Do Something With Your Marketing: Human Transfer Learning

In today's episode, I want to encourage you to think about human transfer learning. Now, what in the world does that mean? Well, in the machine learning and AI world, there's this concept called transfer learning, in which we take a model that we've built in one domain, industry, whatever, pick it up, transfer it to a new environment, and then begin retraining it. And the reason you do this is that in transfer learning, it saves you an enormous amount of time. You don't have to build a brand new model from scratch, you don't have to have hundreds of millions of lines of data.

You can take a pre-existing model that's good or best in class in one place and move it to another. The example often given in machine learning is that if you were to take the standard approach for machine learning, in which you told a machine catch the ball, right, and there was a red ball, the machine would learn and build an algorithm that could catch a red ball. And then when you threw a green ball at it, no idea what to do. In a number of the Facebook groups I am in for uh marketing, particularly digital and social media, every week somebody's like, Does anyone have any best practices for B2B companies like this or fashion companies or perfume companies or this or that or the other thing? And what people are not realizing is that there are transfer learning opportunities, human transfer learning opportunities that they could be doing.

Think about again the example red ball versus blue ball or tennis ball versus baseball. Not a huge difference, right? You can learn to catch one if you learn to catch one, you can learn to catch another one, and you don't have to completely retrain your mind to do that. If you work in, for example, um solar power marketing for residential solar power, you are trying to get people to buy a system that they stick on their house and that generates power for them, and that it has a payoff period, right? What else do you know about for people who buy something that has a reasonably long payoff period, but does eventually in many cases pay itself off and is a net benefit to those people?

Well, think about the transfer learning models you could use, the human ones. You could look at people who uh buy houses because a house is something that you buy, right? And it has a long payoff period, but it provides benefit to you right away. So does a car, so does a swimming pool, so does uh uh an expansion like a sunroom on your deck, so does a camper. All of these things are similar purchase models, right?

People go through a similar path to purchase. So if you are looking at your industry and like, I can't find any best practices for my industry, cool. Find an industry or a type of business that has a very, very, very close process to what you do and transfer the best practices from that. If you're selling solar panels, again, look at the process of selling a car. What works really well.

Use the social media monitoring tool of your toy your of your choice. Like I use Talk Walker. Use that and look at the best performing posts for car sales or car dealerships and see okay, what do they have in common? What can I transfer into my industry? Because maybe my industry doesn't have that.

Uh people like to talk in, for example, in highly regulated industries. Oh, well, you know, we can't use any lessons from like B2C. Maybe, maybe not. If you are in, say, healthcare and you have uh or pharmaceuticals and you have a very you're highly regulated, what other highly regulated industries are there out there that are doing a really good job in their space? What can you transfer from their domain to yours?

By embracing human transfer learning and finding best practices that you can literally pick up and move around, you broaden the opportunities, you broaden the scope of what constitutes a best practice, whether it's digital marketing, email marketing, social media, YouTube, anything along those lines by broadening your scope but still looking at industries that perform for the customer in very similar ways. You can pick up some innovative best practices, bring them into your industry, and be successful with them. So this week's do something with your marketing is to think about the human transfer learning. What can you transfer into your industry from other best practices elsewhere and apply that uh to what you do? So give that a shot.

Uh, as always, please subscribe to the YouTube channel and to the newsletter, and I'll talk to you soon. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.