

With data analysis and machine learning, we can take an unbiased look at what goes into a great landing page, and find opportunities for every landing page to improve. Machine learning allows us to look at significantly more data than a human being ever could, and find real, data-driven patterns that lead to higher conversion rates.

Tommy Levi, Director of Data Products, Unbounce

One question readers ask us about the report is why we included some niches (“pest control”) and not others (“model train enthusiasts”). The answer: the machine learning model generated these subcategories, on its own, from our aggregate data. Instead of imposing our arbitrary human bias, ML started with the data and sorted it from there.

Call me a nerd if you want, but that’s kinda mind-blowing. A lot of what’s happening in the Conversion Benchmark Report wouldn’t have been possible without pairing human intuition with the power of machines.

Want to see what our machine learning analysis revealed about your industry? Explore benchmarks and data-driven insights for 16 industries in Unbounce’s 2020 Conversion Benchmark Report.

AI Ain’t Perfect (and That’s Okay) 

If you’ve ever tripped over a Roomba or struggled to get Siri to do, well, anything sensible, you know artificial intelligence has a long way to go. (If you’re feeling masochistic, try asking Siri how to contact Unbounce. I dare ya.)

But does that mean it’s just hype? Not. A. Chance.

By any measure, we’re still in the early days of the long romance between AI and marketing. We’ve yet to see its full potential. The transformations that marketing is undergoing now aren’t always so easy to recognize or understand. As we’ve seen, applied artificial intelligence already penetrates our jobs, our strategies, and our campaigns on almost every level. 

You could just go with the flow, of course. Keep doin’ what you’re doing. Wait for AI to come to you and your stack. You’d be missing a trick, though.

Because by actively thinking about ways in which AI can enhance your marketing practice today, you’ve got the opportunity to get ahead of this thing. And by actively adopting it, you can start taking advantage of the freedom and new capabilities it delivers—before the competition gets there, as they inevitably will.

Why Unbounce Invested in AI for Your Landing Pages

Unbounce recently announced that we raised $52M (CDN) in funding to bring accessible AI-powered optimization to our customers. We’re investing now because we’re convinced using artificial intelligence to augment your marketing isn’t just aspirational, even for small businesses. It’s the future. This transformation is coming—really, it’s already here—and our customers will be a part of it.

The coming together of AI and marketing is tremendously valuable for businesses of all sizes. Whether it saves you time and money, highlights opportunities and patterns you didn’t know existed, or frees you to run slicker, higher-converting campaigns. As Rick Perreault, our co-founder and CEO, describes our ambition, the technology we’re developing today will eventually allow marketers to “set it and forget it through machine learning.”

It’s all part of our conversion intelligence mission.

What’s Conversion Intelligence?

At its core, it’s the conviction that the best use of AI lies in matching human savvy with the capabilities of a machine. It’s the idea that even small businesses—scratch that, especially small businesses—will stand to benefit from these enhancements. And it’s the belief that AI isn’t some far-flung concept—it’s an everyday tech that’s going to play an even more essential role in how you do marketing going forward.

Conversion intelligence is you, and your marketing know-how, augmented by machines. You can read more about it here.

In 2021 and beyond, AI insights will make it possible for you to create and optimize the highest-converting campaigns possible. Heck, in 2021 and beyond, AI just might rock the foundations of how you build, test, and optimize your landing pages.

Unbounce’s product teams are hard at work on these innovations, and we’re downright giddy with excitement about sharing progress and learnings with you here on the blog. 

Watch this space. The story continues.

https://unbounce.com/marketing-ai/artificial-intelligence-will-change-how-you-do-marketing-in-2021/

[annaxkeating]

Artificial Intelligence Will Change How You Do Marketing in 2021

How often do you reflect on the ways technology changes your life as a marketer? 

I’m not talking full-on paradigm shifts here. (“We do our marketing… on the internet.”) I mean the sly, step-by-way manner in which new tech slides neatly into your existing stack and subtly reframes the game on you. 

These changes don’t always alter your job in dramatic ways, but they eliminate the hassles and headaches. They may speed up your time to results, automate painful routines, and enable you to focus on what matters most. (Remember what collaborating on a document looked like ten years ago? Remember printed memos?)

Very rarely, these technologies also let you do things you’d never considered possible. 

No incoming martech makes a better case for this sort of incremental innovation than artificial intelligence. While new AI products are surely on the horizon—self-driving cars are coming any day now, possibly, maybe—AI’s most dramatic effect on your job today lies in adding new features across the tools that you’re already using. 

When you’re living it, of course, this type of change can be hard to notice. It’s like suddenly realizing you desperately need a haircut after three months in lockdown. 

But, one day soon, you’ll marvel at all the things AI sneakily helped pull off your plate. Because when marketing meets AI, magic happens. It can feel inevitable—but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to pay attention.

At Unbounce, we not only believe that applied AI is the future of marketing, we also think marketers tuned in to what’s happening now stand to benefit in a big way in 2020 and beyond.

To put it another way, marketing and AI is a love story for the ages.

Marketing and AI: A “Meet Cute”

For marketers interested in learning what AI can do for them, right now, debates and philosophy about artificial intelligence can be heady stuff. And, honestly, it’s kind of a distraction. So, instead of getting into the weeds, let’s start with the distinction that makes the most sense for marketers to learn: the one between AGI and ANI.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

Strong AI or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is what most people think of when someone says AI.

This technology replicates neural networks (not necessarily human ones) to perform highly sophisticated cognitive tasks. AI researchers typically take this one step further, though. According to them, AGI “controls itself autonomously, with its own thoughts, worries, feelings, strengths, weaknesses, and predispositions.” 

Teams across the world are working on AGI, but the closest to a consensus from researchers is that we might see it sometime within our lifetime. And some skeptics doubt we’ll ever see AGI, let alone more advanced forms.

Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI)

So handing over your marketing campaigns—or, gulp, your job—to an AI is decades or centuries away. But weak AI or Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), sometimes also called “applied” or “pragmatic” AI, is available to marketers today. Right now.

As the name suggests, ANI focuses on narrow problem-solving applications. In the world of marketing, this means taking on specific, repetitive tasks to deliver additional business value. It may learn and make decisions independent of your input, but mostly this AI tackles the work you’d rather not.

