Who should define your marketing AI adoption?
(It’s not your marketing team, your technology team or your exec)
There’s only one thing in the business world that’s escalating faster than the advancement of AI, and that’s the hot debate around the threats and opportunities it creates.
Within this debate it’s a common assumption that marketing functions and executive teams are in conflict when it comes to AI adoption: senior leaders are embracing generative AI as the golden bullet they can use to supercharge the efficiency and productivity of their marketing teams, while the marketers on the ground worry about quality of outputs and, of course, their jobs.
There’s some truth in these assumptions, but if we frame the ‘AI in marketing’ debate as a stereotypical battle between revenue-focused business leaders and under-pressure marketers (with some technology team decision makers thrown in for good measure), we’re ignoring the one stakeholder whose needs matter the most: the customer.
Customers are after all the recipients of AI influenced marketing, and they’ll vote with their feet if messages and channels fail to connect. The benefits of every AI implementation must be measured not on short-term efficiency goals but on long term strategies to drive customer loyalty and value.
But how do you build a customer-focused AI adoption road map, whilst delivering business benefits and evolving your marketing function? The detail will depend on the profile of your customers and the shape of your business, but these recommendations will provide a solid foundation for your strategy.
1. Always start with this question: ‘What will this technology do for our customer?’ Exposing them to more messages is not the same as connecting them to better messages, and any AI strategy must be focused on enhancing customer experience.
2. Make AI work for your marketing experts. AI has the potential to enable client insight managers to gather and analyse market trends faster, to help creative leads refine their concepts more quickly, to and ensure content creators don’t need to start with a blank page. Far from replacing the marketers in your team, it should free them to spend more time understanding client needs, translating them into marketing strategies, and getting those strategies to market more quickly.
3. Invest in your team as well as your toolkit. Make sure your marketing team is trained to get the best out of the AI platforms they adopt: can they create the very best prompts in the context of their marketing discipline? Do they know how to keep IP secure and validate AI outputs for accuracy? Are they trialling potential apps and platforms alongside your technology experts? AI must be understood and used as more than a quick-fix time saving tool, otherwise the quality and integrity of your marketing will suffer as stressed teams try to do more and more.
4. Measure outcomes, not outputs: generative AI will deliver great benefits in terms of content velocity, but the tools and platforms you invest in must also maintain or enhance brand voice, personalisation and localisation with the guidance of your marketing experts. Otherwise content engagement will suffer, and so will customer experience.
5. Be ready to pivot. AI is advancing at lightning speed and changing the rules in some areas (for example, SEO is already evolving fast as AI creates content that answers very specific questions meaning marketing teams must create clear, authoritative content that’s easily surfaced by these systems rather than relying on traditional search term strategies). As a result, long term investments in large AI technology stacks can be risky; work with your IT team to securely test and deploy tools that will keep your strategy agile and cutting edge.
AI adoption is a powerful weapon for a marketing function if the focus is on enhancing customer experience, empowering your experts and super charging your strategy; but as with all technology roll outs, selecting the right tools to support your people and processes will drive customer value tomorrow, as well as unlocking efficiency today.