Understanding the influence of AI on marketing is not only advantageous, but also essential in today’s digital marketing environment, where 40% of marketers have already experienced efficiency gains from generative AI tools and 95% of marketers hail AI as a transformative technology. The rapid pace of AI development offers Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and other marketing professionals both new opportunities and special problems. In this piece, we explore the reasons why it’s so important to understand AI now and list the fundamental abilities and characteristics that marketing executives must possess in order to succeed in this new environment.
Marketing With AI
The impact of AI on marketing cannot be overstated. Content production, data analysis, search, and automation have all been transformed by generative artificial intelligence (genAI). GenAI is a strong ally that can be used for anything from automating daily tasks to studying consumer behavior and assisting in the creation of interesting content. This translates into a wealth of new tools for CMOs to improve data analysis, ignite deeper engagements, and accelerate brand growth. In the next 12 to 18 months, 81% of CMOs anticipate using genAI to support new business models in their role, per a PwC report. Why? because marketing teams can level the playing field using genAI. As stated by Mastercard’s CMO, Raja Rammannar:
The emergence of [generative] AI in particular, in my opinion, presents marketers with a great chance to regain their time because all competitors have access to the same set of tools, leveling the playing field.
Marketers will fall behind if they don’t learn about and use AI.
The Role Of The Modern CMO
In 2024, the CMO’s function has changed dramatically over the last ten years, particularly with the introduction of artificial intelligence. In addition to spearheading marketing initiatives, today’s CMOs need to have a thorough awareness of how marketing, sales, and customer success are all impacted by marketing. Executives now need to possess a wider variety of talents, combining strategic management with strong analytical ability, due to the digitization and usage of algorithms in marketing. Chief marketers are increasingly more generalists as a result of this change, juggling financial objectives, sales performance, and customer insights. AI can be useful in each of these areas:
Project Financial Objectives
Analyze sentiment from reviews, customer service or sales calls, and survey replies.
Give insightful information to support greater data-driven decision-making.
Modern marketing executives need to have a sophisticated understanding of AI’s potential and use cases in order to enhance marketing campaigns and propel brand expansion, in addition to their strategic vision and acquired talents. those who don’t want to lag behind their rivals.
Essential Executive AI Qualities
To successfully negotiate the intricacies of the contemporary marketing environment, CMOs need to possess a few essential characteristics in today’s quickly changing, AI-driven world. This calls for a thorough comprehension of the technological improvements in the field as well as the analytical abilities necessary to effectively utilize them.
1. Recognize The Basics Of AI
For CMOs, having a firm understanding of AI principles is essential. Do you understand the fundamentals of artificial intelligence (AI), including fuzzy logic, natural language processing, and machine and deep learning? To learn about these fundamental AI ideas, we suggest a combination of the following:
Work together with your data scientists, who can assist you and your team in understanding the fundamentals of AI and who probably have firsthand knowledge of the subject.
Enroll in online courses offered by reputable organizations such as the Marketing AI Institute.
Attend seminars or watch videos and listen to podcasts hosted by AI specialists.
Examine research studies, white papers, and guidelines on AI marketing tactics and success stories.
Understanding how AI works and being knowledgeable about the best AI technologies, along with their uses and applications, are essential components of a solid AI foundation. To find out which AI tools your network of marketers use, as well as their successes and problems, rely on them. To find more resources, you may also sign up for online marketing forums or communities. You can more successfully assess solutions and use AI tools with this product expertise.
2. Recognize And Quantify The Impact On Business
The concrete effects AI technology will have on the company must be well understood and communicated by CMOs. But first, one must comprehend the marketing department’s financial influence. A CMO can more readily support the use of AI tools in future campaigns if they can demonstrate a connection between marketing and business performance, client acquisition, and sales growth. This entails understanding which KPIs to track and how to calculate the advantages of deploying AI technologies. You must have a solid understanding of your current KPIs at the macro level, including your overall customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer lifetime value (CLTV), and the conversion rates of various campaigns. You can compare the ROI of your AI technologies with these baseline data. Start small if you want to use AI effectively. Compare the open and click-through rates of emails sent with genAI versus those created entirely by humans using A/B testing. CMOs will be able to make well-informed judgments regarding the integration of AI technology into more comprehensive marketing plans and the optimization of business outcomes thanks to the tangible data on efficacy and efficiency that these A/B tests will provide.
3. Encourage Trust In Your Group
The current velocity of AI development and its integration into marketing strategies overwhelms 7 out of 10 marketers, according to our recent research. Only 39% of our respondents have formal AI education and training, and only 19% were getting training at the time of the study (September 2023), which may explain this view. Monica Ho, our CMO, is optimistic about AI in marketing.
“Instead of replacing marketing roles, the collaboration between AI and human expertise is set to redefine them in 2024, producing a synergy that enhances results across the board.”
Marketing leaders must adequately train their teams on the principles of AI and how to recognize hallucinations (inaccuracies produced by AI) in order to accomplish this partnership. Trainings on the best AI practices and ethical and efficient AI use should be held. We also suggest establishing AI policies for your business and marketing division. Your marketers will feel more prepared to embrace genAI technology thanks to this continuous education and training, which will also assist to build trust around AI.
4. Encourage Change
Most marketers are enthusiastic about AI, even though they believe that the field is developing at a rapid speed. According to our research, 69% of marketers think that marketers that use AI will eventually supplant those who don’t. Additionally, we discovered that 41% of marketers were worried about an excessive reliance on AI. CMOs must handle their teams’ conflicting feelings of enthusiasm and reluctance around AI in order to promote change. Your marketing staff needs to be able to view AI as a comarketer, not a substitute. By reassuring your team that AI technologies are designed to complement, not replace, their skills, you can foster a creative and cooperative work environment as a marketing executive. Additionally, it’s critical to keep the “human in the loop,” meaning that even while AI can process massive amounts of data and automate monotonous activities, the imaginative and compassionate aspects of marketing must continue to be uniquely human. Manu Orssaud, CMO of Duolingo, reminds us that artificial intelligence is a tool to help marketers:
“The primary function of artificial intelligence is to boost productivity. Since a marketer has more control over performance marketing, which accounts for more than 50% of spending, having more time for creativity is essential. The potential of AI to help us optimize ourselves is what we’re most interested in.
In addition to allaying AI concerns, the human-in-the-loop strategy emphasizes how important human intuition and inventiveness are to achieving fruitful marketing results.
5. Improve Your Data-Driven Choices
With the help of AI technology, marketers can sort through enormous amounts of consumer data and find insights that could result in more focused and successful marketing campaigns. But the saying “garbage in, garbage out” applies especially to genAI systems. To fully utilize AI, you need to employ clean, high-quality data. Data that is unclean or “dirty”—that is, insufficient, inaccurate, or overly specific—can distort AI analysis and result in poor choices and tactics. As was previously mentioned, marketing executives and teams must be aware of their baseline data and KPIs. If not, it will be difficult to gauge AI’s efficacy precisely, which could cause problems if you use this data to inform future strategic choices. To properly use AI in marketing initiatives, maintaining data integrity is both a first step and a continuous requirement. To learn how to execute an AI marketing strategy, read our guide, “A CMO’s Planning Guide to Navigating AI Transformation in 2024.” Your comprehension and use of AI in digital marketing will improve with the aid of this working guide.
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The strategies and techniques used by CMOs must change along with AI technologies. Marketing professionals need to be “nimble, and stay attuned to AI developments and even policy changes,” according to our CMO, Monica Ho. Marketers need to make sure that their strategies are modified to properly take advantage of AI’s revolutionary and constantly expanding potential.