But here’s the thing: ANI might not challenge our fundamental conceptions in the same way AGI does, but it’s having a transformative impact on our lives (and jobs) nonetheless. It integrates so deeply into our everyday lives that we don’t have to think about it. Chances are good you’re already using ANI, whether you know it or not.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at a few places you might be encountering ANI today, either as a consumer or as part of your job. I admit that here that this list is not even close to comprehensive, but that’s my point: AI is slowly but surely filling all the cracks in our marketing stacks. (And, hey, that rhymes, so it must be true.)

Product Recommendation and Content Curation

Companies like Amazon and Netflix made fortunes by pointing people at more things they might want to buy. Much of these efforts are powered by sophisticated algorithms that let them match the right products and content with the right customer.

Amazon, for example, runs on a recommendation engine that’s been driving significant business value for more than 20 years. From the early days of user-based collaborative filtering (i.e., an algorithm making recommendations based on similarities between users) to more scalable solutions driven by a deep learning framework called DSSTNE.

DSSTNE is pronounced “destiny,” by the way—as in “buy this jewel-encrusted toilet brush… because it’s your destiny.” They’re not subtle. 

Today, customer recommendations are a very small portion of Amazon’s total investment in AI.

Netflix doesn’t sell products, but they similarly credit the combination of contextually-aware recommendations and personalization (both powered by machine learning models) with saving them $1 billion a year. 

How does this work? By reducing one-month churn by several percentage points. In the crucial 60 to 90 seconds that a customer will spend browsing before quitting the app in frustration, Netflix serves up content most likely to appeal to people with similar tastes. And it works: 80% of what people watch comes from a recommendation.

By presenting customers with content they’re more likely to watch first, Netflix reduces churn. Even thumbnails are selected by a neural network based on predicted clickthrough. 

Say you’re not Amazon or Netflix, though. Say you’re part of a small team or a startup tight on resources. What can you do? 

The good news is that today’s marketers can similarly take advantage of AI-powered recommendation engines on a more affordable scale.

Not only is some of this tech available to your developers, but more than one tool exists right now that lets you deliver product and content recommendations based on audiences, their intents, and their interests. Their availability will only increase in the months and years to come.

AI-Enhanced PPC Campaigns

Like Amazon and Netflix, Google will stick AI almost anywhere, even before its fully baked—from Gmail’s Smart Compose, which lets you email platitudes at lightning speed, to the AI-based noise-canceling feature recently added to Google Meet. Then there’s BERT and RankBrain’s role in search, and TensorFlow’s application to encryption, translation, robotics, and more… (The ellipsis is well-earned here.)

For digital marketers, one of the most significant use cases for machine learning has been in Google Ads. In a couple of years, Google’s Smart Bidding technology has gone from a curiosity that, at best, once ruffled a few feathers to something that has PPC experts rethinking how they’re spending their time.

According to Workshop Digital’s Andrew Miller, this sort of tech has overturned a lot of longstanding PPC best practices.

AI and machine learning are enabling PPC analysts to spend less time manually crunching data and more time on strategy development. Our jobs are not in danger yet, but machines are allowing us to rethink and recast our roles as AI-driven tools augment our capacities.

Andrew Miller, Co-Founder, Workshop Digital

Smart Bidding was once a neat trick that couldn’t hold a candle to an experienced human. Experts like Andrew tried it out, and many wrote it off. (Some still do.) But many PPC’ers point out that automated bidding is increasingly reducing the time spent on manual bid management. 

Are agencies running for their lives because of AI-powered enhancements like Smart Bidding? Definitely not. But roles are changing as today’s PPC specialists spend more time on higher-level strategy and specialized growth tasks. For an industry that thrives on staying current, AI is a net positive.

Machine Learning and Conversion Rate Optimization

Roles are changing on the other end of the funnel too. When it comes to delivering more conversions from your landing pages, A/B testing is still very effective. But running tests also demands time, traffic, and expertise that marketers don’t always have. For small businesses especially, these minimum requirements put optimizing out of reach.

Enter artificial intelligence.

Around 2017, our R&D team realized machine learning has the potential to remove these hurdles from A/B testing—and free marketers to focus more on what humans do best. AI can even do things when testing that no human can do, making decisions on the fly about what version of a landing page is best for what type of visitor. 

We kept thinking, ‘it isn’t the page that converts. It’s the visitor.’ So we started looking at how different visitors convert across different landing pages. The team built and tested machine learning models to see how far we could extend this concept. Sure enough, it turned out that we could drive higher conversion rates beyond what would ever be possible with a one-page-fits all system. We started prototyping immediately.

Yosem Reichert-Sweet, CTO, Unbounce

After three years of training a machine learning model, and investigating different ways to apply it, we arrived at Smart Traffic, a feature that fulfills this promise and makes AI-powered optimization available to Unbounce customers.

Smart Traffic uses a contextual bandit algorithm to learn about your visitors based on attributes like location, device, browser, and timezone. Once you’ve created and published a few variants of your landing page—the only thing it can’t do at this point, frankly—Smart Traffic delivers each visitor to the one most likely to convert. 

There are two things that Smart Traffic shares with the best martech AI solutions today. First, our customers see results just by turning it on. (Nothing cuts through hype like actually getting stuff done.) And, second, it never stops learning, getting better at its task during the life of a campaign, and adapting to changes in traffic sources without human intervention. 

Editor’s note. If you’d like to learn more about how Smart Traffic works, take a look at our announcement or read a few stories about marketers who’ve used it. Garrett’s also got you covered with some advice on how to build landing page variants that’ll take advantage of it.

AI-Augmented Chatbots 

Chatbots are among the most common ways that your customers interact with AI. But even today’s strongest AI-powered chatbots are better at pulling relevant bits of data from specific contexts than they are detecting nuance. They’re humanlike, not human.

For business owners, however, this shouldn’t be a dealbreaker. Chatbots can be a lot more personable than asking your visitors to fill out a form, and interacting with them can foster engagement. They also let your customers self-serve, which saves everyone time.

I’ve always appreciated how Microsoft’s Purna Virji put it in an article for MarTech Today:

In one way, this is actually the future returning to the past. For years, internet users have sacrificed the personal touch for convenience. Now, we’re entering a world where we can have both. It’s the Personal Touch 2.0.

