Qusai Mahesri is the founder and CEO of Xpediant Digital, a leading MarTech product and services firm.
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I launched myself into the marketing technology sector over 20 years ago, so I’ve certainly seen all kinds of trends come and go. But I can assure you that artificial intelligence (AI) is not going anywhere soon. In fact, in many ways, it will define our future.
Given my line of work, I get lots of questions about what role AI will play in marketing technology. Although there are lots of moving pieces and multiple angles to consider, I usually reply that the marketing field actually has the most to gain from AI—and even more so for marketing technology.
AI In Marketing
Mark Zuckerberg recently told his employees, “Our single largest investment is in advancing AI and building it into every one of our products. We have the infrastructure to do this at unprecedented scale and I think the experiences it enables will be amazing.” Anyone who doubts that AI is the future is really not paying attention.
After all, marketing is all about knowing customer desires, leading them to relevant products and services and then “moving them into the buy column.” AI can help in all these areas, as amply demonstrated by Thomas H. Davenport, Abhijit Guha and Dhruv Grewal in their Harvard Business Journal article “How to Design an AI Marketing Strategy” (registration required).
In addition, Amazon Ads describes MarTech as shorthand for “the software marketers use to optimize their marketing efforts and achieve their objectives. It leverages technology to plan, execute, and measure campaigns and other marketing tactics. Essentially, it can help make marketers’ jobs easier.”
You see, AI allows marketing tools to utilize data, such as customer profiles, to understand customers and predict quite accurately how they are likely to act. Then, AI can tailor and deploy tactics and messages to optimize communications with customers, motivating them to make a purchasing decision. And don’t forget that once these AI systems are put in place, very little direction is necessary from marketing team members. So AI can maximize efficiencies—or put another way, it can save you time and money.
One interesting example of utilizing AI is that Starbucks can now predict, within a small time window, when a customer is going to place their next order. Just consider the power this puts in their hands, allowing them to understand when and how to deploy ads, when to offer discounts, how to project sales and so on.
Marketing can use AI in additional ways, including:
• Pegging evolving (and therefore competitive) pricing on products, including via sales and promotion tactics,
• Recognizing sentiment and knowing the right time to deploy messaging,
• Editing a company’s strategies and messaging to boost effectiveness
• Improving customer satisfaction via more targeted communications and analyzing social media messaging to measure and better understand its effectiveness.
In written communication, we are starting to see more AI-powered writing assistants. “By training the product on the user’s writing style, rather than the other way around, these tools can help users be more efficient without sacrificing their personal touch,” according to Ariel Shapira of The Jerusalem Post. So, in some ways, AI has the potential to help us not just save time and money but to do so in ways that retain and even amplify our own personality and style.
Things To Keep In Mind
However, there are areas in AI that a lot of thought leaders are worried about. Throughout history, educated advisors have warned kings and queens that with immense power comes a higher level of responsibility. We have to find a way to leverage AI with responsibility. At the corporate level, it behooves companies to enforce standards on ethics, diversity and inclusion with their AI approach.
Getting Started
The first step in using AI is to clearly articulate “what” you are trying to achieve and not get sidetracked by all the new “shiny” AI tools that are coming to the market on a daily basis. There is no optimal way to implement it since we don’t have enough data or best practices yet. Once you have a vision established, stick to the course and do a pilot with one or two AI engines, then learn through experimentation.
Conclusion
What marketers wouldn’t want to develop more beneficial and accurate predictions around the aggregate customer behavior data that they are indeed collecting but are not sure how to use? In a sense, the use of AI within the marketing industry is still just getting started and the potential is great. For this reason alone, now is a good time to put AI to work as part of your MarTech efforts.
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