Five Ways Artificial Intelligence Will Disrupt Marketing
The consumer experience is becoming increasingly fragmented. Consumers no longer visit one site or follow one general flow to get their information or make purchases. We’re seeing everything from slack channels to paid search results driving intent to purchase journeys. The same type of fragmentation — or consolidation, depending on how you look at it — happening on the marketing tech stack is beginning to vertically integrate to provide a one-stop shopping solution and new segments of the MarTech stack are appearing. The last MarTech Lumascape shows 6,829 providers in the MarTech landscape.
1- Marketers will need to work with IT to merge, consolidate, and tag data.
Unifying fragmented data and tying independent parts of your tech stack together will be critical to leveraging upcoming AI tools. Most of this work requires extensive planning and execution.
According to IBM Watson Marketing, conversion rates could be boosted upwards of 68% based on a customer case study. In a test run at Autodesk, machine learning technology was able to quadruple the conversions. The trick is to ensure your data is clean, unified, and tagged as “meaningful” and “not meaningful”— both will be critical parts of your AI solution.
2-Digital Marketing Will Go Through A Massive Automation Era Eliminating and Creating Jobs
At the heart of AI technology is its intellectual insight and automation potential. Many areas in marketing will benefit from this. While bidding algorithms will become more robust, optimization and A/B testing, traditionally managed by a large staff to support test conceptualization, execution, analysis, and admin work, has the most potential to be automated. Automating optimization using AI will significantly increase the throughput on testing — scaling winners faster and impacting business sooner.
3-Investment in Advertising Will Begin to Swing Back to Traditional Media
Nvidia’s Bryan Catanzaro has developed an amazing open-source AI code around social listening called the “Sentiment Neuron”. This technology is able to read social posts and comments to measure the level of buying intent, as well as general attitudes towards brands, both negative and positive. A long-time marketing challenge is hitting that “moment of truth” when the customer is ready to buy and has moved past consideration into purchase. One of the strategies most brands use is to be present at all times. Why? We just don’t know when customers are ready to move into the buying phase. AI can change that.
One of the largest benefactors of this will be traditional media — television, radio, and print. We’ll see an era where the ability for customers to interact deeply and in real-time with live TV, radio, and print ads through chat, text, social, or other “posting” mechanisms will give traditional media the smarts it needs to interact with a high volume of customers and identify where they are in their journey to purchase the brand.
Knowing which digital or offline advertising channels are aligned to customers in their consideration or awareness phases can help focus ad dollars and drive greater efficiency.
4-CMOs Will Be The CMTO – This Is Only The Beginning Of C-Suite Changes
We’re already seeing the shift from a traditional chief marketing role to one of chief marketing and technology officers as opportunities to use data and backend systems together in marketing get more robust. The challenge for the CMTO is to work with IT to educate that organization on the growing needs of marketing and how to properly unify all data. This will be a critical step in data transformation.
5- If You Aren’t Ready To Play In The AI-Era Of Marketing, You Will Be Left Behind
You probably work for a company currently involved in data transformation or have at least heard of a few companies that have embarked on this process. The term is so general it’s hard to understand what’s included and what’s not. In essence, for a company to be ready to absorb technologies like machine learning or artificial intelligence into their strategies, they will need to go through this transformation. Data cleansing, tagging, and unification are at the heart of digital transformation. The structure of how an organization houses, tags, and unifies data must be set up to reveal actionable business insights. We as digital marketers know that there is a vast amount of data that doesn’t really help the business. Finding the data that does help the business will be crucial to success.