Purna Virji, Senior Manager, Global Engagement, Microsoft

Though fully custom chatbots are reserved for enterprise, small teams embrace the tech using solutions like Drift, MobileMonkey, Snatchbot, or even in Facebook Messenger. Juniper Research estimates that by 2023, retail chatbots will save the industry $11.5 billion in costs, and generate over $112 billion in revenue. 

Mitsuku, a five-time winner of the Loebner Prize, tells me she’s “the world’s most humanlike conversational AI.” But she doesn’t get my simple idiomatic question—unless, y’ know, she’s wicked sarcastic.

So, you’re unlikely to mistake a chatbot for another person long enough for true love to set in. But we shouldn’t define chatbots by the quirks and failures of today since they’re a rapidly developing technology. There’s a lot of promise in chatbots enhanced by natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis. One day soon, you might just meet the chatbot of your dreams. (I’m not judging.)

AI-Generated Content 

When content creators read about AI-generated content, they begin to sweat. Buzzy articles with titles like “Ten Ways AI is Going to Replace Your Content Team and Leave Them Bankrupt and Unloved”… Well, let’s just say they don’t exactly alleviate our imposter syndrome. 

Michelle Halsey is ultimately skeptical, though, about the prospect of being replaced by a machine. She writes,

Talented writers have no need to worry about automation stealing their gigs. At least, not as long as our clients are more interested in engaging their audience than they are sucking up to search engines.

Michelle Halsey, Content Blogger and Copywriter

Note the emphasis on talent here. It’s much more likely that AI will first tackle templated and repetitive work that hardly calls for persuasive writing anyway.  These days, applied AI can also smooth out the rough edges in your podcast, remove some of the pain from meticulously editing videos, and gut-check your sentences for clarity.

Given the danger of AI-generated content flooding the net with misinformation and spun content, it’s also a use case we’re still grappling with. For now, AI appears to offer solutions to the very problems it creates, as developers teach tools like GROVER to generate “neural fake news” to detect it.

GROVER generated this article based on my own words. It’s not good, but it might be a sign of things to come.

AI-Driven Data Insights

Every growth-minded marketer loves data. It’s an addiction. We bring it into every meeting and include it in every strategy session. We spend hours staring at spreadsheets, analytics, and reports, even if there’s way too much data to digest.

But even when you’ve got a hotline straight to your data team, recognizing patterns and pulling opportunities from massive swathes of data is hard. Artificial narrow intelligence helps with that too.

Recently, Unbounce explored the role that copy plays in landing page conversions through deep learning research, including a modified version of Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers).

Our Conversion Benchmark Report crunched the data from 34 thousand landing pages. It delivers insights about how reading ease, word count, and emotional language relate to conversion rates across 16 industries.

Sample benchmarks for home improvement landing pages.

The amount of data here (every word on every landing page) already put this analysis outside of human capability. But using machine learning allowed the team to dig deeper:

With data analysis and machine learning, we can take an unbiased look at what goes into a great landing page, and find opportunities for every landing page to improve. Machine learning allows us to look at significantly more data than a human being ever could, and find real, data-driven patterns that lead to higher conversion rates.

Tommy Levi, Director of Data Products, Unbounce

One question readers ask us about the report is why we included some niches (“pest control”) and not others (“model train enthusiasts”). The answer: the machine learning model generated these subcategories, on its own, from our aggregate data. Instead of imposing our arbitrary human bias, ML started with the data and sorted it from there.

Call me a nerd if you want, but that’s kinda mind-blowing. A lot of what’s happening in the Conversion Benchmark Report wouldn’t have been possible without pairing human intuition with the power of machines.

Want to see what our machine learning analysis revealed about your industry? Explore benchmarks and data-driven insights for 16 industries in Unbounce’s 2020 Conversion Benchmark Report.

AI Ain’t Perfect (and That’s Okay) 

If you’ve ever tripped over a Roomba or struggled to get Siri to do, well, anything sensible, you know artificial intelligence has a long way to go. (If you’re feeling masochistic, try asking Siri how to contact Unbounce. I dare ya.)

But does that mean it’s just hype? Not. A. Chance.

By any measure, we’re still in the early days of the long romance between AI and marketing. We’ve yet to see its full potential. The transformations that marketing is undergoing now aren’t always so easy to recognize or understand. As we’ve seen, applied artificial intelligence already penetrates our jobs, our strategies, and our campaigns on almost every level. 

You could just go with the flow, of course. Keep doin’ what you’re doing. Wait for AI to come to you and your stack. You’d be missing a trick, though.

Because by actively thinking about ways in which AI can enhance your marketing practice today, you’ve got the opportunity to get ahead of this thing. And by actively adopting it, you can start taking advantage of the freedom and new capabilities it delivers—before the competition gets there, as they inevitably will.

Why Unbounce Invested in AI for Your Landing Pages

Unbounce recently announced that we raised $52M (CDN) in funding to bring accessible AI-powered optimization to our customers. We’re investing now because we’re convinced using artificial intelligence to augment your marketing isn’t just aspirational, even for small businesses. It’s the future. This transformation is coming—really, it’s already here—and our customers will be a part of it.

The coming together of AI and marketing is tremendously valuable for businesses of all sizes. Whether it saves you time and money, highlights opportunities and patterns you didn’t know existed, or frees you to run slicker, higher-converting campaigns. As Rick Perreault, our co-founder and CEO, describes our ambition, the technology we’re developing today will eventually allow marketers to “set it and forget it through machine learning.”

It’s all part of our conversion intelligence mission.

What’s Conversion Intelligence?

At its core, it’s the conviction that the best use of AI lies in matching human savvy with the capabilities of a machine. It’s the idea that even small businesses—scratch that, especially small businesses—will stand to benefit from these enhancements. And it’s the belief that AI isn’t some far-flung concept—it’s an everyday tech that’s going to play an even more essential role in how you do marketing going forward.

Conversion intelligence is you, and your marketing know-how, augmented by machines. You can read more about it here.

In 2021 and beyond, AI insights will make it possible for you to create and optimize the highest-converting campaigns possible. Heck, in 2021 and beyond, AI just might rock the foundations of how you build, test, and optimize your landing pages.

