Get Schooled: Expert Bob Steelhammer Talks Digital Marketing

Artificial Intelligence. Digital Marketing. These two buzz-worthy topics are making headlines, but they’re also rife with potential for private equity portfolio companies. So how can you use digital engagement to engage customers with your brand? And, more importantly, how can you utilize it to drive EBITDA growth?

Beckway recently sat down with Bob Steelhammer, a digital marketing expert whose cutting-edge insights have been sought-after by Sun Capital Partners, AT&T, IBM, and even Apple—where he led the marketing strategies behind the first iPhone.

Bob says there are a variety of inbound, or digital marketing, channels that you can use to increase traffic to your website and create a one-to-one relationship with your customers. They include SEO, PPC, Email Marketing and Social Media, to name a few. But recently, companies have upped the stakes and started using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to generate marketing data to improve and even predict what their customers want next.

You may recognize these forms of Digital Marketing Artificial Intelligence

  • Chatbots: Machines that have been programmed to ask you a question if you’ve been on a website for a while
  • Personal Assistants, like Siri and Alexa, which use speech recognition. These applications actually “learn” from all of the data they collect
  • AI that powers search engines, such as Tay by Microsoft—you may not hear much about it in the news, but it’s going strong behind the scenes
  • In the automotive industry, Autopilot by Tesla actually gathers data from your car and feeds it back to Tesla, to help designers develop autonomous driving
  • Big Machines, like IBM’s Watson, use machine learning, speech and even physical observation data from their customers

So what’s the takeaway? Bob says Artificial Intelligence is still in its infancy stages, but he predicts we’ll soon begin to see machines computing the data they have received and then start “self-learning.” Imagine that. You should be aware of these fantastic advancements and speak with your clients, so you can harness them for your own profit potential.