2024: Call to Marketing AI Vendors for Game-Changing Capabilities

Many of us talk, read, and try stuff related to AI. New job titles emerge for professionals creating the right prompts for different industries and domains. We all feel something is going on and trying to figure out how it can all benefit us. Right now most of the things I read are mainly approached as 'inside-out'. What I mean by this, is that every tool talks about its features and functions and less about the outcome. People are talking about how it makes certain processes more efficient and how apparently as a non-creative I can create images like a pro. In the meantime, after many attempts, you find out it isn't that easy to make Mid Journey create what you are looking for. So we are definitely in the middle of the AI storm where everybody tries to form their opinion and takes a position. For years I have been asking marketing tooling vendors to make one element of marketing, journey orchestration, smarter, less labor intensive with a better outcome. So far I haven't seen such a platform apart from some proprietary solutions built by brands themselves. So let's take another approach to talking about AI. This is my call out to marketing tooling vendors asking for AI so they can approach this outside-in.

So we are definitely in the middle of the AI storm where everybody tries to form their opinion and takes a position.

Baseline segmenting

To create a marketing growth engine I prefer to set up a framework for something that can scale in size, reach, and performance. Define certain pockets that we can measure so we can adjust parameters to influence and optimize metrics, leading indicators and KPI's. That all sounds very abstract and for that reason, I created the image below. Not rocket science but given the media landscape of today already quite complex to create that effective growth engine that scales.

The basic segments applied:

1. customer buying journey stage
2. audience type (e.g. SMB and/or enterprise)
3. customer type (e.g. existing and/or new)
4. persona type (e.g. C-suite and/or director)

So with every outreach we create, we consider all the items above because at the moment we reach out to a person we want to gain attention. And we all know, you can buy reach but you have to earn attention. You will increase your chances of getting attention by being hyper-relevant. Once you gain attention the best outcome is to have interaction, one of the aims in the ultimate marketing play.

Given the segments defined above this already becomes quite a complex game. Take the following example having 3 customer buying stages, 2 different types of audiences, 2 customer types, and 2 personas. If we consider that all brand-building activities should be relevant for all segments, we have to cope with 1+16 segments. Keep this figure in mind. Also, keep in mind the factor of complexity added once we decide to add one more segment.

Media channels, messaging and assets

To build reach and gain attention we have means, many media channels and different ways to express what we think is valuable at that specific moment in time for the person you reach out to. So this outreach consists of the following elements:

1. media channel (e.g. LinkedIn, Instagram, X)
2. message (e.g. different variances within a specific segment)
3. asset (e.g. copy, image, video, animation)

The flexibility to reach out to one of the 17 segments described above is huge. Take as an example we configure 3 media channels, 2 message variances for each segment, and 3 asset types we have 18 different ways to reach out and try to get attention.

So in total, there are (17 x 18 =) 306 different ways to do this. It's a system an engine that is always trying to be hyper-relevant by tracking and monitoring what works and what doesn't work. Do you feel the pain? With all the great tools we have today, this remains a huge (manual) challenge. Of course, specific elements like creating images or copy AI can help but I want to go a step further, that on top of all of this AI helps me to run and optimize the engine as such.

Marketing repository

What I am looking for is basically to build a repository in which for each of the 17 segments we have a set of media channels, messages, and assets available being the fuel of this growth engine. Can AI play a role here as the CPU (central processing unit) of this growth engine? Specialists like creatives, copywriters, product marketers, and online marketers are constantly tracking and monitoring the health and progress of the growth engine. They help the system to adjust the algorithm, add suggestions with refined prompts and in some cases even ingest their own ideas. This self-learning growth engine continuously tries to be hyper-relevant based on behavioral data, because that leads to the ultimate outcome which is attention and interaction.

Interaction in many cases will lead to a landing page on the website and with all collected first-party intent data you should be able to build a hyper-personalized webpage instantly. We need to add an extra media channel to this engine, our own website with specific messaging and assets. By doing this the growth engine becomes exponentially complex but hey, AI should be able to do this in a blink of an eye.

It's all about building your brand

To me what I have described above is all about the infrastructure, the basics of a growth engine. However, during my whole career, I haven't been able to build it exactly as described. But in this world of democratization and the many ways we can reach out and interact with people we need to have this in place as a marketing discipline. In essence, it is just the infrastructure for bringing the right message at the right time to the right people. Although important it's only a small element we need to take care of as marketers. Having this in place will allow us to focus more on those elements in which we can genuinely distinguish ourselves from the competition.

With AI coming into play it looks like we all need to go back to the drawing board and start from scratch.

Something that sticks, touches people emotionally, and creates a brand preference. In the end that is something that you can't copy or replicate that easily and prevails. With many brands getting on par with digital marketing we were misled that we could go back to the core of building a brand. With AI coming into play it looks like we all need to go back to the drawing board and start from scratch. The ones who can adopt the fastest and best will have a competitive advantage. At least what I tried to do is give you a view of my drawing board. Happy 2024!