The proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) tools continues at an exponential pace. Across every business function, the technology is having an increasing influence on the way organisations approach strategic and tactical processes.
Take the impact AI is having on marketing operations, for example, where a wide variety of mainstream and niche products are competing for visibility and budget. At the same time, marketing professionals are faced with the challenge of deciding how and where to integrate AI services into their existing approach.
Yet, change is inevitable, with automation technologies already playing a crucial role in a wide range of digital marketing activities, from campaign design and delivery to management and analytics. One of the difficulties faced by marketers, in general, is that almost everyone is learning at the same time, and there are no established ground rules that people can follow to understand the basics or implement best practices.
Tools, tools, tools
In this context, it’s important to assess the role AI can play in marketing planning, delivery, and measurement, and what it can add to existing processes and approaches. Most digital marketers will already use automation technologies to carry out tasks that would normally require human intervention. Whether it’s translation, content editing and optimisation, SERP ranking, tracking and optimisation, campaign management or analytics, users benefit from increased efficiency, productivity, the ability to implement complex campaigns at scale, and highly nuanced levels of data-driven insight.
AI, however, takes these capabilities a stage further by applying human-like reasoning and learning skills to carry out more complex tasks. As such, it is being applied to a huge range of processes across the marketing mix, from creative campaign ideas to the more mundane and repetitive management and reporting tasks, bringing a greater degree of autonomy and generative ability.
Software vendors everywhere are lining up behind the AI message with the result that marketing pros have a bewildering array of services to choose from. Today most tools now carry an AI message of some kind on their home pages, underlining the level of integration the technology has already achieved across the marketing ecosystem.
Building an effective strategy
In practical terms, these kinds of ‘AI-powered’ apps are more than just buzzwords and hype, with many offering huge scope to help marketing teams reach and engage more customers and boost effectiveness. For example, AI-driven personalisation, pricing and offers can deliver a more tailored and relevant customer experience to customers and can also be used to more effectively segment and group customers, prioritising them and predicting what they may want or need.
This has the potential to significantly improve customer relationships, as marketing teams uncover their preferences and use different channels and content to communicate with the greatest level of impact. One of the other capabilities that sets AI-powered marketing tools apart from legacy solutions is their ability to learn. Marketing is an iterative process, and as campaigns are implemented, AI can continuously assess the impact of marketing approaches and feed this insight back into the next round of strategy and planning, ensuring activities become more differentiated and customer-led.
However, selecting tools and platforms piecemeal is unlikely to give marketing operations the kind of integrated capabilities they really need. As with any digitalisation project, success relies on having an effective strategy aligned with business goals. Key questions include:
Can the organisation add marketing operations to the C-level agenda and educate decision-makers so they understand the urgency of adopting AI in a controlled way?
Can it identify the best capabilities, platforms, and tools to trial and adopt?
- Can it build an AI roadmap that focuses on data management, technology and process integration, and compliance?
- Can it train and reskill team members so they can operate AI tools effectively?
- Can it make a commitment to continual learning about AI developments, so the business can anticipate evolving market needs that may be met by the latest tools and platforms
Ultimately, while martech AI is still in its infancy, there’s already enough information out there to show that the future will be driven by rapid innovation. Those organisations that take time to understand the technologies now will be ideally placed to succeed.
