How to reframe AI adoption to focus on outcomes, not tools

“How are we utilizing AI to enhance marketing performance?”

Marketers often find themselves apprehensive when faced with this question, while executives are increasingly seeking answers to it. The lack of a coherent narrative regarding their team’s martech maturity leaves marketers feeling anxious and defensive. Moreover, they struggle to articulate the tangible benefits of AI due to the challenges in measuring its usage and impact on results.

Nevertheless, this challenging question presents an opportunity to showcase the genuine impact of AI on customer engagement and marketing outcomes.

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Ultimately, the use of AI or any martech tool should not be solely about generating more content but about producing better content that resonates with the audience. It should swiftly address their concerns and assist customers in finding the products and solutions they seek. These outcomes have always been the hallmark of exceptional marketing.

Instead of fixating on tools, marketers should emphasize how AI drives results and enhances the overall customer experience. This entails evaluating AI’s role within the martech stack, understanding where it is currently making an impact, and identifying areas for enhancement.

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Understanding AI’s existing role in martech

Begin by assessing whether the integration of AI in marketing has transformed the martech stack. While many marketers continue to use familiar tools, these tools now boast AI-driven capabilities for enhanced speed and customization. Vendors are quick to highlight the longstanding presence of AI in addressing marketing challenges. It is essential to pinpoint how and where AI is already contributing to your martech stack.

This evaluation aids in crafting your “AI impact story,” a narrative that underscores how AI enhances marketing performance and boosts conversions. Similar to all marketing reporting, the focus should be on customer needs and motivations. Structure your narrative around three key benefits:

• New capabilities.
• New customer engagement.
• New team opportunities.

AI-driven capabilities: Expanding what’s possible

AI has been deeply ingrained in martech for years, powering personalization, scoring, and segmentation features across various marketing tools such as automation, email marketing, CRM, and social media. It is crucial to identify the new capabilities facilitated by AI within your technology stack. Ask yourself:

• Can prospects be scored more efficiently or minutely?
• Do you have access to diverse data sources from different platforms?
• Are you able to create personalized content based on first-party data on your website or landing page?
• How frequently is your chatbot utilized, and does it lead to product page visits or conversions?
• Are AI-driven algorithms predicting future behaviors or analyzing social sentiment?
• What insights have you gained from A/B testing?

Utilize historical performance data to showcase outcomes across the customer lifecycle and demonstrate incremental improvements over previous years. Integration across platforms may yield additional boosts in conversion and engagement metrics.

This is how you narrate the story of how AI enhances your marketing efforts without losing sight of the primary objective of marketing: creating exceptional customer experiences.

Enhancing customer engagement with AI

Engagement is typically measured at the content level, gauging how different segments or personas respond to various content elements. Marketers are increasingly leveraging generative AI to expedite content creation, leading to an abundance of generic and unremarkable content. It is imperative to shift focus from quantity to quality, ensuring that content resonates with the audience.

While there is a push to incorporate generative AI at every production stage, it is essential to acknowledge that human creativity is indispensable in developing customer-centric, data-driven strategies. Human connection is pivotal in creating campaigns that resonate and drive action, something that generative AI alone cannot achieve authentically or with trust.

However, when paired with a strategic approach, generative AI can significantly enhance engagement by streamlining the creation of personalized assets for diverse segments and enabling real-time customization, thereby amplifying the impact of experiences and advertising.

It is crucial to demonstrate (using AI-powered analytics tools) that distinct segments exhibit varying response rates and engage more profoundly with personalized content. Different segments may have varying buying behaviors and spending patterns, highlighting the importance of personalized content in converting them.

Incremental improvements drive marketing effectiveness and should be central to the AI impact story. Measure this progress through metrics such as productivity, performance, and quality, including time saved, increased output, reduced costs, and consistency in messaging.

Empowering marketing teams with AI opportunities

Consider how AI presents opportunities for your team’s growth, skill development, and overall satisfaction. While most individuals are intrigued by AI and its impact, they often lack the time for extensive formal training.

As a marketing trainer, I have observed a preference for concise, actionable training modules that aid in utilizing tools and platforms more efficiently. Focus on areas where AI can augment human creativity and productivity, enhancing the overall workflow.

AI-driven productivity and training tools can significantly increase efficiency and add hours to everyone’s day. Leveraging AI for tasks like summarizing meetings can free up time for strategic decision-making and planning.

Incorporating AI into the executive dialogue

Marketers are increasingly embracing AI, directly leveraging generative AI and AI tools for data analysis and content customization. Research from Gartner consistently indicates a rising adoption of AI among marketers.

Instead of shying away from inquiries about AI’s role in customer connectivity, embrace it and integrate it into your executive reports. By transparently incorporating AI into existing measurements and reporting structures, you can demystify AI while showcasing your commitment to martech advancement.

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