AI-Powered Marketing – It’s About the Data “Cupid!”

Marketing is a fertile petri dish for the use of artificial intelligence (AI).  In fact, a recent study by Forrester Research found that 46% of respondents said that marketing and sales were the leading groups inside their companies evaluating the investment and adoption in AI.  In a recent webinar with analyst Rusty Warner from Forrester Research, Stewart Rogers of VentureBeat and Vijay Chittoor of Blueshift, we discussed these and other developments in the world of AI as they relate to marketing.  This is part 1 of a 3-part series about the topics discussed.

Customer data is exploding and marketers need help

Anyone who’s been in the trenches of online marketing in the last few years has seen the explosion of data first-hand. We’ve gone from having to work with just demographic data to the plethora of online data including online browsing activity tracked through cookies, opens and clicks of emails, mobile app activities, social media engagement, intent to purchase and purchase data and so much more. There is a treasure trove of information in all this data, but marketers are overwhelmed. 85% of them are unable to extract value from their data according to a study by Econsultancy and 59% of those attending our webinar told us that they are using less than 25% of their marketing data.

Not surprising to most marketers, there is a growing rift between the amount of customer data being generated and the capacity for traditional marketing techniques –largely powered by human analysis– to process this data. Rusty Warner refers to this phenomenon as “exceeding the human cognitive capacity” because of the complexity, volume and velocity of information.

Effective use of AI can narrow this human cognitive challenge by processing these large volumes of data quickly and use machine learning to recognize patterns in the data and predict what to do next based on the past behavior of similar audiences. While this sounds pretty logical and straightforward, it’s not as easy as buying a black-box AI system and dropping it in.  

The decision to deploy an AI system to improve marketing performance is a big one that should to be given the same level of planning and preparation that was given to deploying a CRM system (your system of record) or your marketing automation system (your system of engagement). The AI powered system will become your system of intelligence that must work closely with these other systems to improve results.

In the next part of this series, we will outline Forrester’s recommendations for planning, organizing, and deploying AI for your marketing.