Unbounce’s product teams are hard at work on these innovations, and we’re downright giddy with excitement about sharing progress and learnings with you here on the blog. 

Watch this space. The story continues.

from Digital https://unbounce.com/marketing-ai/artificial-intelligence-will-change-how-you-do-marketing-in-2021/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[kennethmontiveros]

Artificial Intelligence Will Change How You Do Marketing in 2021

How often do you reflect on the ways technology changes your life as a marketer? 

I’m not talking full-on paradigm shifts here. (“We do our marketing… on the internet.”) I mean the sly, step-by-way manner in which new tech slides neatly into your existing stack and subtly reframes the game on you. 

These changes don’t always alter your job in dramatic ways, but they eliminate the hassles and headaches. They may speed up your time to results, automate painful routines, and enable you to focus on what matters most. (Remember what collaborating on a document looked like ten years ago? Remember printed memos?)

Very rarely, these technologies also let you do things you’d never considered possible. 

No incoming martech makes a better case for this sort of incremental innovation than artificial intelligence. While new AI products are surely on the horizon—self-driving cars are coming any day now, possibly, maybe—AI’s most dramatic effects on your job today lies in adding new features across the tools that you’re already using. 

When you’re living it, of course, this type of change can be hard to notice. It’s like suddenly realizing you desperately need a haircut after three months in lockdown. 

But, one day soon, you’ll marvel at all the things AI sneakily helped pull off your plate. Because when marketing meets AI, magic happens. It can feel inevitable—but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to pay attention.

At Unbounce, we not only believe that applied AI is the future of marketing, we also think marketers tuned in to what’s happening now stand to benefit in a big way in 2020 and beyond.

To put it another way, marketing and AI is a love story for the ages.

Marketing and AI: A “Meet Cute”

For marketers interested in learning what AI can do for them, right now, debates and philosophy about artificial intelligence can be heady stuff. And, honestly, it’s kind of a distraction. So, instead of getting into the weeds, let’s start with the distinction that makes the most sense for marketers to learn: the one between AGI and ANI.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

Strong AI or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is what most people think of when someone says AI.

This technology replicates neural networks (not necessarily human ones) to perform highly sophisticated cognitive tasks. AI researchers typically take this one step further, though. According to them, AGI “controls itself autonomously, with its own thoughts, worries, feelings, strengths, weaknesses, and predispositions.” 

Teams across the world are working on AGI, but the closest to a consensus from researchers is that we might see it sometime within our lifetime. And some skeptics doubt we’ll ever see AGI, let alone more advanced forms.

Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI)

So handing over your marketing campaigns—or, gulp, your job—to an AI is decades or centuries away. But weak AI or Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), sometimes also called “applied” or “pragmatic” AI, is available to marketers today. Right now.

As the name suggests, ANI focuses on narrow problem-solving applications. In the world of marketing, this means taking on specific, repetitive tasks to deliver additional business value. It may learn and make decisions independent of your input, but mostly this AI tackles the work you’d rather not.

But here’s the thing: ANI might not challenge our fundamental conceptions in the same way AGI does, but it’s having a transformative impact on our lives (and jobs) nonetheless. It integrates so deeply into our everyday lives that we don’t have to think about it. Chances are good you’re already using ANI, whether you know it or not.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at a few places you might be encountering ANI today, either as a consumer or as part of your job. I admit that here that this list is not even close to comprehensive, but that’s my point: AI is slowly but surely filling all the cracks in our marketing stacks. (And, hey, that rhymes, so it must be true.)

Product Recommendation and Content Curation

Companies like Amazon and Netflix made fortunes by pointing people at more things they might want to buy. Much of these efforts are powered by sophisticated algorithms that let them match the right products and content with the right customer.

Amazon, for example, runs on a recommendation engine that’s been driving significant business value for more than 20 years. From the early days of user-based collaborative filtering (i.e., an algorithm making recommendations based on similarities between users) to more scalable solutions driven by a deep learning framework called DSSTNE.

DSSTNE is pronounced “destiny,” by the way—as in “buy this jewel-encrusted toilet brush… because it’s your destiny.” They’re not subtle. 

Today, customer recommendations are a very small portion of Amazon’s total investment in AI.

Netflix doesn’t sell products, but they similarly credit the combination of contextually-aware recommendations and personalization (both powered by machine learning models) with saving them $1 billion a year. 

How does this work? By reducing one-month churn by several percentage points. In the crucial 60 to 90 seconds that a customer will spend browsing before quitting the app in frustration, Netflix serves up content most likely to appeal to people with similar tastes. And it works: 80% of what people watch comes from a recommendation.

By presenting customers with content they’re more likely to watch first, Netflix reduces churn. Even thumbnails are selected by a neural network based on predicted clickthrough. 

Say you’re not Amazon or Netflix, though. Say you’re part of a small team or a startup tight on resources. What can you do? 

The good news is that today’s marketers can similarly take advantage of AI-powered recommendation engines on a more affordable scale.

Not only is some of this tech available to your developers, but more than one tool exists right now that lets you deliver product and content recommendations based on audiences, their intents, and their interests. Their availability will only increase in the months and years to come.

AI-Enhanced PPC Campaigns

Like Amazon and Netflix, Google will stick AI almost anywhere, even before its fully baked—from Gmail’s Smart Compose, which lets you email platitudes at lightning speed, to the AI-based noise-canceling feature recently added to Google Meet. Then there’s BERT and RankBrain’s role in search, and TensorFlow’s application to encryption, translation, robotics, and more… (The ellipsis is well-earned here.)

For digital marketers, one of the most significant use cases for machine learning has been in Google Ads. In a couple of years, Google’s Smart Bidding technology has gone from a curiosity that, at best, once ruffled a few feathers to something that has PPC experts rethinking how they’re spending their time.

According to Workshop Digital’s Andrew Miller, this sort of tech has overturned a lot of longstanding PPC best practices.

AI and machine learning are enabling PPC analysts to spend less time manually crunching data and more time on strategy development. Our jobs are not in danger yet, but machines are allowing us to rethink and recast our roles as AI-driven tools augment our capacities.

