Businesses have long had the data they need to create highly personalized experiences. But it's stored in disparate datasets across multiple departments, and until now marketing hasn't had the power to leverage it.
Generative AI powers both advanced content creation and real-time data analysis, giving marketing teams the nitro boost they need to deliver bespoke customer communications. While this strengthens an organization's brand, it can also introduce new risks. In this environment, 76% of CMOs say generative AI will change the way they do marketing. 76% also say that failure to rapidly deploy generative AI will significantly harm their ability to remain competitive.
Many marketing organizations already use generative AI based on public large language models (LLMs) for content creation, but by feeding the model with your own data, you can take advantage of this innovative feature for extreme customization. There are very few organizations that achieve this. But with more than half (51%) of CMOs saying they plan to use their own data (the customer intellectual capital that exists in marketing) to build foundational models by the end of 2024, things will change quickly. It will change.
Generative AI offers a faster way to create content with more personalized messages, gives marketers more control over analytics, and provides insights from customer data at scale, quickly, and specifically. much easier to extract. This highlights patterns that reveal details about customer preferences, ultimately enabling marketers to go beyond targeted segmentation and deliver truly personalized offers and interactions. .
The real-time insights this enables can also help marketers determine whether personalized products, services, and experiences are hitting the mark, and quickly switch gears if the answer is no.
The IBM Institute for Business Value has identified three things every leader should know.
- Marketing is at the vanguard of generative AI across the enterprise.
- Content creators are freed from feeding the beast.
- With generative AI, hyper-personalization is no longer a pipe dream.
And three things every leader needs to do right now:
- Position marketing as a model for generative, AI-driven workforce transformation.
- Prioritize creative ideas and high production values in your marketing content.
- Build 360-degree customer profiles using unified data.
What you need to know
Marketing is ushering in generative AI across the enterprise
How should humans spend their time when all mundane and repetitive tasks are automated? More than one in four (27%) executives expect marketing roles to be automated by generative AI. I expect it to be. Mark Read, CEO of WPP, the world's largest advertising organization, says this may sound dire for marketing professionals, but there are huge opportunities yet to be discovered. That's it.
“We know what kind of work it is. [generative AI] AI is disruptive, but we don't know what jobs it will create. And it will surely create a lot of jobs. If you look at WPP, probably half of the jobs in the company didn't exist 20 years before he did. We didn't have a social media manager. We didn't have a programmatic media manager. There was no search engine optimizer. You can continue. ”
To realize its full value, generative AI models need access to customer data across the entire chain of engagement, from marketing to sales to service. So marketing teams have great growth opportunities, but they also need to expand their horizons around data privacy and governance to manage brand risk and protect customer trust. However, only 26% of CMOs said their marketing department is implementing generative AI in conjunction with both sales and customer service.
Rethinking marketing operating models to enable more effective partnerships between humans and technology, freeing up humans to focus on higher-value work. Enhancing creativity and innovation, strategic thinking and decision-making, product positioning and merchandising will help improve marketing team skills and accelerate the learning curve. As these teams perform, CEOs can distill their learnings into a roadmap to help other departments integrate this technology more effectively across the enterprise.
What to do
Positioning marketing as a model for AI-powered generative transformation of the workforce
Ask your CMO to redefine the marketer's job. And what they don't do. Apply lessons learned to transform other departments across the enterprise.
- Make your CMO your customer advocate. Position marketing as the owner of the brand's customer experience and lifecycle. Gives you the responsibility and authority to influence the customer value chain across your enterprise. Recognize and address brand risks while leveraging new engagement opportunities provided by generative AI.
- Focus on creating more high-value roles. Work with your CMO to build a marketing team rooted in the skills needed in the age of generative AI. Apply the lessons learned from reinventing marketing to other functions as well as customer service.
- Turn your anxiety into excitement. Encourage CMOs to implement a purpose-driven, targeted, and formal change management approach to help marketers understand and address new value propositions for their roles. We lead with openness, transparency, and authentic communication from both the top down and the bottom up.
What you need to know
Content creators are freed from feeding the beast
Content creation can be oppressive. As teams rush to meet endless deadlines, high-value strategic work often gets lost in the shuffle.
