Within the field of marketing, every interaction matters - whether it’s a word, slogan, campaign, or type of communication. Equally important is every moment spent crafting campaigns, identifying optimal audiences, and implementing and measuring their success and ROI. All of it amounts to budget costs - costs that CMOs are constantly under pressure to reduce while maximising campaign results.
Naturally, trying to do this at scale is nearly impossible for even the most diligent, dedicated marketing team. AI, as a scalable, ready-to-deploy solution, is the ideal facilitator for enabling speedier, more focused and results-driven marketing campaigns.
According to Salesforce’s State of Marketing Report, 62% of respondents are already using AI in their marketing efforts. But there’s also a significant amount of worry and uncertainty surrounding AI, particularly around its ability to replace human marketers. In this post, we’ll show that AI in marketing is not a threat to humans, but a powerful, underutilised asset that can transform your marketing operations.
A closer look at AI in marketing
AI in marketing is primarily used to automate and streamline repetitive tasks that, together, build marketing campaigns. Marketers can use AI to collect and analyse data, derive insights and next-best steps, and observe and predict current and future audience behaviour and responses. In an area as time-sensitive as marketing, AI is a powerful lever for streamlining operational processes without sacrificing quality or accuracy.
AI-powered marketing tools collect and use data to generate a host of insights, as well as build comprehensive customer profiles. Collectively, these data aggregations can help to customise messages at key points in the buyer’s journey without leaving the marketing team to do the time-intensive heavy lifting of manual data analysis and customisation tasks.
Where can you utilise AI in your marketing strategies?
Segmentation and targeting
Segmentation is the foundation of targeted, high-conversion marketing efforts. Identifying distinct segments of your target audience/audiences by a host of criteria, deepening your understanding of them for more tailored messaging, and sending them highly-targeted campaigns are a necessity - and also extremely taxing and time-consuming.
AI can speed up your segmentation efforts by quickly scoring leads and accurately segmenting the audience based on criteria like demographics, purchase history and more. From there, it's far easier to create streamlined, focused customer campaigns.
Personalisation
AI can take your personalisation efforts further than manual, by-hand attempts ever could. One of AI’s greatest advantages is its ability to analyse enormous amounts of big data in real-time, generating insights within minutes and using them to personalise every customer touchpoint.
Combining AI with personalised products and services creates highly personalised customer journeys at scale, along with offers that can be updated instantly using geolocation and other data. AI also uses NLP and generative capabilities to translate your campaigns and communications into other languages, allowing your team to expand their marketing reach across the world within minutes.
Process optimisation
AI can enhance your workflows, making them more efficient. Together, AI tools can synchronise, automate and optimise existing processes. For example, AI-powered chatbots can assist in closing sales or providing more information to customers, virtual assistants can handle note-taking and meeting recordings, AI software can determine and recommend ideal times for sending client emails to optimise open rates, and generative AI can create end-to-end marketing copy that your team only needs to review and make adjustments if need be.
Implementing AI in your marketing practices: best practices for success
- Set clear, measurable goals for what you want to achieve with AI in your marketing - whether it’s improving customer engagement, boosting lead generation, or optimising ROI on ad targeting, make sure you have defined goals you can measure your efforts against.
- Test before committing - before investing too heavily in one or many AI solutions, run a test or pilot its abilities in a key area. Pick one area or campaign to augment using AI and monitor the results. This can help identify existing challenges or operation gaps to close before rolling out AI at scale.
- Shop around before choosing - consider your needs, goals, current technical skills and budget before committing to an AI solution or suite of solutions. Also take into account the tool’s scalability, ease-of-use and integration abilities.
- Integrate and connect your existing systems to your AI tools - ensure your CRM platform, marketing automation software and any other relevant tools can connect and integrate to your AI solution, preventing process gaps and information silos from forming that could impact campaign quality and results.
- Train and upskill your team on AI -run regular training sessions and workshops for your team on how to implement and utilise AI to its full potential in their processes. This will help maximise the value of your AI investments and also help erase any lingering uncertainty that AI may replace them in their roles.
CloudSmiths: leveraging advanced AI across all marketing sectors
Choosing the right AI solution is only the first step in the process of successfully rolling out and deploying AI across your marketing initiatives. Overseeing its introduction, managing its implementation, and measuring its results all take time and experience, often leading CMOs to abandon their efforts.
At CloudSmiths, our mission is to make AI easy and accessible to all sales teams and executives across sectors. Contact us to discover how we can help you introduce AI to your workflows and maximise its performance and output.
