Artificial Intelligence is on everyone’s lips these days – from technology to medicine to entertainment. Yet very few professionals in the marketing arena are using artificial intelligence (AI).
Marketers are in an excellent position to utilise artificial intelligence to get significant results.
However, a lack of education is holding back adoption.
What I see repeatedly is marketing teams in large companies with data science and tech teams, is that the marketing and business teams leave the AI to their data scientists and tech teams. These teams are exactly who should implement, but they are not the best teams for business or marketing strategy, as that is not their area. Data scientists and tech teams are not marketing strategists. This means that they do projects that make sense to them, but may not be the right ones to move the dial on generating more revenue or solving specific business challenges for the commercial teams.
One large pharmaceutical company got tech help in their marketing with AI and turned to IBM Watson. For 6 months the company marketing team met with them to hash out a project. The problem was, according to someone from the company, they were speaking apples and oranges, and IBM Watson was speaking bananas and pears. This is not uncommon, even within one company across the marketing versus data science and tech teams.
Most brands are confident that their investment in artificial intelligence will pay off for them, but the results show a different picture with 85% of AI projects failing. A large part of the reason for this, is a lack of understanding the basics of AI, which is holding back adoption of AI for many marketers, according to research by Altimeter Group. Their research found that 70 percent of respondents identifying it as a barrier to adoption of AI in their marketing. They also found that over 77 percent of marketers have less than a quarter of all marketing tasks intelligently automated and 18 percent say they have not automated any tasks at all.
Where do you fit?
Part of the challenge is that many marketers lack the knowledge to even define what it is, let alone understand how it can solve their specific challenges. The lack of knowledge holding them back may hold them back because they think that it’s too complicated to implement. However, AI is essential for marketers but lack of education holding them back.
So, what is artificial intelligence, and why is it so important to marketers? The benefits are enormous. To list a few of these, AI enables marketers to:
• Get transformative insights
• Predict results of marketing campaigns with great accuracy
• Speed up revenue growth
• Reduce costs
• Reduce repetitive tasks
• Create mass personalised customer experiences at scale
• Increase sales teams’ ability to sell (AI sales coaching)
• Generate greater return on all marketing activities
When you implement artificial intelligence into your marketing strategy, the results are impressive.
You’ll be able to put yourself in front of your audience and interact with them with precision and 360 degree insight about the customers and improve their customer experience dramatically.
You’ll be able to put yourself in a position to succeed by learning how to do marketing the right way. Artificial intelligence is changing the way businesses are run. It holds a lot of promise for the future.
For example, AI can automate some repetitive tasks that you currently handle. It can help you identify and reach out to customers more effectively. It’s also a powerful way to generate new insights about your business and industry, and potential opportunities for growth or transformation.
Yet with all these advantages, why do so many marketers not do it?
The potential is vast, but so is the challenge of understanding it is holding back many marketers. Many marketers lack the knowledge to implement artificial intelligence into their marketing campaigns. They believe that it’s too complex to achieve and something best left to the data science and tech teams. But that is a mistake which leads to the high failure rate among AI projects.
It’s important that marketers fully grasp the benefits of artificial intelligence, because it’s going to impact all sales and marketing–and already is. This doesn’t mean that it’s going to be easy without the right assistance. So many training courses on AI focus on coding and tech.
That is not what marketers need to know!
Marketers should not become data scientists and data scientists should not become marketers. However, there is a way to make this process work more smoothly for successful AI projects that help both the marketer and the company. Education for marketers. Not in data science or coding but educating marketers on the basic concepts of AI and the terminology and knowing what is possible and where the limitations lie. This would allow them to better communicate with their teams as well as make smarter decisions when trying to communicate with the data scientists, engineers, and developers and tech teams.
Conclusion
By understanding AI, marketers have the ability to better engage their existing customers, as well as find new customers. It lets them take charge of their marketing to improve their results. Of course, we predicate all of this upon the reality that artificial intelligence is simply a tool that can be used in many ways. The more you use AI, the more benefit you’ll see as the more data comes into the system and the system continues to learn and get better and better.
Just because you’ve seen some success with one application doesn’t mean you can rely on it to handle everything. There are so many applications, but marketers need to start with their business challenges. Solve what needs to be solved in your business with it first, rather than just doing AI for the sake of doing AI. It is a tool to solve problems.
Found this article interesting?
If you haven’t used artificial intelligence or aren’t sure what you need, you may consider this comprehensive training that I put together for marketers to really understand AI easily and in their own time. Download the brochure here.