CEO and cofounder of conversational marketing automation platform Spectrm.
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.
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.
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.
