Abstract
- Benefits of AI. Generative AI tools enable small teams of marketers to compete effectively with larger, better-resourced competitors.
- Key strategies. Building or rebuilding an effective marketing capability in the AI era requires adopting five key strategies, including adhering to fundamental marketing principles.
- Operator required. AI does not eliminate the need for experienced and creative marketing professionals to operate AI tools.
Generative AI has only been widely available for just over 18 months, but it's already reshaping many business functions, from finance to HR to marketing. To keep up, marketers need to take advantage of this new capability – generative AI in marketing – and move quickly.
Here are five key strategies marketers can use to make the most of generative AI and stay competitive.
Adopting these strategies requires reworking your existing marketing department or starting a new one from scratch. Both situations represent significant organizational change. Start-ups with little or no marketing capabilities will find it much easier to adopt this new generative AI into their marketing strategies than organizations with well-developed marketing teams.
To determine the speed with which these strategies can be implemented, company leaders must begin by assessing their organization's ability to absorb change.
5 Generative AI in Marketing Strategy for Success
1. Abandon the step-by-step approach
Abandon the typical piecemeal approach to building marketing strategies and marketing capabilities and build all capabilities at the same time. Startups often build marketing capabilities one piece at a time. On the other hand, companies often change only one functional area at a time. AI allows you to cost-effectively launch many functions at once. This is highly advantageous as it is the integration of numerous marketing functions to enhance the marketing goal of influence.
AI tools enable small teams to rapidly develop market, competitive, and customer intelligence and analysis. This analysis shows you the most effective ways to reach and influence your target customers, guiding and informing decisions about next steps.
With the insights gained from AI analytics in mind, you can then create (or re-create) your core marketing capabilities. It also uses AI to speed up the process from ideation to creation and delivery of content. However, remember that every organization still needs people with expertise in core marketing functions.
Related Article: AI in Analytics: 3 Top Tips to Keep Your Workflows Modern
2. Build departmental flexibility
Large marketing departments often fall victim to silos. This reduces our ability to adapt to rapidly changing market conditions, customer needs and product developments. In the age of AI, this is a death sentence. AI allows for relatively flat structures. This helps prevent the development of territories that become rigid and resistant to change.
use this approach
Using a “council” approach, all members see themselves as part of one team rather than a departmental structure. This does not mean avoiding hiring experts in core functions. Quite the opposite. But that means teams must be highly integrated and comfortable with change. AI tools allow small teams to deliver tremendous power, but they need to be flexible.
collaborate with stakeholders
Council members must also be able to identify and work closely with stakeholders beyond the marketing team. This includes members of sales, finance, product development teams and management. As with all marketing organizations, these stakeholders are critical to success, from endorsing recommended programs and campaigns to actively participating in recommended activities. Because buy-in is everything.
This is especially important for B2B companies because the purchasing environment is changing. Millennial buyers want more self-service options and less interaction with sales representatives. This makes integration with sales and product development even more important. Generative AI tools that support the development of effective presentations can help marketing teams gain buy-in from internal stakeholders.
Related article: Generative AI in Marketing: Unlocking the next generation of use cases
3. Design an operational strategy based on capabilities
Today, AI tools can dramatically and cost-effectively improve efficiency across a variety of marketing activities, including market and audience analysis, content creation, performance monitoring, digital and social media marketing, customer engagement, and marketing automation. I can. However, build your operational strategy around core marketing capabilities, not AI capabilities. This is because marketing capabilities stay relevant much longer than individual AI tools.
By focusing on the capabilities needed to influence buyer behavior, rather than over-investing in the current capabilities of AI tools, organizations can more easily adapt their work to new AI tools and capabilities as they are developed. can be adapted to.
The hallmark of successful marketing is the ability to pivot quickly in response to changes in products, markets, competitors, or simply when strategies and tactics do not work as expected. A key benefit of generative AI in marketing is that it allows organizations to pivot more quickly, so this capability should be built into your operational approach.
Related article: Generative AI in Marketing: Will it drive growth or detract from your department?
4. Adopt an AI mindset
Marketing practices and the tools used by marketers have undergone significant changes over the past two decades. As a result, successful marketers tend to be very flexible in their thinking. In the age of AI, flexibility of thought and the ability to quickly adapt to new techniques and technologies are important.
