– Marketers need to be curious AI isnt a magic bullet, it doesnt fix everything But finding solutions that are powered by AI that do things more intelligently can give you a massive competitive advantage in the marketplace (bright music) – So Paul, can you tell us how marketers can get started with artificial intelligence? – Yeah, I tend to look at three main steps The first is, think about all the things you do as a marketer So lets say youre an inbound marketer in an agency.
or with a brand If you make a list, and you could just do this in an Excel spreadsheet if you want to or in a Google sheet, just make a list of all the activities you do every week or every month So it might be develop email subject lines, build an editorial strategy, figuring out when to send, monitor performance, whatever it is, just create your list.
Then go through and put a column for how much time you spend every month doing that thing Then make a leap of faith that someone, whether its an existing company you work with or another software company, has built a more intelligent way to do that Take the things that you spend the most time doing They will usually be very data intensive, very time intensive Look at those things and go see if you can find something to pilot Because AI isnt a switch you flip.
We dont just like all of a sudden go find a way to do everything more intelligently We do it at a use case level, a single activity level And so find the things that youre spending a ton of time on that are very inefficient that might be able to be done better So the first is time intensive, data-driven activities Look for smarter ways to do it The second is think about all the data you have access to as a marketer So you may have your CRM system, your automation system,.
your call tracking system, conversational (indistinct), all these sources of data And try and figure out, are we able to leverage all that data to better personalize, to tell a better story, to better engage with consumers? And then the third, and actually what ends up probably being the best way to start, is go talk to your core tech platform companies, because you dont wanna have to go buy.
15 or 20 new software tools to do each individual thing smarter What you want is to make bets on the platform companies that are taking a very strategic approach to building smarter features within the product that you can then use more intelligently – And do you see any kind of obstacles and things that people should look out for as theyre thinking about those sorts of things?.
– I think they try and Well, one, they dont understand what AI is and they just asked for AI So first its education on what it is Then they probably try and achieve too much right away versus small scale pilot tests So I think the smartest route is to find the thing that is kind of a quick win that you can build support around and you have a greater probability of it making an impact So an example might be media buying So if youre spending $5,000 a month,.
or 10,000 or 50,000, and humans are doing it all, and theyre the ones making the changes to the media buying plan, and theyre the ones moving the resources around, and theyre the ones figuring out which creative to offer and which audience segments to target, none of that is a human better than a machine at And so if youre spending a ton of money, go try and find a way to have that done more intelligently And you can probably have quick wins, even if you just start with one division of your company.
instead of like the whole thing So thats an example of try and find something where the probability of it being better than what youre doing is pretty good and the investment required to figure that out is pretty little, versus going and trying to tackle some massive undertaking that would take a year and then youll find out, well, that didnt work, and half a million dollars later we dont believe AI is gonna work and now the C suite doesnt wanna hear anything with AI in it – Yeah, I think thats a great point about finding one area.
and then sort of rolling it out across an organization Again, thinking of the analogy to electricity, its like bringing in an electrician into a factory And just because you hire an electrician, he still needs to understand every single role within that and how to best apply a more intelligent automation to that role – Yeah, and I think the key ends up being marketers need to be curious AI isnt a magic bullet, it doesnt fix everything.
But finding solutions that are powered by AI, that do things more intelligently, can give you a massive competitive advantage in the marketplace And so for the marketers who are curious, who try and find ways to go explore, find better solutions, find more information, develop a better confidence around what it is and how it can be used, those are the marketers thatll probably excel in their careers and build competitive advantages for brands – And are there any particular resources that you would recommend that marketers kind of look into.
if theyre trying to learn more about this? – Yeah, I mean, selfishly, thats why we built the Marketing AI Institute for So we created that in 2016 as just a content hub built by PR 20/20 and underneath PR 20/20, and then actually split it out in January this year as its own entity, and then we launched the Marketing AI Conference, which will be July in Cleveland So thats what we built Now, where we learn from, honestly, there arent that many marketing resources for it So HubSpots doing a lot more with it.
I know through our Academy, making an effort, its part of this series, like making an effort to really educate the marketplace on what it is and how it can be used A lot of individual brands are doing similar things So SAS companies that are powered by AI are trying to create more demand for smarter solutions, so you see a lot of it there But the places we tend to go is Google has ai google, and its literally just a free resource center to teach about AI.
Microsoft teaches about AI, IBM has a ton of free resources and demos So I would say go to the big companies that are building it, who are betting their future on consumers demanding smarter solutions, and a lot of them are creating resources to help educate the market so there is demand Its why Microsoft runs their Microsoft AI commercials Theyre trying to differentiate that these are smarter ways to do things So yeah, I think once youre curious about it and you start looking around,.
youll start seeing a lot of resources out there for marketers to learn from – Yeah, were definitely fans of the human-centered machine learning blog that Google has out there, which, you know, is being very careful about avoiding bias and things like that within machine learning – Which is a whole nother topic (laughs) – Definitely – Its not perfect, AI is not perfect, but its a unique opportunity I think,.for many of us we wont see something like this in our careers again That really gives us the chance to leap forward in our capabilities and our knowledge.
Leave a Reply