By Neel Pandya, CEO of EMEA & APAC at Pixis
Deploying artificial intelligence (AI) for marketing has helped many companies around the world outperform their competitors and achieve a stronger bottom line. AI for marketing is only going to grow every year as more businesses begin to adopt, innovate and invest in AI-driven automated intelligence. And, this is just the beginning.
Recently, during Campaign Middle East’s Marcomms360 – Predictions 2023 event, I had the opportunity to talk about some of the hottest trends for AI in 2023 and how different industrial sectors stand to benefit fro adopting AI-led marketing to enhance performance. Additionally, we conducted a comprehensive, data-driven SWOT analysis of the potential benefits and challenges associated with AI-led marketing. To help marketers take informed decisions, the highlights of the SWOT analysis are presented here. Through this piece, we will explore strengths, seize opportunities and manage weaknesses and threats.
Exploring Strengths
AI-powered marketing can be a powerful tool for marketing professionals who seek to increase engagement and generate better results in a competitive environment. By leveraging its strengths, marketers can more effectively target their audiences, automate complex and repetitive workflows, optimise campaigns for better performance and deliver on brand one-to-one marketing to customers.
Precise targeting
Powered by billions of data points, AI identifies and clusters those highly relevant customer groups, enabling brands to quickly and accurately expand and convert target audiences across different platforms. This enables marketers to effectively reach and engage their target audience, leading to increased conversions and ROI.
1:1 communication
AI-powered intelligence facilitates persona-based creatives and copy that boosts audience engagement and clickthrough rates (CTR) across marketing channels. This AI-led communication is based on insights derived from analysing billions of customer data points across the user journey to identify patterns and trends from click to cart.
Performance optimisation
AI orchestrates campaign performance optimisation across different channels around the clock. This is done by continuous and rigorous analysis of data from historical campaigns, seasonality-based trends, attribution analytics and real-time performance data. The AI then uses this information to adjust budgets and strategies in real time in order to achieve the best results.
Seizing opportunities
Several factors such as the rise of walled gardens, frequent privacy regulation changes, the threat of looming recession, the decline of cookies and talent shortages are disrupting the established order of all things marketing worldwide. As a result, marketing strategies and channels that were successful in 2022 or earlier may not be as effective in the days to come.
To stay ahead of the curve, marketers will be required to experiment with new strategies and quickly determine what works best. However, this process can be difficult and time-consuming, requiring a significant investment of company resources – budgets, human effort, time and more. AI can help marketers overcome these challenges by enabling fast experimentation with speed and accuracy at scale, optimising resources in real time and automating execution to free up more time for strategy. Additionally, AI’s ability to manage and optimise multiple tasks in real time makes it a valuable asset for brands that use or want to experiment with multiple channels and campaigns to reach and engage customers.
Overall, this year offers a wealth of opportunities for AI in marketing where brands will use it to act with confidence in the face of uncertainty, streamline their marketing efforts, improve efficiency and achieve higher returns on their investment.
Weaknesses and threats
Some of the main concerns are multiplicity of bias and unethical usage, concerns about the expenses and infrastructure needed to implement AI solutions and the need for ongoing technological innovation to keep up with the constantly changing needs of the marketing industry. These concerns might discourage companies from adopting and investing in AI technology, hindering adoption in the field of marketing.
To address these concerns, it is important for organisations to take a responsible approach to the development and use of AI in marketing. This can include working with AI-providers to establish ethical guidelines, education and awareness about the capabilities and limitations of AI and investing in the necessary tools and training to ensure that teams are prepared to work alongside AI. It is also important for organisations to invest in ongoing tech innovation to ensure that their AI models are equipped to handle the constantly changing needs of the marketing industry. By taking these steps, organisations can help to alleviate concerns about AI and create a positive culture for its responsible usage.
Brands are beginning to realise the potential benefits of using AI to efficiently and quickly address a range of marketing challenges. As we move into the new year, it is likely that there will be a continued interest in and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing.
