Can AI Really Deliver Smarter Marketing Automation?
AI brings a wide range of opportunities to the underlying intelligence needed to conduct marketing campaigns. But how does it all work and how can you use it to grow your own business? Let’s take a closer look.
Why Use AI in Marketing Automation?
AI in marketing automation brings a number of benefits to your optimization strategies. First and foremost, trying to manage all of your marketing efforts is a LOT of work. Even if you have lean, mean MarTech stack, the potential for errors is still high. AI can help you save time, minimize errors and enhance productivity considerably.
Plus, if the marketing message you’re sending out to prospects is a mismatch in some way, your users are simply going to ignore it. It’s not relevant to them, so they expect nothing from it. Using AI in your marketing automation can help ensure that your messaging is taking the right product or service and tailoring it to the right audience at the right stage of your sales funnel.
How Can You Use AI to Improve Automation?
Before you leap into fully embracing AI and marketing automation, it’s important to consider how you’ll be using it in your business. You don’t want to hand off everything to AI, right out of the gate ( (as tempting as that would be!). As with any big shift like this, you want to start out small and test. Don’t buy into all of the hype that AI can and will replace everything in your business — it won’t. But the things it CAN replace will definitely save you hours of time.
To that end, you’ll want to take a close look at your MarTech stack and your outstanding to-dos and figure out where AI and automation figure into the equation. There are a lot of questions to ask before you jump in — how easy is the technology to use? How will it integrate with your existing solutions? Will it replace any of those solutions? You’ll need to prioritize the areas where the technology will have the biggest and most measurable impact.
It’s not a bad idea to get buy-in from the higher-ups in your organization, with the understanding that AI isn’t going to replace or steal anyone’s job. You’ll still need people to help to train the AI and teach it to help them in their work, not take it over. AI works best when there is a plan and a purpose in place, and it’s up to you to provide that. Finally, in getting everyone on board, it’s understandable to be excited about AI — it really CAN be incredible when used right. But there’s a lot of hype out there, and it’s a good idea to work with a company that can guide you in having realistic expectations.
Reliable Data Means Reliable Results
Even if you feel like you’re not quite ready to embrace AI wholeheartedly, it’s not going away. In fact, together with marketing innovation, you can expect AI to deal with a lot of heavy-lifting of the “if this, then that” types of marketing automation. Expect to see a lot of overlap between account-based marketing strategies and lead generation, creating a sort of hybrid that will depend on the company’s boals, target audience, sales enablement, sales engagement and more.
This type of focus in turn will have a ripple effect in measuring marketing performance, as well as the analytics of the customer journey among other things. To be sure, these are exciting times we’re living in. Taking steps to combine marketing automation with AI can have a profound impact on your business while increasing your efficiency while providing you with even more actionable, verifiable data.
But you don’t have to go it alone. At Workdom, our expertise in helping to identify your MarTech stack as well as where AI and marketing automation can fit in can help you create realistic expectations for the role that this exciting technology will play in your specific business. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you with your marketing automation and AI integration.
Originally published at https://www.workdom.io on September 27, 2021.
