AI, Machine Learning, and Marketing Automation are huge buzzwords that we hear about on a daily basis. If you’re wondering how you can use them to strengthen your marketing and demand generation, you’re not alone. In 2021 the budget for AI in marketing was $15.84 billion. Statista predicts that number will grow 678% by 2028. And it’s not surprising—marketing teams are under the lens to prove ROI and justify their budget, so they’re capitalizing on any means possible to become more efficient while generating meaningful data.
But what does AI actually mean for your marketing department? And how can we turn those buzzwords into a reality that drives huge ROI and allows your marketing plan to shift with customer demands?
My team and I are actively using AI-driven data models to supercharge marketing automation for our clients and provide a facelift for how they acquire and serve customers. While the use cases and potential are limitless, I’m breaking down five areas where we’re already starting to see clients get a huge payoff.
Leveraging AI means starting with the basics
Before continuing the AI conversation, it’s crucial to understand that AI is a learning model that requires caring and feeding. What I’m getting at is that AI gets increasingly sophisticated as the algorithms have more data and patterns to analyze. Over time, predictions become increasingly accurate, and you’ll see better results within your automation.
For marketers to succeed using AI, the next vital piece is understanding that it’s less about ideas and more about putting the scientific method into action. It even follows the same steps:
- Create a hypothesis based on observations
- Test your hypothesis
- Get data from the test
- Draw a conclusion
- Act on the new information
That defines our starting point. From there, it’s a matter of preparing the data and using it to build a model, and this is what it looks like:
But truthfully, there’s one more step that the AI itself usually takes care of—adjusting the model based on resulting data and the strength and accuracy of its predictions.
6 Use Cases for Developing Intelligent Automation
As It was mentioned, my team is actively involved in AI-driven marketing automation projects with clients in a wide range of industries. To illustrate the potential for AI in your business, here’s a peek behind the curtain at the types of projects already in flight.
Client Acquisition
By diving into your current audience, we can identify common characteristics and use the resulting information to create lookalike models for automation and upsell.
Tailored Offers
Using lookalike audiences that purchase specific offers after specific behaviors, it’s possible to tailor product or service offerings to expand or deepen your reach with targeted automations.
Cross-Selling
While cross-selling is applicable to a number of markets, it’s especially valuable to retail, finance, SaaS, and B2B services. By identifying the types of clients using specific products and services, we can again create lookalike models to determine which of your existing clients could benefit from additional offerings, whether new or existing.
Displacement Campaigns
Every one of your competitors has unhappy customers who have an interest in moving away, which creates an opportunity for you to come in and wow them. For displacement campaigns, we review the data points to identify models we can build to win new clients. To that end, displacement campaigns present an opportunity to win back historically lost business. While particularly relevant for B2C, there is AI potential here for nearly every business.
Client Retention
AI presents enormous opportunities when it comes to preventing attrition. By analyzing the customer journey, it’s possible to identify which behaviors, engagements, and data points represent attrition risk, giving you the opportunity to improve customer relationships while simultaneously transforming the client experiences.
Third-Party Demand Management Platforms
Regardless of the platforms you use to advertise and engage with customers, ensuring that you’re connecting with your target audience remains critical and a substantial undertaking. By using AI to review real-time customer data, it can feed segmentation for specific audiences to simplify and improve the way you show up and engage.
Always-on Campaigns vs Intelligent Automation
Before diving headfirst into the world of AI and ML, it’s important to understand the difference between campaigns that are continually running and intelligent automation. An always-on campaign might involve an ad placement pushing contacts to your CRM for a series of touch points based on how they engage. While you might update the ad, the audience or the content, the campaign is always running and doesn’t adapt unless you change it manually.
On the flip side, intelligent automation, which refers to automations powered by AI and ML, continually analyzes data, looking for new trends and opportunities. Then, using real-time insights, it can adapt and segment the audience as well as the types of content it delivers based on what’s currently trending or popular.
And that’s just a single example of how AI can improve your customer experience.
Turning AI into the Art of the Possible
When it comes to AI, ML and other maturing technologies, it’s less about asking if something is possible and more important to consider what we can do when we put our heads together. Think of these technologies as always-evolving models that consistently grow as they get more data and identify what’s working.
With my background in predictive analytics, it’s fascinating to see how real-time data is transforming what we know and how we approach marketing.
To that end, one of the biggest opportunities for companies looking into adopting AI and ML-driven models is the ability to overcome problems like incomplete or dirty data. And while it takes time to fine-tune and see significant results, as the real-time data on trends comes in, it’s no longer a matter of finding a solution to adapt. Instead, it’s a matter of applying models to identify where you can move the needle the fastest.
The bottom line is that AI and ML are the future and it’s an exciting time to be in marketing as the changes we’re seeing now are transforming what’s possible in front of our very eyes.
BDO Digital’s team of AI professionals excels in using artificial intelligence and machine learning to transform the way businesses approach marketing. To get started, contact us today.
Source: BDO USA