Artificial Intelligence

Why AI is good news for marketers

Artificial Intelligence is propelling marketers into a customer-centric world based around predictive targeting.

VP Customer Experience

Time to read2 min read
March 16, 2017

Not so long ago, we may have thought of artificial intelligence (AI) as being limited to the realms of science fiction, rather than an everyday factor of mainstream marketing. But today, as we move away from rule-based marketing and towards predictive marketing, AI has an increasingly important role to play in a profitable marketing strategy.

In the past, the B2C marketers job has consisted of two parts:

  1. The strategic and creative side, which is all about working on the right products and interesting offers, coordinating with category managers, while also creating strong messages, engaging USPs and compelling CTAs.
  2. The second part of the job is trying to get the orchestration rules right for all this created content. For example, deciding what offer to send to whom, how many times to send customers messages, and through which channel. This process often uses pre-defined rules based on demographics, age, location and/or the recent activity of the customer. This creates a lot of administrative and quantitative work, while some of the messaging that results isn’t always directly relevant to the individual. This is because it’s mostly based on a combination of arbitrary rules, marketing intuition (that could be right!) and social preconceptions.

But that was yesterday, if you’re ready for the revolution. Today, AI is helping bring about liberating changes that transform the B2C marketer’s role—and I believe those changes are for the better. With AI, marketers can be free to focus more on the truly strategic and creative part of their job, with AI or predictive intelligence doing the other part, with great efficiency.

So, AI will predict each customer’s individual preferences, even in the absence of recently expressed intent, enabling marketers to create customer-centric messages for the vast majority of their database. This is at a level of precision that we, as mere mortals, are never going to achieve any time soon. A robot is simply more efficient! The resulting interactions will therefore be very specific, smart and relevant.

With AI-driven marketing, gone is the one-size-fits-all approach, replaced by customers receiving more proactive messages that are targeted and interesting. You might think that data-driven decisions mean less control for marketers, but it’s not the case. When we have the full picture, we have more control and more confidence in our strategies.

AI is certainly a more powerful way of engaging with people—profitable too. And I believe it’s going to help put the thrill back into a lot of marketers’ jobs. Bring it on!

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