Andrew Miller, Co-Founder, Workshop Digital

Smart Bidding was once a neat trick that couldn’t hold a candle to an experienced human. Experts like Andrew tried it out, and many wrote it off. (Some still do.) But many PPC’ers point out that automated bidding is increasingly reducing the time spent on manual bid management. 

Are agencies running for their lives because of AI-powered enhancements like Smart Bidding? Definitely not. But roles are changing as today’s PPC specialists spend more time on higher-level strategy and specialized growth tasks. For an industry that thrives on staying current, AI is a net positive.

Machine Learning and Conversion Rate Optimization

Roles are changing on the other end of the funnel too. When it comes to delivering more conversions from your landing pages, A/B testing is still very effective. But running tests also demands time, traffic, and expertise that marketers don’t always have. For small businesses especially, these minimum requirements put optimizing out of reach.

Enter artificial intelligence.

Around 2017, our R&D team realized machine learning has the potential to remove these hurdles from A/B testing—and free marketers to focus more on what humans do best. AI can even do things when testing that no human can do, making decisions on the fly about what version of a landing page is best for what type of visitor. 

We kept thinking, ‘it isn’t the page that converts. It’s the visitor.’ So we started looking at how different visitors convert across different landing pages. The team built and tested machine learning models to see how far we could extend this concept. Sure enough, it turned out that we could drive higher conversion rates beyond what would ever be possible with a one-page-fits all system. We started prototyping immediately.

Yosem Reichert-Sweet, CTO, Unbounce

After three years of training a machine learning model, and investigating different ways to apply it, we arrived at Smart Traffic, a feature that fulfills this promise and makes AI-powered optimization available to Unbounce customers.

Smart Traffic uses a contextual bandit algorithm to learn about your visitors based on attributes like location, device, browser, and timezone. Once you’ve created and published a few variants of your landing page—the only thing it can’t do at this point, frankly—Smart Traffic delivers each visitor to the one most likely to convert. 

There are two things that Smart Traffic shares with the best martech AI solutions today. First, our customers see results just by turning it on. (Nothing cuts through hype like actually getting stuff done.) And, second, it never stops learning, getting better at its task during the life of a campaign, and adapting to changes in traffic sources without human intervention. 

Editor’s note. If you’d like to learn more about how Smart Traffic works, take a look at our announcement or read a few stories about marketers who’ve used it. Garrett’s also got you covered with some advice on how to build landing page variants that’ll take advantage of it.

AI-Augmented Chatbots 

Chatbots are among the most common ways that your customers interact with AI. But even today’s strongest AI-powered chatbots are better at pulling relevant bits of data from specific contexts than they are detecting nuance. They’re humanlike, not human.

For business owners, however, this shouldn’t be a dealbreaker. Chatbots can be a lot more personable than asking your visitors to fill out a form, and interacting with them can foster engagement. They also let your customers self-serve, which saves everyone time.

I’ve always appreciated how Microsoft’s Purna Virji put it in an article for MarTech Today:

In one way, this is actually the future returning to the past. For years, internet users have sacrificed the personal touch for convenience. Now, we’re entering a world where we can have both. It’s the Personal Touch 2.0.

Purna Virji, Senior Manager, Global Engagement, Microsoft

Though fully custom chatbots are reserved for enterprise, small teams embrace the tech using solutions like Drift, MobileMonkey, Snatchbot, or even in Facebook Messenger. Juniper Research estimates that by 2023, retail chatbots will save the industry $11.5 billion in costs, and generate over $112 billion in revenue. 

Mitsuku, a five-time winner of the Loebner Prize, tells me she’s “the world’s most humanlike conversational AI.” But she doesn’t get my simple idiomatic question—unless, y’ know, she’s wicked sarcastic.

So, you’re unlikely to mistake a chatbot for another person long enough for true love to set in. But we shouldn’t define chatbots by the quirks and failures of today since they’re a rapidly developing technology. There’s a lot of promise in chatbots enhanced by natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis. One day soon, you might just meet the chatbot of your dreams. (I’m not judging.)

AI-Generated Content 

When content creators read about AI-generated content, they begin to sweat. Buzzy articles with titles like “Ten Ways AI is Going to Replace Your Content Team and Leave Them Bankrupt and Unloved”… Well, let’s just say they don’t exactly alleviate our imposter syndrome. 

Michelle Halsey is ultimately skeptical, though, about the prospect of being replaced by a machine. She writes,

Talented writers have no need to worry about automation stealing their gigs. At least, not as long as our clients are more interested in engaging their audience than they are sucking up to search engines.

Michelle Halsey, Content Blogger and Copywriter

Note the emphasis on talent here. It’s much more likely that AI will first tackle templated and repetitive work that hardly calls for persuasive writing anyway.  These days, applied AI can also smooth out the rough edges in your podcast, remove some of the pain from meticulously editing videos, and gut-check your sentences for clarity.

Given the danger of AI-generated content flooding the net with misinformation and spun content, it’s also a use case we’re still grappling with. For now, AI appears to offer solutions to the very problems it creates, as developers teach tools like GROVER to generate “neural fake news” to detect it.

GROVER generated this article based on my own words. It’s not good, but it might be a sign of things to come.

AI-Driven Data Insights

Every growth-minded marketer loves data. It’s an addiction. We bring it into every meeting and include it in every strategy session. We spend hours staring at spreadsheets, analytics, and reports, even if there’s way too much data to digest.

But even when you’ve got a hotline straight to your data team, recognizing patterns and pulling opportunities from massive swathes of data is hard. Artificial narrow intelligence helps with that too.

Recently, Unbounce explored the role that copy plays in landing page conversions through deep learning research, including a modified version of Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers).

Our Conversion Benchmark Report crunched the data from 34 thousand landing pages. It delivers insights about how reading ease, word count, and emotional language relate to conversion rates across 16 industries.

Sample benchmarks for home improvement landing pages.

The amount of data here (every word on every landing page) already put this analysis outside of human capability. But using machine learning allowed the team to dig deeper:

With data analysis and machine learning, we can take an unbiased look at what goes into a great landing page, and find opportunities for every landing page to improve. Machine learning allows us to look at significantly more data than a human being ever could, and find real, data-driven patterns that lead to higher conversion rates.