Generative AI promises to change all this. They can take on much of the content creation work, helping your team summarize messages, brainstorm catchy taglines, and optimize assets for different audiences.
By 2025, three out of four CMOs say their organization will use generative AI for content creation. Additionally, more than half said they would use it for content transcreation (51%). This goes beyond simple translation to ensure that the tone and meaning of the original asset is properly localized to a specific region or culture.
As generative AI plays a growing role in content creation, teams are increasingly thinking strategically about how messaging can support both business goals and customer needs and experimenting with innovative marketing approaches. You will be able to spend more time. You can create dynamic journey maps based on buyer behavior.
Rather than frantically filling up your publishing pipeline, you can carefully consider where to create high-value content based on your data inputs and determine which delivery methods are most effective for each customer. These directives may also drive product and commercialization decisions throughout the organization.
What to do
Prioritize creative ideas and high production values in marketing content
Elevate your marketing materials by connecting them to customer journey touchpoints and moments of truth. Increase productivity by streamlining content creation and redirecting human energy to higher-value work.
- Say goodbye to writer's block. Show your team how generative AI can accelerate the content creation process. Tap LLM, customized with your organization's data, to help you brainstorm topics, headlines, social posts, and messaging variations that are appropriate for different audiences. Triple-check to eliminate bias in content created by generative AI or humans.
- Bridge the gap between customer needs and marketing content. Determine where content is needed to drive desired customer actions and outcomes, and use generative AI to create content that alleviates specific pain points in the customer journey.
- Identify the people who will do tomorrow's work today. Discover new roles enabled by generative AI by paying close attention to those on the front lines. Those who adopt generative AI from the beginning will gain insights, key practices, and lessons learned that will help define their MarOps models of the future.
What you need to know
Generative AI makes hyper-personalization no longer a pipe dream
Every customer is unique, but traditional marketing dashboards dilute them in a sea of aggregated data. The details needed to make a personal connection are lost.
More than two in five (42%) CMOs say increasing hyper-personalization is a marketing priority, and 64% will use generative AI for content personalization in the next 1-2 years. I expect that. But to get there, organizations need a unified, detailed view of customer behavior and preferences. This requires flawless data integration and management, which has long been marketing's Achilles heel.
As a result, CMOs are seeking greater control over data collection and insights. When asked which aspect of marketing they would like to have more control over, analytics topped the list.
Generative AI can integrate the complexity of customer preferences and behaviors to provide marketers with the actionable insights they need. By analyzing customer data from different sources more quickly and dynamically, teams can determine what works best for specific customers and adjust outreach efforts accordingly. From personalized content and experiences to bespoke chatbot support, generative AI helps teams address customer needs in real-time.
The list of potential applications continues to grow, and CMOs are focused on building a strong foundation of analytics capabilities to help keep up with the pace of change. For example, 78% of CMOs expect to use generative AI to conduct data analysis and gain insights from digital/social channels by the end of 2024 (up from 36% today). Additionally, 86% of CMOs say they plan to use generative AI to analyze customer insights by 2025.
What to do
Build 360-degree customer profiles using unified data
Unified data makes a huge difference in highly personalized marketing. Give CMOs autonomy over the marketing technology stack across all touchpoints, including sales and service.
- Build multidisciplinary marketing and IT teams. Align CMO and CIO priorities and foster partnership between them. Stand up the infrastructure, systems, and data integration needed for true one-to-one marketing with generative AI.
- Get a complete picture of your customer's needs. Break down functional silos and integrate data from marketing, sales, and customer service to get a complete picture of your customers' individual journeys with your business.
- Power your open model with customer data. Position customer data as your brand's biggest differentiator and defense against misinformation. At the same time, leverage the speed and scalability of open and public models to personalize experiences and services while protecting sensitive data at every step.
The statistics that inform the insights on this page are based on two independent studies conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value in collaboration with Oxford Economics. The first survey was conducted between September and October 2023 among 110 US-based chief marketing officers on the impact of generative AI on marketing functions. The second survey surveyed 300 US-based executives in May 2023 and asked them about the impact of generative AI on their workforce.
