A Step-By-Step Guide For Retention Marketers Developing Their Generative AI Strategy

 

Max Koziolek

Forbes Councils Member

Forbes Technology Council

COUNCIL POST| Membership (Fee-Based)

Jan 23, 2024,10:00am EST

CEO and cofounder of conversational marketing automation platform Spectrm.

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Are you eager to use artificial intelligence (AI) in your marketing efforts and just not sure where to start?

AI has been around for a while. But it's the recent wave of publicly available AI models that have everyone excited about the possibilities. Early iterations of AI could analyze data, find patterns and provide insights. Generative AI does the same but then generates new ideas or content based on that data. It learns and then it does.

This is why AI is so exciting for marketers. Yes, generative AI can write marketing copy in seconds, but its use cases extend way beyond writing. Marketers say the biggest benefits of using AI are increased performance, increased creative variety and cost efficiencies, while 74% of organizations that adopt AI into their marketing efforts have seen their revenue increase.

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For example, generative AI can help scale one-to-one personalization efforts, meeting customer demands with more tailored experiences. AI can even help you orchestrate the entire customer journey. AI can take over the execution of repetitive, manual work, freeing you up to focus more on your strategy. AI can analyze your data, find patterns and make real-time recommendations for customer interactions.

Marketers are looking to incorporate these new generative AI tools into their workflows and initiatives. If you want to reap the benefits of AI-powered marketing but don't know where to start, here are five steps you can take today.

Five Steps To AI-Powered Marketing

You may have already started to implement AI into your marketing efforts, or maybe you're overwhelmed by what it can actually do for your business. These five steps are designed to help set you on the right path to leverage AI and bring more value to your customers.

1. Clarify your use cases and goals.

It's tempting to just launch AI across every channel and function you oversee. AI is a great tool when harnessed and used to optimize specific initiatives, so start by clarifying what you want to accomplish and how AI can fit in.

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If you want to scale your personalization efforts, use AI to power your chatbots. Use it to scale the number of conversations you can have across social media and direct messaging apps. Train AI on how to respond to your customers and ask questions back to connect them to the products and services they're looking for.

If you're looking for ways to streamline your retention efforts, use AI for its predictive modeling capabilities. By training it with your data, it can uncover the best ways and times to target your customers. Additionally, decide how involved you want AI to be. Do you want it to help in your efforts or actually run them?

2. Pick tools carefully to support your use cases.

It may be tempting to start adopting all the new AI-powered tools, but be deliberate in choosing those that serve your use cases. This might include chatbots or tools for creating engaging written copy or tools to help with data analysis, predictive modeling, customer journey orchestration and automation.

As you evaluate your tools, look at what types of AI they use. Understand its capabilities and how they fit your use cases. Also, consider how the product will evolve. What types of security does the tool have in place? How easy will it be to use? Don’t forget to have a plan in place for training once you do select your tools.

3. Safeguard your brand, data and customers.

As you begin incorporating AI-powered tools into your marketing efforts, make sure that you put guardrails in place to protect your brand, your data and your customers.

For example, stay away from using public AI models to power something like a chatbot. Since these models are trained on large sets of data from the internet, their answers likely won't be tailored for your audience. Along with this, they may also be inaccurate, inappropriate or biased—things you don't want attributed to your brand.

Similarly, prioritize keeping the data you're using safe. Public AI models work by sending your data to third-party APIs to generate responses. So the data you feed it—including customer messages or information—doesn't stay private.

Instead, set up your own customized solutions powered by your own data that will accurately represent your brand to your customers. Create privacy-safe ways to use AI in your organization. Seventy-five percent of consumers say they would feel more comfortable with a brand that uses AI if they have an AI ethics management plan in place.

4. Test and scale incrementally.

AI is a skill that you'll need to learn, train and grow, which involves testing and scaling your efforts incrementally. Take time to train your AI with your data and give it feedback so that it learns how to better represent your brand. Start utilizing AI's predictive capabilities on a small test group before you ramp it up to your entire audience. Always check that it's giving you accurate and quality responses that align with your efforts before you implement what it suggests.

Make sure that you're consistently tracking and measuring your efforts as well, especially against pre-AI data. Ideally, you'll see that AI-assisted efforts improve your metrics. But if they don't, use your data to find out why and adjust as needed.

5. Communicate the impact.

Finally, communicate the impact your AI-powered initiatives are having on your efforts. Everyone's eager to see how much AI will improve engagement, retention and revenue. Share KPIs and metrics with your organization and your leadership team so that you can make decisions around future investments in AI.

Better Marketing Starts Today

For those looking to improve retention efforts with generative AI, evaluate your use cases, find the right tools and implement them wisely to see a difference in the value you can bring to your customers. More targeted personalization and improved one-to-one experiences mean you’ll be better positioned to keep them engaged and keep them coming back.