Tommy Levi, Director of Data Products, Unbounce

One question readers ask us about the report is why we included some niches (“pest control”) and not others (“model train enthusiasts”). The answer: the machine learning model generated these subcategories, on its own, from our aggregate data. Instead of imposing our arbitrary human bias, ML started with the data and sorted it from there.

Call me a nerd if you want, but that’s kinda mind-blowing. A lot of what’s happening in the Conversion Benchmark Report wouldn’t have been possible without pairing human intuition with the power of machines.

Want to see what our machine learning analysis revealed about your industry? Explore benchmarks and data-driven insights for 16 industries in Unbounce’s 2020 Conversion Benchmark Report.

AI Ain’t Perfect (and That’s Okay) 

If you’ve ever tripped over a Roomba or struggled to get Siri to do, well, anything sensible, you know artificial intelligence has a long way to go. (If you’re feeling masochistic, try asking Siri how to contact Unbounce. I dare ya.)

But does that mean it’s just hype? Not. A. Chance.

By any measure, we’re still in the early days of the long romance between AI and marketing. We’ve yet to see its full potential. The transformations that marketing is undergoing now aren’t always so easy to recognize or understand. As we’ve seen, applied artificial intelligence already penetrates our jobs, our strategies, and our campaigns on almost every level. 

You could just go with the flow, of course. Keep doin’ what you’re doing. Wait for AI to come to you and your stack. You’d be missing a trick, though.

Because by actively thinking about ways in which AI can enhance your marketing practice today, you’ve got the opportunity to get ahead of this thing. And by actively adopting it, you can start taking advantage of the freedom and new capabilities it delivers—before the competition gets there, as they inevitably will.

Why Unbounce Invested in AI for Your Landing Pages

Unbounce recently announced that we raised $52M (CDN) in funding to bring accessible AI-powered optimization to our customers. We’re investing now because we’re convinced using artificial intelligence to augment your marketing isn’t just aspirational, even for small businesses. It’s the future. This transformation is coming—really, it’s already here—and our customers will be a part of it.

The coming together of AI and marketing is tremendously valuable for businesses of all sizes. Whether it saves you time and money, highlights opportunities and patterns you didn’t know existed, or frees you to run slicker, higher-converting campaigns. As Rick Perreault, our co-founder and CEO, describes our ambition, the technology we’re developing today will eventually allow marketers to “set it and forget it through machine learning.”

It’s all part of our conversion intelligence mission.

What’s Conversion Intelligence?

At its core, it’s the conviction that the best use of AI lies in matching human savvy with the capabilities of a machine. It’s the idea that even small businesses—scratch that, especially small businesses—will stand to benefit from these enhancements. And it’s the belief that AI isn’t some far-flung concept—it’s an everyday tech that’s going to play an even more essential role in how you do marketing going forward.

Conversion intelligence is you, and your marketing know-how, augmented by machines. You can read more about it here.

In 2021 and beyond, AI insights will make it possible for you to create and optimize the highest-converting campaigns possible. Heck, in 2021 and beyond, AI just might rock the foundations of how you build, test, and optimize your landing pages.

Unbounce’s product teams are hard at work on these innovations, and we’re downright giddy with excitement about sharing progress and learnings with you here on the blog. 

Watch this space. The story continues.

Artificial Intelligence Will Change How You Do Marketing in 2021 published first on http://nickpontemktg.blogspot.com/

[annaxkeating]

Artificial Intelligence Will Change How You Do Marketing in 2021

How often do you reflect on the ways technology changes your life as a marketer? 

I’m not talking full-on paradigm shifts here. (“We do our marketing… on the internet.”) I mean the sly, step-by-way manner in which new tech slides neatly into your existing stack and subtly reframes the game on you. 

These changes don’t always alter your job in dramatic ways, but they eliminate the hassles and headaches. They may speed up your time to results, automate painful routines, and enable you to focus on what matters most. (Remember what collaborating on a document looked like ten years ago? Remember printed memos?)

Very rarely, these technologies also let you do things you’d never considered possible. 

No incoming martech makes a better case for this sort of incremental innovation than artificial intelligence. While new AI products are surely on the horizon—self-driving cars are coming any day now, possibly, maybe—AI’s most dramatic effects on your job today lies in adding new features across the tools that you’re already using. 

When you’re living it, of course, this type of change can be hard to notice. It’s like suddenly realizing you desperately need a haircut after three months in lockdown. 

But, one day soon, you’ll marvel at all the things AI sneakily helped pull off your plate. Because when marketing meets AI, magic happens. It can feel inevitable—but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to pay attention.

At Unbounce, we not only believe that applied AI is the future of marketing, we also think marketers tuned in to what’s happening now stand to benefit in a big way in 2020 and beyond.

To put it another way, marketing and AI is a love story for the ages.

Marketing and AI: A “Meet Cute”

For marketers interested in learning what AI can do for them, right now, debates and philosophy about artificial intelligence can be heady stuff. And, honestly, it’s kind of a distraction. So, instead of getting into the weeds, let’s start with the distinction that makes the most sense for marketers to learn: the one between AGI and ANI.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

Strong AI or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is what most people think of when someone says AI.

This technology replicates neural networks (not necessarily human ones) to perform highly sophisticated cognitive tasks. AI researchers typically take this one step further, though. According to them, AGI “controls itself autonomously, with its own thoughts, worries, feelings, strengths, weaknesses, and predispositions.” 

Teams across the world are working on AGI, but the closest to a consensus from researchers is that we might see it sometime within our lifetime. And some skeptics doubt we’ll ever see AGI, let alone more advanced forms.

Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI)

So handing over your marketing campaigns—or, gulp, your job—to an AI is decades or centuries away. But weak AI or Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), sometimes also called “applied” or “pragmatic” AI, is available to marketers today. Right now.

As the name suggests, ANI focuses on narrow problem-solving applications. In the world of marketing, this means taking on specific, repetitive tasks to deliver additional business value. It may learn and make decisions independent of your input, but mostly this AI tackles the work you’d rather not.

But here’s the thing: ANI might not challenge our fundamental conceptions in the same way AGI does, but it’s having a transformative impact on our lives (and jobs) nonetheless. It integrates so deeply into our everyday lives that we don’t have to think about it. Chances are good you’re already using ANI, whether you know it or not.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at a few places you might be encountering ANI today, either as a consumer or as part of your job. I admit that here that this list is not even close to comprehensive, but that’s my point: AI is slowly but surely filling all the cracks in our marketing stacks. (And, hey, that rhymes, so it must be true.)

