5 Areas in Marketing where Artificial Intelligence can help

There is lot of debate on how robots will replace humans and how some jobs will cease to exist in the immediate future. While Elon Musk is trying to fuse humans with robots, Bill Gates is talking about taxing robots to keep humans competitive. Enough indicators from the technology visionaries on what AI can do!

Keeping the human survival concerns debate aside for another day, let’s focus on how AI can help us with mundane marketing tasks.

Artificial Intelligence is a broad term used for different things like Predictive Algorithms, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision , Machine Learning, Deep Learning and more.

Leaving the technical jargon aside, In a simpler layman (marketing) language, AI can help marketing because of 2 main strengths:

1. It can help convert raw data to useful data by being able to understand data in the context of the usage. i.e It can deep dive into a heap of data and pull out a needle to help sew. Today, data is not the problem. The problem is being able to use it for specific small day to day tasks. AI can make that possible.
2. It can help take decisions based on existing patterns and improvise it based on continuous feedback. i.e it can do things on its own and improve it on its own. Today, you can set rules and filters for everything. A/B testing is not the problem. The problem is to have 1000’s of combinations and being able to change it daily, until it works, and do it before you lose sanity. AI can make that possible.

And, Artificial Intelligence is all about making robots more like humans, and not vice-versa. In-case, you still had that doubt 🙂

There are 5 areas where AI can make immediate impact in Marketing (I am sure there are more areas. )

1. List Building (Targeting) – Any marketing campaign starts with a “list”. It is nothing but the list of people that you are interested to reach out. The very top of your funnel. The idea is to get them inside your marketing funnel. One of the biggest challenges today is the ability to get a narrow targeted list. User Personas are a good start, but given that there are tons of data, both public and private, it would really help if we can connect the dots and consolidate the various data points to laser focus on the target audience. eg. someone who is using HP Fortify, but not looking for a job change.
2. Email Marketing (Cold Outreaches) – There is a long unending debate on whether cold calling/emailing is dead. The reality is that it still works, provided it done right. Assuming that we have all the 360 degree data about someone we are really interested in, and we can use it – it is not impossible to write simple, short, personal emails that the recipient would like to respond to. The problem is that the current era of marketing automation tools are not helpful, and it is impossible to do this at a scale. It usually sounds cold and robotic. What if we can write such context-aware, human like emails, and iterate it at a scale and also get past those annoying spam filters? (We all love our spam filters because it keeps the noise out, but as marketers, we hate them for the same reason. Damn!).
3. Content Marketing – Almost all content that organizations produce is one-size-fits-all. We create it keeping in mind the ideal “buyer persona”. Now imagine what happens when you just change one parameter – lets say country. The style changes, The context changes. The story-line changes. Are we not supposed to be in 1 seamlessly connected world without boundaries called internet where anyone from anywhere can read my content? What if we can do 1:1 customization, where the content is customized per viewer? (forget country for now)
4. Customer Engagement – Every marketer dreams that she/he has the Midas Touch– everything marketing touches becomes a customer, that too in the 1st touch. The reality is that it does not happen in 99.9% of the cases! You need to engage them for a period of time, longer in B2B. Engaging a prospect (and customers) for long periods of time is a challenge. It goes back to the discussion how one-size-fits-all strategy does not work when dealing with humans. When you meet and talk with people one:one, you can engage them at a deeper contextual level. Imagine being able to replicate that in the digital world. Wouldn’t that lead to more “conversions”?
5. Customer Advocacy – No business conversation is complete without the topic of “How we helped solve similar problems, earlier for someone like you“. Imagine customer stories that can highlight those nuances on the run?

In summary, the underlying crux is that AI can enable 1:1 marketing, the one that will sound more human, less robotic, more contextual, and something that can be executed at the scale and speed of machines.

I’m looking forward to your comments. Do you agree?

As per CB-Insights, In the last 5 years from a funding perspective, $1B has been invested on AI startups in the Advertising and Marketing space, across 200 deals.
And many of those are already in the market.