Grant McDougall is the CEO and co-founder of blue oceanan AI brand strategy platform that helps companies outsmart the competition.
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We live in a world of massive data flows that exceed our limited human ability to understand and act on this information. Today, marketers must track customer interactions with brands across dozens of platforms, devices, and media formats. You need to track measurable metrics, such as how often a post is shared, as well as qualitative metrics such as how customers feel when you share a post. You need to understand how a customer interacts with your brand and how that customer interacts with other brands, especially competitors, and other customers. And now, with increasing economic pressures, it’s more important than ever for you to make timely decisions what information you have to optimize brand performance and achieve the business results for which you are responsible.
It’s dizzying to even think about.
The internet has connected brands and consumers in ways that are both strange and beautiful, but the cost of this connection is complexity. There is now so much data from these interactions that marketers don’t know what to do with it. This is exactly the kind of challenge that artificial intelligence must overcome. Intelligent algorithms get smarter the more data they ingest, increasing the value they provide to users by storing data in them. crispy insights.
AI unlocks new marketing potential.
While many chief marketing officers and other decision-makers have embraced the promise of AI, many marketers still seem wary — if not outright shocked — of incorporating machine intelligence into their workflows. Their concerns are the same as those of workers in any industry where automation is on the rise: what if AI makes my job redundant?
These fears are natural, but no more justified than the paranoia of the Luddites who destroyed textile machines at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Rather than replacing people, the introduction of machine manufacturing unlocked the workers’ full potential and enabled each factory worker to produce the same amount of goods that tens or hundreds of people would need to make without machine assistance. At the same time, the cost of these goods fell rapidly and their quality increased, enabling a significantly improved quality of life for the average consumer.
We are already seeing a similar dynamic emerging from the introduction of AI into marketing. The use cases for AI in marketing are incredibly diverse and tailored to the needs of a particular brand. There are well-known uses such as purchasing programmatic advertisements and new and increasingly sophisticated practices such as sentiment analysis and content generation. And with marketing budgets Faced with ongoing budget cuts, technology like AI can help marketers get more out of every investment.
AI is an employee, not a replacement.
Regardless of the specific implementation, AI consistently drives value for marketing teams along a few key vectors. It can automate repetitive and tedious tasks and analyze large amounts of heterogeneous data to provide a comprehensive picture of a brand in the wild. It can also enable real-time personalized marketing efforts at scale and leverage predictive analytics to produce actionable recommendations for future campaigns.
These AI applications have important implications for both marketers and your audiences. For marketers, it unlocks new and creative ways to engage with customers, while accelerating your ability to learn and adapt to the rapid changes in digital culture. It’s like hiring an assistant that allows you to focus on areas that you are passionate about and that you can handle like no other. For consumers, these AI-driven marketing techniques result in more relevant and personalized interactions with brands at a scale that even the best legion of human brand specialists could never achieve.
I’m sure we can all agree that AI has permanently transformed digital marketing by reducing the risk of human error and streamlining even the most complex marketing campaigns. Integrating AI-powered software, such as predictive analytics, into your martech stack has table stakes to stay competitive. However, to really connect with customers, you still need a human perspective, especially with regard to emotional and relational elements such as storytelling, compassion, and empathy. Therefore, realizing the The full potential of human-machine partnerships requires a lot of attention to both automate processes and develop human potential.
It’s critical that marketers recognize that AI is a salve for data overload, not a panacea. Marketing will always need a human touch. AI is just a tool to help you achieve superhuman results in what really matters: engaging your customers in meaningful interactions, wherever they are.
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