Providing a personalised customer experience is a challenge that consumer brands took on years ago. It is also becoming ever more important within B2B organisations. Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly enabling marketers to automate tasks which are time-consuming and repetitive. The result is more time for creativity and delivering added value! Here are three tips for you as a marketer for getting started with AI.
Chatbots simplify the lives of both customers and customer service employees. Employees no longer have to answer recurring questions again and again, and customers receive help very quickly.
In certain cases, however, the customer will prefer to speak to an actual person – someone who will really listen and tell him or her what needs to be done. The motto, in other words, is ‘digitisation where possible, but human where desirable’.
This encapsulates the challenge for the modern marketer: when should we use digital technologies to automate tasks? And at what point is the human aspect more important?
AI: don’t think it has nothing to do with you
Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of those technologies that can make life much easier for marketers. Nothing to do with you? Nonsense, AI is already surreptitiously present in many marketing tools and applications!
Take Google Ads for example: the models that tell you what your ad’s conversion rate is likely to be are a great example of artificial intelligence in its most accessible form. And Facebook itself now identifies the target audiences that are likely to respond best to your messages. In short, marketers already regularly use AI applications without being aware of it.
AI makes marketing fun and effective!
As a marketing department, you can use AI to automate tasks that keep recurring and add little value to your organisation (or job satisfaction). This includes things like collecting all kinds of customer data and accurately defining and adjusting target audiences. In addition, AI enables you to make data-driven decisions where you previously acted on the basis of gut feeling.
- Typing in the numbers again and merging Excel files before you can draw any conclusions is a thing of the past: with the help of AI you are able to make decisions instantly.
- You no longer need to take the communication channel as your starting point: AI allows you to base your actions on customer behaviour and profiles.
AI in marketing: three tips
Do you want to get started with AI in marketing? We notice that there’s still a lot of hesitancy, so we have three practical tips for you!
Tip 1. Aim for balance
Automating absolutely everything takes all that’s human out of your organisation, but automating nothing makes your business inefficient and ineffective. You need to strike the right balance between people and technology.
Do you already know how to automate all those mind-numbingly repetitive tasks such as rewriting content according to SEO principles or manually putting together the same periodic marketing reports time after time? If so, you’ve loads of time and space left as a marketer to set up innovative and trend-setting campaigns!
Tip 2. Think about what you want to do with the data
Technology makes collecting user and customer data easy. But data are simply a collection of ones and zeros: what you want is to extract information from those data. About customer needs, about trends, and preferably with an eye to future developments too. It’s therefore wise to think carefully about two things beforehand.
- What information you want to extract from the data. For example, do you want to find out at what point in the customer journey the customer drops out? Or are you mainly interested in how customers end up on your website?
- Exactly what data you need in order to be able to collect that information. A clear data strategy is essential. It prevents you from collecting data that you do nothing with, while ensuring you have enough data to draw valuable conclusions from.
Tip 3. Just do it!
Ultimately, with AI and marketing as in other areas of life, it’s ‘just’ a matter of doing it. As mentioned earlier, marketers already use artificial intelligence on a daily basis, often without realising it. Not to mention all the AI applications that we also consciously or unconsciously use in our private lives. For example, Netflix series and film suggestions or the Discover Weekly playlist on Spotify: all are offered and compiled on the basis of our behaviour and optimised using our customer profile.
Many marketing tools and applications also contain AI functionalities these days. They represent an ideal and easy way to get started with artificial intelligence!
AI is an essential part of personalisation
In our trend report on Digital Marketing, E-commerce & Customer Services we discussed one of the most important trends in digital marketing: personalisation. Personalisation means abandoning the generic content push and approaching customers with exactly the right content, at the right time and via the right channel.
Artificial intelligence plays a crucial role in achieving this personalisation. You’ll never be able to offer personalised content manually on a large scale, but with automation and the help of trained algorithms and highly developed models, it is possible. AI is therefore an essential tool for realising your personalisation ambitions.
Take action!
One tool that helps create this personalised customer experience is Sitecore’s Digital Experience Platform (DXP). In addition to content management, the Digital Experience Platform, operating with the help of AI, data and analytics and marketing automation, offers you the opportunity to roll out impressive marketing campaigns. It gives you the space to be creative again. And let’s face it: that’s why you got into marketing in the first place, isn’t it?
