The Future of AI In Marketing
The world of Artificial Intelligence has come a long way in the last few years: What was once the preserve of tech giants like Google and Amazon is increasingly being adopted by businesses of all sizes.
It might seem obvious to some, but marketeers can no longer rely on simply old techniques to appeal to an ever-changing audience. Companies must blend new technologies with their existing marketing experience to stay ahead of the game, and it’s pretty clear that AI (Artificial Intelligence) will play more and more of a crucial role in the future of marketing. Where as ML (Machine Learning) is a powerful tool for informing strategy and decision-making it is still rigid and rules based with people still remaining responsible for how that information is harnessed, AI is different still. AI has the power and ability to perform tasks in ways that are "intelligent." These machines aren't just programmed to do a single, pre-determined, repetitive motion - AI is much more is flexible and able to handle variable situations and can do more by adapting to different situations.
Smarter marketing tools make life easier for businesses while delivering improved results - they compliment, not replace current strategies, but companies can’t simply buy martech solutions off the shelf and expect to see gains right away. To make the most of AI tools, businesses should prepare:
Define your goals … and establish how to measure them … quickly
When it comes to defining your goals when using AI, you should obviously think about what you are wanting to achieve and/or measure by its presence. You don’t have to do everything in one go, think of a possible use case, you might want to utilise AI intelligent data pattern matching to-
• take sales forecasting to the next level
• introduce dynamic pricing
• gain a deeper understanding of your consumers
• optimise digital campaigns
• create detailed consumer profiles to drive sales
• leverage AI to intelligently automate certain operational decision making in the marketing content lifecycle
Defining those goals can enable you to create a light-weight framework of the key steps can help you measure your ROI when it comes to your AI implementation.
1. Defining Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). You should be clear what segments are going to be used for and what success criteria will be defined as. These metrics may well differ by segment too. For example, in the case of using AI in retail marketing, increasing average spend for best customer segments and improving retention rates for average customer segments.
2. Having a Benchmark of Comparison: Once performance metrics are defined and clear, maintaining a valid control group is key to understanding the true impact that AI models (or ML models) are contributing. Marketeers have been measuring the success of customer treatments in this way for decades, and these principles are still valid today. Segments such as these are now more personalised.
3. Consistent Monitoring: Have a rigorous process in place to monitor your rolled-out AI models, and re-train and measure the impact of them frequently. This two steps forward, one step back approach is valid here to ensure your KPIs continue to move in the right direction.
Work together as a business
We all now understand that tech for tech’s sake doesn’t work and that projects run purely by IT teams rarely land well, equally the marketing team shouldn’t make tech decisions alone. They need to be working across the spectrum of the business to form a collaborative team, and ensure they have the right expertise from IT, Data, Business, Operations and relevant external Subject Matter Experts, in order to choose the right AI and achieve the optimal results.
When it comes to assessing the business case for AI as well the potential growth in sales, web-site traffic, market share and engagement, the following questions could be asked :
• Do I want to use AI to build better products?
• Do I want to use AI to get products to market faster?
• Do I want to use AI to become more efficient or profitable in ways beyond product development?
• Do I want to use AI to mitigate some form of risk (Information security risk, compliance risk…)?
IT departments can work with marketing to implement marketing tools correctly, and by doing this can ensure the return of the greatest benefits. When adopting AI (or any martech for that matter), involving a broad team of ‘fresh eyes and ears’ can help avoid teething problems caused by marketing team-only decisions and bring new insight. Sharing the load means that potential advantages and problems can be thrashed out early doors. Such a team can help prepare the data, develop and test models, before deploying the system.
The use of Pilots or Proofs-of-Concept programs can be particularly beneficial here, when these are aligned to an aforementioned set of goals and success criteria, combined with using agile & responsible technical partners, the results of a well -managed pilot can often set the foundations for good-practice and positively drive future direction. They also afford the opportunity to achieve real contextual feedback from a wider range of stakeholders in the front-line of any business.
Prepare to Hand Over Old Tasks
The majority of AI tools speed up existing processes that involve lots of data and repetitive work. Data segmentation, image classification, and resource optimisation all come under this. Marketing departments using staff to perform long manual tasks i.e. churning out data into Excel spreadsheets could become a thing of the past, with more of their time freed up for other things.
Other tools (chatbots as an example), can manage top-of-funnel conversations without any human intervention. These bots then work on pulling data and interpreting it via other AI tools, which means each marketing team must know how the tools work in conjunction with one another to make the most of them.
