Promotion targeting and automated data science, where do I even start?

Promotional planning is the process of optimizing marketing tools, strategies, and resources to promote a product or service to generate demand and meet set objectives. Artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to effectively plan promotional events, measuring their outcomes, and adjusting as necessary to achieve growth.

Targeted marketing is a marketing strategy which identifies an audience that is most likely to buy a product or service and subsequently creates a marketing campaign designed specifically to advertise said product or service to the target audience, using advertisements and promotional messages. This allows different companies to hone in on certain market segments, creating a "specialty" and possibly lowering competition with similar companies.

Nowadays, the abundance of data and the advances in Machine Learning and big data applications reduce the need for top-down segmentation of customers. Smart customer clustering based on many commonalities help companies better address customer needs to provide the right experience and divide resources efficiently.

Most if not all companies and organizations seek to establish themselves in social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram in addition to their official website. Online and social media performance tracking is meant to analyze the effectiveness of a company's social media presence. Are they generating new leads? Are they promoting brand awareness? These questions are important to assess the efficiency of the use of these social media platforms.

An online recommendation engine is software that analyzes available user data to generate suggestions for something the user may also be interested in. Such engines are used in an advertising capacity to promote products or services or for the purpose of recommending similar content to the content the user has consumed in the past, such as in streaming services and online shopping services.

As opposed to customer segmentation which divides the market into groups based on demographics and purchase history, persona detection and segmentation creates more personal profiles in order to better understand potential customers using information about behavior, attitude and personal journeys.

Traditionally, personalization was focused on a set of rules based on existing data. Firms used to collect data in advance without any consideration for real time data but now better and much faster results can be obtained by using AI that allows businesses to conduct profiling and real-time analysis to optimize each conversion. This process is defined as Predictive Personalization and is driven by Machine Learning.

Product performance forecasting predicts future sales volumes—at what price, during which time, and in which market. It enables businesses to make informed decisions in both the short term and the long term. Nowadays, companies rely on machine learning software for product performance forecasting as these programs continuously improve, providing businesses with faster and more reliable estimates all the time.

Price optimization is the mathematical analysis by a company determines the response of potential buyers to different prices for its products and services. The aim is to meet a company's objectives of maximizing profits and growing and retaining a customer base.

Price segmentation is the practice of offering the same products or services for different prices based on who is paying. Examples of a price segmentation strategy include loyalty cards, coupons, and student or senior discounts.

Companies post content to their websites, newsletters, and social media accounts based on social media metrics that indicate when posts receive the most engagement. This engagement varies by social media site, industry, content type (promotion, article, etc.), and the time of posting: post engagement varies by weekday and even time of day. A content calendar, then, is the scheduling of content publication to increase engagement and conversion. Companies also schedule site maintenance on these calendars, to ensure they only occur during times of least engagement. Other terms for content calendar include editorial calendar, social media posting schedule, and other variations of these. An editorial calendar, however, focuses on content planned for company-managed websites plus social media accounts. Social media content schedules, on the other hand, focus on social media posts, as the name indicates.