Book Review: Using Artificial Intelligence in Marketing — How to Harness AI and Maintain the Competitive Edge
Log in to your email, use a search engine, pay a bill safely online, or use a map app on your phone to get from point A to point B — by the time you get to work in the morning, you’ve probably already used artificial intelligence (AI) in a number of different ways.
Just as it has already done so in many ways, AI holds even greater potential to transform the tech-driven world most of us live in to make life even easier, even faster, and even more personalized. Though it’s still evolving, every day AI is, in some way, changing the very fabric of how we live, how we do business, and particularly, how we market.
For experienced marketer Katie King, who recently wrote about her experiences and thoughts in her newly released book, “Using Artificial Intelligence in Marketing: How to Harness AI and Maintain the Competitive Edge”, the floodgates are open and one thing is certain: artificial intelligence is here to stay.
King brings decades of experience to the table: over the past 30 years, she has successfully navigated the often choppy, and always changing, waters of marketing in a climate that’s swiftly changed from marketing to captive audiences via singular platforms such as television or print ads to now marketing to customers via hundreds of channels online.
Though the days of agonizing over the perfect verbiage for an ad may be over, King is excited by how AI can help make marketing happen on the individual level — such as through delivering the right version of an ad to a person in their best possible place (on Facebook for one person, Instagram for another) at the best possible time of the day on the best possible day of the week.
King succinctly puts it this way, “we’re witnessing a new paradigm in marketing, as AI impacts every aspect of marketing, from market research to ambassador marketing.” This new paradigm is allowing brands to understand and interact with their consumers in unprecedented ways, King points out, and this means one big thing for marketing over the next ten years: “banks, retailers and many other organisations will provide less homogenised and far more personalised marketing.”
Today, marketing and customer experience (aka experience design) are all but one-in-the-same: marketers must go out and find consumers wherever they happen to be, on Facebook, on Instagram, reading the news, and so on — and identify a personalized way to engage with them (such as through sponsored content). From that first engagement on, the customer experience needs to be seamless and in line with the original vision.
Of course, this new era of responsive, experience-based marketing all sounds great on paper — but how can even the largest of marketing firms accomplish all of this? Until recently, there simply wasn’t enough hands, time, or resources to deliver this level of marketing in an impactful way. Enter AI.
King explains that as AI continues to overhaul the old ways of doing things and continues to automate tasks that were once time-consuming for marketers, marketers will need to adapt, as well.
Marketing today means using a series of constantly evolving channels to still reach the same number of consumers that was once possible with just a single television commercial. As new channels continue to come out, marketers will have to analyse and act, rinse and repeat. The importance of artificial intelligence in helping to get all of this done cannot be underscored.
As we shift into the era of experience design, in that the consumer experience is the number one commodity being sold, machine Learning and AI are becoming fundamental to marketing strategies because of their profound impact on the ability to personalise customer experiences.
Marketers are tasked with providing relevant information at every point of interaction, proactively suggest other content that will help each customer along their journey, and anticipate what they’ll need next: to pull all this off, they need AI.
AI helps businesses draw insights from their data; with Machine Learning, they’re able to make each interaction relevant, according to context and customer intent in that given moment, at scale.
To stay relevant, King argues, modern marketers will have to embrace working in an environment of continuous learning. The core of what artificial intelligence does is to analyse its environment and take actions it determines has the highest percentage to be successful; King effectively makes the case that just as AI must continuously analyse its environment to be successful, modern marketers will have to follow suit.
Though some skeptics may wonder if the importance of AI has been overstated and that the human aspect will again return to tasks being replaced by AI, King makes a compelling case that AI is here to stay and will, in fact, enhance human experience rather than take away from it, “Once AI and this next wave of automation take hold, we aren’t going to want to go back to more manual ways of doing things. AI will reshape all tasks though, rather than taking away the human in the loop. The person will analyse the incredible findings and move up the food chain.”
