AI is a practical tool to help Marketers gain insights

Marketers are not scientists, and technologies like AI have become more important to help Marketers understand customer data and insights. With AI, Marketers are able to focus on the bigger picture - improving experiences for customers and driving revenue for the business.

Many Marketers are trying to understand where AI fits into the wider field of marketing technology and analytics.

We deep-dived into this topic in our recent webinar Why AI will power CX in the world after COVID-19.

We discussed four themes:

Algorithms

Artificial intelligence is based on algorithms and an algorithm is simply a set of rules. What makes AI powerful, is that the processing power available in a hyper-scaled cloud environment means, these rules are executed at incredible speeds and at very low cost, known as CPU cycles. 

But for the AI magic to work, algorithms need to be fed data and as they get more data, there is better accuracy. This has the effect of creating a baseline for further innovation.

Automation

Automation improves productivity by converting repeated manual processes into code, then executing at scale. For analytics, Marketers can use machine learning to continuously train systems, to ensure they get the most relevant results.

In the old world of inbound marketing, we used to call this: getting the right content in front of the right person at the right time. It sounds simple but Marketers soon discovered this is actually quite difficult.

Marketers would use social and economic demographics to manually segment and target. Then they buyer personas, which felt a little bit more niche and a little more targeted. But with automation and predictive analytics, Marketers can predict customer behavior based on the customer’s historical behavior and on the behavior of other alike customer segments.

Beyond the lab

An issue Marketers face with AI, is applying it to the real world. Marketers want to be able to use the technology but are not on a mission to become data scientists. Marketers' role is to market products and services, and need any new technology to live within the tools they already have within their martech stack.

Easy to use

Finally, Marketers want human-like interfaces, because they don't want to have to learn how to code. Marketers need AI to do all the powerful work in the background. AI should do this in a way that doesn't require Marketers to understand everything that is happening on a technical level.

Another important issue discussed in the webinar was how to align AI to the customer journey, to provide insights that enable Marketers to improve the customer experience and optimise ROI.

In a way, AI doesn't do anything that Marketers weren't already doing traditionally. Instead, it helps Marketers to do more, and do it more accurately. 

For example, when planning out a buyer’s journey, AI is quietly watching segmentation, assessing the results, and allowing Marketers to develop better insights and then to ultimately act on them.

To listen to the whole discussion watch the webinar Why AI will power CX in the world after COVID-19.