Test your adaptability
So, when hiring members of your marketing team, test candidates for suitability. There are several tools readily available to do this. Ask candidates about the use of AI. AI tools are now readily available, so hire people who are familiar with AI and are actively using it in their work. Using such tools and managing their use is a virtual test of adaptability.
detailed analysis
With the advent of AI tools and technology, even small marketing teams can now access capabilities that were previously only available to large, well-funded organizations. One such feature is detailed analysis. Such analytics give teams the speed, flexibility, and accuracy to evaluate results and quickly adjust strategies and tactics. However, this is only if your team understands how to use data and analytics to derive insights that enable such adjustments. When hiring, look for analytically-minded individuals who are comfortable evaluating and using data generated by AI.
reduce costs
These analyzes help reduce costs by requiring differentiation and proof of performance. At the same time, it also improves marketing's ability to quantify results, as every digital medium has its own set of analytics, surveys, and dashboards for review.
The legendary “father of advertising” David Ogilvy once said: “Today, a marketer who ignores research and analysis is as dangerous to a company's success as a general who ignores deciphered enemy signals.”
Eliminate repetitive tasks
AI is already eliminating repetitive and mundane tasks in marketing. At the same time, AI's tendency to create content that is closer to the average, reflecting current “best practices,” emphasizes human creativity to ensure deliverables differentiate and engage with human customers. .
Therefore, marketing recruiters need to shift their focus from candidates who are good at day-to-day tasks to candidates who are creative and have a high emotional IQ. Emotional intelligence, the ability to manage one's own emotions and understand the emotions of others, allows marketers to design marketing campaigns that more effectively influence the purchasing behavior of others.
Focus on emotional intelligence
In fact, given the current direction of AI development, where the use of AI tools requires less technical knowledge, we should focus on emotional IQ rather than technical IQ. However, this does not mean that knowledge of marketing techniques is unnecessary. That knowledge is essential. Rather, as tools become easier to use, technical knowledge of the tools themselves becomes less and less important.
Related article: Generative AI in marketing and sales: 8 high-impact B2B use cases
5. Don't forget the basics and basics
Even in the age of AI, marketing needs a foundation on which to build operational programs and campaigns. This includes setting marketing and sales goals. AI can help with this, but ultimately it needs to be tied to the organization's business goals. Similarly, while AI can help develop the language of value propositions and desired market positions, value propositions must emerge from the value that a company, its products, and services provide to its target customers; is born from the company's aspirations. Organizational leadership and business strategy.
Other fundamental components of marketing, such as target customers, competitive environment and market analysis, and even the overall marketing strategy itself, can also be built using AI tools. But it will take an experienced marketer to ensure that the right prompts, content, and context are provided and that the results are properly evaluated with an experienced critical eye.
Notes
Currently, AI is wrestling with three key factors related to building or rebuilding marketing capabilities.
Creativity:
Generative AI, such as large-scale language models and LLMs, are built by ingesting large amounts of text from across the internet. This means that its output is often a kind of average of the data ingested. Creativity and uniqueness are key to marketing programs and campaigns that differentiate you from your competitors.
AI tools produce outputs that can be called “best practices.” But when something becomes a “best practice” in marketing, it is, by definition, no longer unique or new. Beware of competing against averages, which are often generated by AI tools. Marketing leaders should monitor this closely, as the model is expected to improve over time.
Integration:
Effective marketing involves integrating different activities across media and engagement channels and formats, leveraging customer, market and competitor data, and implementing monitoring and research tools that provide feedback loops for improvement. Masu.
Currently, no AI tools exist that can effectively provide end-to-end integration of marketing functions. This may change over time, but integrations are complex and highly individualized based on business goals, target customer personas, product sets, and market types. As with creativity, marketing leaders need to keep a close eye on this area.
Beginning:
Building a marketing capability, especially one that can compete with competitors that are much larger and better resourced, requires the marketing field and the ability to influence target customers to consider, buy, and ultimately advocate for them. It requires a broad knowledge of all the factors that determine how to become a person. new products and services; Starting with the right foundation is often the difference between success and (long-term) failure.
Just as AI tools have not yet mastered integration, marketing capabilities cannot yet be developed from scratch.
Final thoughts on generative AI in marketing
AI provides powerful tools that organizations can leverage to build or rebuild marketing capabilities to compete with larger, better-resourced competitors. But at least for now, AI is just providing a tool. Marketing is a complex field because humans are complex creatures. Influencing people to change their behavior or adopt new behaviors is also complex. So far, AI has failed to replace human intuition and creativity in the marketing mix.
Sameness is dangerous when using AI tools. Don't fall victim to “best practices” or “average content.” Humans should use AI tools, not the other way around.
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