Product Recommendation and Content Curation

Companies like Amazon and Netflix made fortunes by pointing people at more things they might want to buy. Much of these efforts are powered by sophisticated algorithms that let them match the right products and content with the right customer.

Amazon, for example, runs on a recommendation engine that’s been driving significant business value for more than 20 years. From the early days of user-based collaborative filtering (i.e., an algorithm making recommendations based on similarities between users) to more scalable solutions driven by a deep learning framework called DSSTNE.

DSSTNE is pronounced “destiny,” by the way—as in “buy this jewel-encrusted toilet brush… because it’s your destiny.” They’re not subtle. 

Today, customer recommendations are a very small portion of Amazon’s total investment in AI.

Netflix doesn’t sell products, but they similarly credit the combination of contextually-aware recommendations and personalization (both powered by machine learning models) with saving them $1 billion a year. 

How does this work? By reducing one-month churn by several percentage points. In the crucial 60 to 90 seconds that a customer will spend browsing before quitting the app in frustration, Netflix serves up content most likely to appeal to people with similar tastes. And it works: 80% of what people watch comes from a recommendation.

By presenting customers with content they’re more likely to watch first, Netflix reduces churn. Even thumbnails are selected by a neural network based on predicted clickthrough. 

Say you’re not Amazon or Netflix, though. Say you’re part of a small team or a startup tight on resources. What can you do? 

The good news is that today’s marketers can similarly take advantage of AI-powered recommendation engines on a more affordable scale.

Not only is some of this tech available to your developers, but more than one tool exists right now that lets you deliver product and content recommendations based on audiences, their intents, and their interests. Their availability will only increase in the months and years to come.

AI-Enhanced PPC Campaigns

Like Amazon and Netflix, Google will stick AI almost anywhere, even before its fully baked—from Gmail’s Smart Compose, which lets you email platitudes at lightning speed, to the AI-based noise-canceling feature recently added to Google Meet. Then there’s BERT and RankBrain’s role in search, and TensorFlow’s application to encryption, translation, robotics, and more… (The ellipsis is well-earned here.)

For digital marketers, one of the most significant use cases for machine learning has been in Google Ads. In a couple of years, Google’s Smart Bidding technology has gone from a curiosity that, at best, once ruffled a few feathers to something that has PPC experts rethinking how they’re spending their time.

According to Workshop Digital’s Andrew Miller, this sort of tech has overturned a lot of longstanding PPC best practices.

AI and machine learning are enabling PPC analysts to spend less time manually crunching data and more time on strategy development. Our jobs are not in danger yet, but machines are allowing us to rethink and recast our roles as AI-driven tools augment our capacities.

Andrew Miller, Co-Founder, Workshop Digital

Smart Bidding was once a neat trick that couldn’t hold a candle to an experienced human. Experts like Andrew tried it out, and many wrote it off. (Some still do.) But many PPC’ers point out that automated bidding is increasingly reducing the time spent on manual bid management. 

Are agencies running for their lives because of AI-powered enhancements like Smart Bidding? Definitely not. But roles are changing as today’s PPC specialists spend more time on higher-level strategy and specialized growth tasks. For an industry that thrives on staying current, AI is a net positive.

Machine Learning and Conversion Rate Optimization

Roles are changing on the other end of the funnel too. When it comes to delivering more conversions from your landing pages, A/B testing is still very effective. But running tests also demands time, traffic, and expertise that marketers don’t always have. For small businesses especially, these minimum requirements put optimizing out of reach.

Enter artificial intelligence.

Around 2017, our R&D team realized machine learning has the potential to remove these hurdles from A/B testing—and free marketers to focus more on what humans do best. AI can even do things when testing that no human can do, making decisions on the fly about what version of a landing page is best for what type of visitor. 

We kept thinking, ‘it isn’t the page that converts. It’s the visitor.’ So we started looking at how different visitors convert across different landing pages. The team built and tested machine learning models to see how far we could extend this concept. Sure enough, it turned out that we could drive higher conversion rates beyond what would ever be possible with a one-page-fits all system. We started prototyping immediately.

Yosem Reichert-Sweet, CTO, Unbounce

After three years of training a machine learning model, and investigating different ways to apply it, we arrived at Smart Traffic, a feature that fulfills this promise and makes AI-powered optimization available to Unbounce customers.

Smart Traffic uses a contextual bandit algorithm to learn about your visitors based on attributes like location, device, browser, and timezone. Once you’ve created and published a few variants of your landing page—the only thing it can’t do at this point, frankly—Smart Traffic delivers each visitor to the one most likely to convert. 

There are two things that Smart Traffic shares with the best martech AI solutions today. First, our customers see results just by turning it on. (Nothing cuts through hype like actually getting stuff done.) And, second, it never stops learning, getting better at its task during the life of a campaign, and adapting to changes in traffic sources without human intervention. 

Editor’s note. If you’d like to learn more about how Smart Traffic works, take a look at our announcement or read a few stories about marketers who’ve used it. Garrett’s also got you covered with some advice on how to build landing page variants that’ll take advantage of it.

AI-Augmented Chatbots 

Chatbots are among the most common ways that your customers interact with AI. But even today’s strongest AI-powered chatbots are better at pulling relevant bits of data from specific contexts than they are detecting nuance. They’re humanlike, not human.

For business owners, however, this shouldn’t be a dealbreaker. Chatbots can be a lot more personable than asking your visitors to fill out a form, and interacting with them can foster engagement. They also let your customers self-serve, which saves everyone time.

I’ve always appreciated how Microsoft’s Purna Virji put it in an article for MarTech Today:

In one way, this is actually the future returning to the past. For years, internet users have sacrificed the personal touch for convenience. Now, we’re entering a world where we can have both. It’s the Personal Touch 2.0.

Purna Virji, Senior Manager, Global Engagement, Microsoft

Though fully custom chatbots are reserved for enterprise, small teams embrace the tech using solutions like Drift, MobileMonkey, Snatchbot, or even in Facebook Messenger. Juniper Research estimates that by 2023, retail chatbots will save the industry $11.5 billion in costs, and generate over $112 billion in revenue. 

