Business vs Technology: Don’t Drown in the Deep End – Find Your Strategic Starting Point

The marketing landscape is vast and ever-changing. Today, it feels like an ocean of possibilities, with countless AI tools with an immense potential for simplifying our jobs, our collaborations, our lives. However, as much as it seems like a super-power, many of us have not felt this overwhelmed before.

AI indeed holds immense potential to revolutionize marketing, offering a vast number of benefits for businesses across all industries. McKinsey and PWC studies estimate that AI may deliver an additional economic output of over US$13 trillion by 2030. A significant portion of this growth could stem from improved commercial and marketing effectiveness.

Here’s a glimpse into the transformative power of AI for marketing and customer experience, I am sure we have all heard about:

• Enhanced Customer Personalization: AI allows for hyper-personalization of marketing messages, content, and offers, leading to increased engagement and conversion rates.
• Predictive Analytics: AI can analyse vast amounts of data to predict customer behaviour, allowing marketers to anticipate needs and deliver timely, relevant experiences.
• Chatbots and Virtual Assistants: AI-powered chatbots offer 24/7 customer support, improving accessibility and providing instant assistance.
• Automated Content Creation and Distribution: AI can automate tasks like content creation, scheduling, and distribution, freeing up marketers’ time for strategic initiatives.
• Improved Customer Segmentation and Targeting: AI can segment customers based on their unique characteristics and behaviours, enabling targeted marketing campaigns with higher ROI.

While AI innovation is exploding, with new tools and applications emerging at an exponential rate, it’s crucial to remember that learning and mastering every single one isn’t feasible for most businesses, especially when we know by experience that it can take up to a couple of years for marketers to fully adapt and integrate new solutions into their workflows. And this is why marketing professionals, like most of us, are struggling to keep pace with this frantic pace of technological evolution.

So, how do we get around this? These are times where we more than even need to revert back to core principles of prioritisation, so we don´t let the vastness of the AI landscape deter us. A few suggestions to find your strategic starting point to navigate the AI marketing ocean effectively are:

• Align AI Implementation with your Business Strategy: Before diving headfirst, ensure your AI initiatives are aligned with your overall business and brand strategy. Ask yourself: how will AI help achieve your unique goals and objectives?
• Identify the gaps in your customer experience: Focus on the customer experience and in those areas where most improvements can be made and let that drive the efforts to seek help from AI tools and enhanced learning.
• Identify “quick wins”: Once defined the key spaces to focus on, make sure you define those within your marketing strategy where AI can deliver the most significant value with minimal learning curve, investment, or integration.
• Develop the road map: Organise the plan over time, to ensure careful implementation, appropriate learning and embedding and organic integration into business practices.
• Build Internal Support and Collaboration: Successfully implementing AI requires buy-in from various teams within your organization. Once the efforts have been prioritised, educate your colleagues about the potential benefits of AI for the achievement of the commercial objectives and foster adoption and collaboration between marketing, IT, and other departments.

Before getting enchanted by the shine of AI, it is important to be clear on what customer pain points we are trying to solve, how this aligns to our business strategy, where we want to create value, what our internal capabilities will allow us to implement, so we can leverage the power of AI in the areas that make a difference, for your customers and your business. Only then, you will have the focus you and your team need to navigate the AI marketing ocean and emerge victorious.

Ready to embark on your AI marketing journey? Start by identifying your “quick wins” and take that first strategic step!