AI can have a transformational impact on the day-to-day roles of the typical marketing department, mostly for the better, which can be a little overwhelming, peoples roles evolve, a team will have to adapt and develop new skills, although this should be seen as a positive thing.
Adapting to change as a marketeer When AI tools take over the most time-labourous tasks, marketers will find themselves with a whole lot more free time to pursue work they never had time for in the past. Marketeers now get the opportunity to have more creativity, customer insight and collaboration according to a gated Gartner report. However, AI is unlikely to learn to fully mimic real humans for a long time to come, meaning that Marketeers will still manage their own customer relationships (which isn’t a bad thing!) It’s important to remember that for the foreseeable future, using using AI tools will supplement or augment the role marketeers do, but not replace the real skill and experience of an actual person.
However depending on the scope of your AI implementation, a plan should be made for this, factoring in various impacted elements, managing the change successfully, so that a team, function, business unit or organisation can not only benefit from the value AI tools can bring, but that the journey is graceful, transparent and the applicable teams or key individuals are fully on-board with the journey.
Analyse and Evaluate Martech Effectiveness
Just because AI tools are becoming smarter, it doesn’t mean they’re totally fool proof- even artificial intelligence can make mistakes. Marketers who rely heavily on unfamiliar new technologies can pay the price when those tools don’t work as expected. Before a business trusts smart tools with their vital business processes, they should be tested within controlled environments. Even after initial testing and implementation, new integrations and expectations could throw older AI tools for a loop, even with regular updates (see our former paragraphs on goal-setting and working as a business when it comes to implementing AI).
It’s also important to have the pre-requisite skills or knowledge available to understand how any AI tool works in principle, particular for anything related to decision making vs simple intelligent process automation. The impact of bad or wrong decisions for a major brand, retailer or regulated company can have significant impacts way beyond the event itself. Make sure your technical teams or your technical partner are able to provide appropriate traceability and the right level of insight, to ensure the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ your AI technology does is well understood by the appropriate stakeholders I your organisation.
Martech’s future is connected to the future of AI. Buyer expectations have grown too high for businesses to go back to using tools that can’t adapt quickly. To make the most of these evolving technologies, marketing teams should prepare to be more flexible with how their roles adapt and change, as well as regularly testing their robotic team mates for accuracy.
Well-known companies using AI in within their marketing strategies:
1. Wayfair is one example of an online retail brand that is using AI to enhance the customer shopping experience, in this case using image recognition technology. Visual search technology is still in the early stages, but gradually image-based searches are replacing text-based search. It has been popularised by the likes of Pinterest and Google lens technology. The user shopping experience can improve greatly because it will personalise theirof the increased personalised shopping experience. AI such as this propels products (in this case, homeware) out there to customers visually much quicker
2. Amazon is a huge global name that uses artificial intelligence for both customer shopping experiences, and also to drive dynamic pricing – reducing prices to elicit more sales when needed, and increasing prices when demand is high. The algorithm they use enables optimal sales and revenue. Amazon also provides technical tools that help it’s technology customers benefit from AI-enhanced services.
3. Google is another large global company which uses AI extensively in the services we consume or use every day, such as it’s search, or it’s email – many of it’s users will have seen Google Mail type-ahead – predicting your favourite words, phrases or sentences. But additionally Google’s AI goes way beyond this, from show-casing a virtual telephone assistant a few years ago, with the ability to almost-perfectly mimic human language using NLP, deep image-recognition capabilities and on to helping smart-meters better predict energy patterns in homes – Google is forging ahead with developing and integrating AI into many of it’s services. Bernard Marr (Forbes) offers some further insight in this article - The Amazing Ways Google Uses Artificial Intelligence And Satellite Data To Prevent Illegal Fishing. More info on Googles vision for AI can be also be found here.
As wells as many well-known companies embracing and leveraging AI for the benefit of their marketing teams, 1,000s of smaller companies and technology providers to the marketing community are integrating AI into their products and services.
This is truly an exciting time for marketeers and marketing technology providers to come together and leverage the collective knowledge of human experience and AI, and with recent estimates citing the marketing technology sector is set to continue it’s +20% CAGR for some years to come – the choice will be plentiful.
If you’d like further information on this article please contact … Neil@team6ix.com and for more articles like this head on over to our blog
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Article by Becky Freeman and Neil McCutcheon