With time and technology advancing, the later is getting more human. We are living in an era where we can speak to our smartphones and they would understand. Not just understand, but also respond.
Only a decade back, this all seemed impossible and probably, no one imagined this life.
With this, we are acknowledging a new aspect to the digital world – Natural language Processing (NLP).
We are talking to machines!
Natural Language Processing stems from AI and is set to change the world. It is that side of the technology that understands the human voice, dialects and their meaning.
They mine out the most relevant search results that help enhance user experience. Also, studies show that NLP’s market share is going to skyrocket to 16.07 billion in the coming year.
Now, this is great data. But, you might want to know why marketers and big giants are investing in NLP.
How does NLP work?
This disruptive technology works by understanding human language and converting that to the computer one. Therefore, making the computer understand what we want to say. One of the best examples to fully understand this is – Siri.
As this explains how a machine can understand human language, convert that into the machine language, churn out data and get back with the language human can understand.
This way, NLP has proved to be a big segment of artificial intelligence and the 4th Industrial revolution.
Businesses can use this to a great extent and inculcate this technology for enhanced outcomes.
What NLP does in digital marketing?
In fact, marketing and NLP can be closely linked. If not more, both of them do have a thing in common and that is – understanding customers.
But before we reach any conclusion, let us hover over the facts and figures. And, understand this disruptive technology.
According to stats,
There are 500 million tweets a day and 800 million monthly active Instagram users. And, more than 90 percent of them are younger than 35.
There is a staggering amount of data on the internet today. And it is generated every single minute.
While it is crucial for companies to get insights and use this big chunk of data, it is equally daunting. How would one even collect this data? And, how to use them?
Thanks to the geniuses who have come up with the latest technologies, that can actually help chunk out the useable data.
Now, let us look at some of the NLP driven applications that have bought a great change in the industry:
- Extract information from the website. Like, price, date, location, names, products, etc.
- Google translate, personal assistants, like: Amazon Alexa, Google assistant, Facebook M, Apple’s Siri).
- Identifying frauds or faults related to finance.
- Keyword search, finding synonyms, spell check, search, etc.
NLP POWERED APPLICATIONS FOR DIGITAL MARKETING:
This disruptive technology, if inculcated in digital marketing, can reap immense benefits. Let us see what are the applications that are powered by NLP and how can they enhance the digital world:
1.Social listening:
When your brand is out in the social platform, you need to keep a check over there.
Social listening means to see, what responses your brand is getting. It’s very important to know, how the consumers are reacting to your brand and are they reacting in a positive manner or not.
This could include customer feedbacks, your brand’s direct mention, using particular keywords, competitors or industry.
But, the catch is, there is just so much data on the internet!
This makes it extremely tiresome for the marketers to mine out actual data and use it for their brand’s betterment.
Now, here comes our hero, NLP. The tools used to extract information from social media, is actually NLP.
It recognizes when people comment with what they are trying to convey.
For example, it takes words like “hate” or “bad” as negative comments while “awesome” and “love” as positive ones.
Though a particular word would have multiple meaning and that is also kept in check with the advancement in NLP.
The technology is improving every single day to better understand the emotions behind the texts. This is vital to every business having their social media presence.
2. Chatbots:
This is yet another outcome of the NLP technology. The world would have not seen chatbots without NLP.
Chatbots are effective, as they reply to customer’s queries as quickly as possible, and at the same time, understand what they are trying to convey.
The automated replies are smart enough to counter people’s problems and provide them with efficient responses.
Moreover, they can speak to the consumers 24×7, so less of losing consumers now. Great!
The more advanced versions understand “ty” as “thank you” and not auto-correct it to “tie”. This way, chatbots are getting more human and understanding human behavior like never before. This is a great way to build customer relations and provide them with pleasurable user experience.
3. Search Algorithm:
They love to experiment and adapt to new change very quickly. And as marketers, you should be doing the exact same.
The way a user’s search has evolved and in the recent past only is drastic and worth considering.
The Internet has witnessed two major changes recently, that has revolutionized searches, these are:
- voice search; and
- Google’s algorithm – RankBrain
Also, Google reveals that 70% of the Google Assistant searches were conversational and had natural tone and were also different from what we usually search in the search box.
Now, this insight gives us a sign that we need to curate content according to what caters best to their problems.
The content needs to be modified in the sense that we need to use more of conversational tone, rather than focusing majorly on keywords.
4. Email marketing:
Stats show that on every $1 you spend on email marketing you can expect returns on an average of $32.
This is how important email marketing is for your business. And, with the NLP powered applications, you can curate emails to match consumer’s preferences and taste. There are not much, but definitely reliable applications like Persado, Boomtrain and Phrasee.
What these tools do is, identify:
- The time when most people open their emails
- Which headlines get more clicks
- Which content attracts more consumers
- What should be the frequency
And, a lot more than that. Wouldn’t it be a great thing that someone told you all about your consumers?
Moreover, these tools help in getting consumers converted as well. These tools, with the collected information, curate a personalized content for your consumers that would connect to them.
As we are saying this time and again:
Content and digital marketing are going to be all about being personal.
The more you connect with your consumers, the more you grow your business.
5. User-experience (UX):
As we already said, that with the abundance of data given on the web today, it becomes difficult for marketers to mine out the gold.
Artificial intelligence is important to make user-experience, more human. After analyzing how consumers interact with the application or website, here are a few attributes that it takes into the account:
- Location
- Demographic
- Interaction on website
- Time spent on the site
- Preferences
And a lot more than that. After collecting data of all these aspects, AI recommends the considerable changes to be made.
This tells the loopholes and points where better content of UX design can be made available.
A survey conducted in 2017 revealed that 33% of marketers use AI to personalize content for their audience. And, upon being asked about the benefits, 63% stated that it increased conversion rates and enhanced the consumer experience.
So these were some ways Artificial intelligence is penetrating into our lives. And that time is not far when we would be completely dependent on these technologies.
Some of the NLP perks we got to know through this article are:
- Personalized consumer experience
- More engagement rates
- Increased ROI
- Enhanced consumer relations
- Personalized content that CONVERTS
- Making the content more human
- How is NLP changing digital marketing
- That there is immense data on the web that can be efficiently used
- Filtering useful data amongst the big data
- NLP powered applications
Let us know in the comment section below, what do you think of it. And also, how many applications of the above, do you already use.
Digital marketing is dynamic and to keep our foot in the market, constantly, we need to gear up.
