Published by Zalak Bhavsar on June 8, 2018
You can wait for AI. AI won’t wait for you. Any growth marketer today will tell you this. AI is playing a pivotal role in enabling marketers to make hyper-personalised customer engagement possible for their brand. As a marketer, you can be sure that AI is transforming marketing, advertising, and everything else along with.
As consumers, today we rely on ‘Search’ all the time to throw up precise results, we like to access recommendations for everything from stocks to music playlists, we appreciate it when service providers resolve our queries over 24×7 chats. This is the power of AI, which has enabled marketers to truly engage with customers, allowing their brands to ‘listen’ and ‘talk to’ them in real time, done at scale.
AI, therefore, is now an important part of effective marketing automation & analytics solutions. The day is not far when it will become indispensable. Companies that are today focusing on being mobile-first will soon become AI-first.
AI can be generally defined as a set of computer systems that can perform ‘tasks’ that are characteristic of human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. These advancements are made possible thanks to the stupendous amounts of customer data that is available today.
AI uses this data to ‘teach itself’ through machine learning algorithms, in order to bring up insights backed by data that can help marketers to determine the best channel mix for a particular segment of customers, the best time to trigger communications to an individual customer, and more. It is using Deep Learning, Neural Networks, Natural Language Processing to do this.
‘The Segment of One’ – the Holy Grail of marketing: Once considered an impossibility, traditional marketing treated the Segment of One almost as an ideal. Today, with AI-powered data-driven marketing, segmentation can get narrower and narrower down to allow customisation on an individual level in addition to providing a seamless customer experience across the digital and the physical. With this unified view of the customer, leading to successful customer journey orchestration, which is to respond immediately to a real-time customer insight. This is the heart and soul of marketing.
The precision with which AI can draw insights is growing each day as these technologies have the capability to ‘learn’ by themselves and come up with the optimum solution, ‘recommendations’ and ‘predictive’ technologies being a case in point. This allows the marketer to differentiate between individual customers like never before – we can now send the right message to the right person at the right time and through the right channel.
Says VeerChand Bothra, the Chief Evangelist & CIO of Netcore Solutions, a leading marketing automation & analytics company that provides AI-powered marketing automation & analytics solutions to enterprises globally, “Marketers need to understand that AI is no longer something for the future – it is already here. It holds the key to hyper-personalisation while freeing up the marketer to do what we as humans do best: focus on creative, content, & strategy. Thus, contrary to perceptions, AI is going to make digital communications high-touch and marketing more human”
What does this tell us? It tells us that for us marketers, personalisation through content and product recommendation is no longer optional since that has become the basic expectation of the customer. Moreover, AI can alert you when a customer is likely to drop out of the funnel – referred to as ‘flight risk’, so you can take appropriate measures to lure them back in or find out the reasons why they want to drop out.
Marketers can gauge the true potential of AI by acknowledging the fact that these are still early days for this technology, and it will improve drastically with time. Early adopters stand to gain the most by cultivating a deep knowhow of how best to apply these technologies for best results. Marketers now have a great opportunity to find out more about the adoption of AI and marketing automation as 25 top Martech evangelists come together on a unique platform this June 13 in Mumbai, to share their knowledge with martech enthusiasts at the Martech Marathon 12×25, presented by Netcore Solutions & CNBC-TV18.
For more information log on to https://www.martechmarathon.com/
This article is originally posted on – Moneycontrol.com
Oddball observer of Marketing technology, content cruncher for Netcore.