Mitsuku, a five-time winner of the Loebner Prize, tells me she’s “the world’s most humanlike conversational AI.” But she doesn’t get my simple idiomatic question—unless, y’ know, she’s wicked sarcastic.

So, you’re unlikely to mistake a chatbot for another person long enough for true love to set in. But we shouldn’t define chatbots by the quirks and failures of today since they’re a rapidly developing technology. There’s a lot of promise in chatbots enhanced by natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis. One day soon, you might just meet the chatbot of your dreams. (I’m not judging.)

AI-Generated Content 

When content creators read about AI-generated content, they begin to sweat. Buzzy articles with titles like “Ten Ways AI is Going to Replace Your Content Team and Leave Them Bankrupt and Unloved”… Well, let’s just say they don’t exactly alleviate our imposter syndrome. 

Michelle Halsey is ultimately skeptical, though, about the prospect of being replaced by a machine. She writes,

Talented writers have no need to worry about automation stealing their gigs. At least, not as long as our clients are more interested in engaging their audience than they are sucking up to search engines.

Michelle Halsey, Content Blogger and Copywriter

Note the emphasis on talent here. It’s much more likely that AI will first tackle templated and repetitive work that hardly calls for persuasive writing anyway.  These days, applied AI can also smooth out the rough edges in your podcast, remove some of the pain from meticulously editing videos, and gut-check your sentences for clarity.

Given the danger of AI-generated content flooding the net with misinformation and spun content, it’s also a use case we’re still grappling with. For now, AI appears to offer solutions to the very problems it creates, as developers teach tools like GROVER to generate “neural fake news” to detect it.

GROVER generated this article based on my own words. It’s not good, but it might be a sign of things to come.

AI-Driven Data Insights

Every growth-minded marketer loves data. It’s an addiction. We bring it into every meeting and include it in every strategy session. We spend hours staring at spreadsheets, analytics, and reports, even if there’s way too much data to digest.

But even when you’ve got a hotline straight to your data team, recognizing patterns and pulling opportunities from massive swathes of data is hard. Artificial narrow intelligence helps with that too.

Recently, Unbounce explored the role that copy plays in landing page conversions through deep learning research, including a modified version of Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers).

Our Conversion Benchmark Report crunched the data from 34 thousand landing pages. It delivers insights about how reading ease, word count, and emotional language relate to conversion rates across 16 industries.

Sample benchmarks for home improvement landing pages.

The amount of data here (every word on every landing page) already put this analysis outside of human capability. But using machine learning allowed the team to dig deeper:

With data analysis and machine learning, we can take an unbiased look at what goes into a great landing page, and find opportunities for every landing page to improve. Machine learning allows us to look at significantly more data than a human being ever could, and find real, data-driven patterns that lead to higher conversion rates.

Tommy Levi, Director of Data Products, Unbounce

One question readers ask us about the report is why we included some niches (“pest control”) and not others (“model train enthusiasts”). The answer: the machine learning model generated these subcategories, on its own, from our aggregate data. Instead of imposing our arbitrary human bias, ML started with the data and sorted it from there.

Call me a nerd if you want, but that’s kinda mind-blowing. A lot of what’s happening in the Conversion Benchmark Report wouldn’t have been possible without pairing human intuition with the power of machines.

Want to see what our machine learning analysis revealed about your industry? Explore benchmarks and data-driven insights for 16 industries in Unbounce’s 2020 Conversion Benchmark Report.

AI Ain’t Perfect (and That’s Okay) 

If you’ve ever tripped over a Roomba or struggled to get Siri to do, well, anything sensible, you know artificial intelligence has a long way to go. (If you’re feeling masochistic, try asking Siri how to contact Unbounce. I dare ya.)

But does that mean it’s just hype? Not. A. Chance.

By any measure, we’re still in the early days of the long romance between AI and marketing. We’ve yet to see its full potential. The transformations that marketing is undergoing now aren’t always so easy to recognize or understand. As we’ve seen, applied artificial intelligence already penetrates our jobs, our strategies, and our campaigns on almost every level. 

You could just go with the flow, of course. Keep doin’ what you’re doing. Wait for AI to come to you and your stack. You’d be missing a trick, though.

Because by actively thinking about ways in which AI can enhance your marketing practice today, you’ve got the opportunity to get ahead of this thing. And by actively adopting it, you can start taking advantage of the freedom and new capabilities it delivers—before the competition gets there, as they inevitably will.

Why Unbounce Invested in AI for Your Landing Pages

Unbounce recently announced that we raised $52M (CDN) in funding to bring accessible AI-powered optimization to our customers. We’re investing now because we’re convinced using artificial intelligence to augment your marketing isn’t just aspirational, even for small businesses. It’s the future. This transformation is coming—really, it’s already here—and our customers will be a part of it.

The coming together of AI and marketing is tremendously valuable for businesses of all sizes. Whether it saves you time and money, highlights opportunities and patterns you didn’t know existed, or frees you to run slicker, higher-converting campaigns. As Rick Perreault, our co-founder and CEO, describes our ambition, the technology we’re developing today will eventually allow marketers to “set it and forget it through machine learning.”

It’s all part of our conversion intelligence mission.

What’s Conversion Intelligence?

At its core, it’s the conviction that the best use of AI lies in matching human savvy with the capabilities of a machine. It’s the idea that even small businesses—scratch that, especially small businesses—will stand to benefit from these enhancements. And it’s the belief that AI isn’t some far-flung concept—it’s an everyday tech that’s going to play an even more essential role in how you do marketing going forward.

Conversion intelligence is you, and your marketing know-how, augmented by machines. You can read more about it here.

In 2021 and beyond, AI insights will make it possible for you to create and optimize the highest-converting campaigns possible. Heck, in 2021 and beyond, AI just might rock the foundations of how you build, test, and optimize your landing pages.

Unbounce’s product teams are hard at work on these innovations, and we’re downright giddy with excitement about sharing progress and learnings with you here on the blog. 

Watch this space. The story continues.

from Digital https://unbounce.com/marketing-ai/artificial-intelligence-will-change-how-you-do-marketing-in-2021/ via http://www.rssmix.com/