Mixed reality is the next shiny thing for marketers, but some remain cautious

Fifteen years ago, few people could have predicted the change smartphones would bring to advertising — going from novelty to necessity and hastening the decline of PCs and linear TV while sparking the rise of social media and streaming entertainment.

Now, as smartphone sales plateau, a new crop of augmented and mixed-reality (AR and MR) devices could once again revolutionize how we experience technology and reach engaged audiences. Some top marketers, however, are not quite convinced — at least, not yet.

Apple announced last week that it will begin selling the Vision Pro headset at the start of February, and the device is already predicted to sell out. During the 2024 Consumer Electronics Showcase (CES), Sony announced it’s building an MR headset slated to launch later this year — as is, reportedly, Samsung and Google’s.

Early adopters can already choose from AR and MR devices from Meta and buzzy upstarts like XREAL, Rabbit, and Humane. Speaking of the Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, Niantic CEO John Hanke told the Financial Times, “I think it surprised a lot of people in terms of how well that was received. I think this version is the right device at the right time.”

These devices enable “ambient” or “spatial” computing, whereby physical and digital worlds converge and our surroundings become our screens. AR glasses, for example, overlay digital content on the real world, and MR devices let users interact with content as if it were part of their surroundings.

For all the promise of AR and MR, marketers who spoke to The Current remained skeptical. “For me, it’s very much ‘wait and see.’ I’m not sold that it is quite where it needs to be for consumers to buy into it,” Josh Campo, CEO at Razorfish, told The Current during CES 2024. “We need to see some kind of adoption rates before we can say that this is a channel we should be doubling down on.”

From curiosities to critical strategies

Lingering economic uncertainty may play a role in marketers’ hesitancy toward MR, unlike the excitement that the industry bestowed upon the metaverse two years ago.

“Right now, marketers are all playing it very safe because of what’s going on in the world,” Maggie Malek, president of North America at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, tells The Current. “If this stuff starts to ramp up more, we [will have] more conversations with clients about advertising in these spaces [and] partnering with these organizations.”

But just as mobile, social media, and location-based ads went from mere curiosities to critical strategies in marketers’ toolkits, the implications of this new crop of gadgets could be profound. Marketers can now tap in to MR experiences with haptic feedback and create hyper-personalized, hyper-local contextual ads.

“The post-smartphone era of advertising, where our surroundings effectively become interactive screens, could lead to a transformative shift in how ads are created, distributed, and interacted with,” says Ellie Bamford, chief strategy officer at Wunderman Thompson North America.

“One significant opportunity lies in transforming the pure ‘spectator’ role of the ad viewer into highly engaging and interactive ad experiences,” adds Jaime Gonzalo, vice president of Huawei Mobile Services Europe. “MR allows for storytelling and brand interaction in three-dimensional spaces, offering a more compelling narrative than traditional ‘flat’ ads.”

As tech firms big and small race to make these next-gen devices appealing and affordable to the masses, we could soon witness advertising experiences like walking through a shopping mall and seeing personalized ads or having a virtual shopping assistant in our living room.

“With advancements in location-based services, ads could become even more hyper-local,” says Bamford. “Walking past a store in the real or digital world could trigger personalized discounts or offers directly to your wearable device, depending on your shopping history or preferences.”

Less screen time, more quality experiences

At CES this year, the flurry of MR product launches and commitment from big tech names like Sony has made some technologists more optimistic than marketers about the direction of the space.

“It’s further evidence that the entire industry is moving in the direction of spatial computing, giving resources to creators to create things in this virtual space,” Michael Miraflor, chief brand officer at venture capital firm Hannah Grey, told The Current during CES 2024.

“Developers are [...] eventually going to want to create things that people want, and people want to be entertained,” continued Miraflor. “They want to be productive. And they want to experience things that they couldn’t experience on devices before.”

Amid this uncertainty, some companies are already preparing for the future by tapping in to technology that’s already here and working. Walmart and Qualcomm are reimagining the retail experience with smart shopping carts, video rails on shelves, and biometrics at checkout. This could further boost the retail media segment of the industry, projected to surpass TV spend by 2028, by providing yet more opportunities to engage with shoppers.

Sensory advertising, like Starbucks’ activation in London last year that featured sound effects of ice shaking and scent dispensers, could also be amplified by the rise of wearable tech — from smartwatches to fitness rings — which is projected to see double-digit growth for the next five years.

“The focus should be on creating meaningful interactions that respect the user’s desire for less screen time and more quality experiences,” says Gonzalo. “This could involve more contextual and situational advertising that feels like a natural part of the user’s environment, rather than an interruption.”