How AI is Changing the Face of Marketing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a hot-button topic across all industries. While some marketers may be concerned that AI could threaten their job security, the truth is that AI will more likely be a tool that makes it easier to deliver effective marketing campaigns. In this blog, we outline how AI is changing the face of marketing in 2019 and beyond.

AI is among the fastest-growing marketing trends, with 80 percent of marketers predicting in 2016 that AI would revolutionize marketing by 2020. Still, according to an article in Business Insider, 34 percent of marketing executives felt unprepared for this change in 2018. The time to better understand AI’s relationship with marketing is now.  Here are some reasons why:

Marketing’s process is becoming more educated.

As Forbes said in a recent article, many ad campaigns still involve a lot of “educated guesswork” from marketers. But with the growth of AI, marketers can now create more data-driven campaigns. Companies are becoming increasingly better at accumulating as much information as they can and utilizing AI to help synthesize that data into actionable intelligence. AI programs identify patterns in massive data sets that ultimately drive successful marketing campaigns.

Mark Simpson, VP of offering management at IBM Watson Marketing, shared his insights with Ad Age:  

“In the era of big data, we have the need to mine all of that information, and humans can no longer do it alone. AI has the capacity to create richer, more personalized digital experiences for consumers, and meet customers’ increasingly high brand expectations.”

The rise of customer segmentation.

In today’s digital landscape, rife with an oversaturation of advertisements, customers have high standards when it comes to personalized experiences. Customers in the B2B space don’t want to be delivered messaging tailored to B2C consumers, and vice versa. AI enables marketers to create audience personas and understand specific purchasing motivations. With these tools, marketers can target their target demographics and speak directly to the buyer’s needs and pain points.

Marketers can now focus on the big picture.

With the help of AI, marketers can now look at the big picture and implement this holistic view to refine their strategies. AI isn’t going to replace marketing teams, but it will take over formerly automated tasks so that they can focus on big-picture decisions. In particular, all-in-one media monitoring platforms cut down time of sifting through millions of data sources, so marketers can spend more time applying what they learned from the data, allowing for the rise of more focused creative strategies instead of crunching numbers. Marketers can oversee this data, and fine-tune the platforms to ensure it’s capturing and analyzing what they need to be the most efficient.

Through interviews with 100 senior marketers from a wide range of industries, Smart Insights found the following data:

The key areas of AI investment and integration:

• Personalization & profiling (11%)
• SEO (8%)
• Content research & creation (15%)
• Buyer journey optimization (9%)
• Customer service and Chatbots (15%)
• CRM enhancement (11%)
• Image recognition software (4)
• None (27%)

How can marketers successfully coexist with AI?

• Critical thinking and problem-solving (32%)
• Creative skills (26%)
• Coding and programming (26%)
• Pattern identification and strategy (16%)

Where humans outperform AI:

• Creative thinking (70%)
• Strategic planning (42%)
• Client services (36%)
• Content creation (34%)
• Data interpretation (31%)
• Community building (27%)

Until next time!
Critical Mention