Intelligence As Its Core: What Happens When AI Drives Marketing
Unless you’ve been living under rock recently, Artificial Intelligence is now officially considered hot. And it’s being bolted on nearly everywhere in the enterprise. That’s exciting for lots of reasons, but most of all because we’re moving from the lab into seeing what we can do in real business contexts.
In marketing and sales, there are now add-ons that deliver incremental new smarts on top of existing marketing systems. Predictive lead scoring, conversational sales bots, even content generation all starting to have an impact on the velocity and productivity of the modern marketing team.
Executed well, these are often useful additions. And so we see Scott Brinker’s ever more crowded Martech landscape of companies growing year over year, with new entrants hoping to improve on the current reality in some way.
But most or maybe all of it is built on an older way of doing basically push messaging to large numbers of potential customers on the hope that a small percentage might “convert”. A team of humans designs a brand, a message strategy, a funnel pathway through to a sale. The trick is basically to get as many customers into that funnel as possible, because, well, that’s how we’ve always kind of done it. It’s also kind of the best we know how to do with what we’ve got.
Most of the current crop of marketing automation platforms were created in the early 2000s to help marketers do this at greater scale. The basic approach of mass push is the same, however, even if the tools have changed: combine customer database, messaging server, and rules engine. Add reporting. Add external integrations. Now sprinkle some AI on top: Salesforce Einstein, Adobe Sensei are recent examples. The underlying assumptions, however, haven’t changed.
But here’s the thing: There’s an alternative coming, and it’s built with Artificial Intelligence at its core — not as an afterthought or add-on. It’s different.
The next wave starts with intelligence and an ability to adapt and learn as the foundation. Add a combination of human marketing experts, incremental learning, and data. Start with the notion that there isn’t one campaign, one funnel, one persona, one channel or one lead score that will win. Make the unit of analysis the person instead of broad segments. This new approach has the potential to upend how we communicate with customers.
Here are five basic ways that things change, and sooner than you may think:
One campaign or a million. The main reason why we run only a few marketing campaigns at a time is because that’s all we can manage as humans. Machines have no such limitation. The latest advances in Bandit-based and Reinforcement Learning (which are two interesting classes of machine learning algorithms out there getting lots of attention) suggest that given minimal input and contextual knowledge, machines can essentially bootstrap themselves into creating complex personal campaigns on demand. Not personalized campaigns in the sense of {token} replacement; I mean the system figures out what the right steps are (and in what order, cadence, channel, and form) to motivate a customer to take a desire action. In other words, instead of a single nurture campaign for a million people, you launch a million campaigns, each of which is learning from all the others, all the time.
The segment of one. Know your audience, craft the message. That’s the game. Humans have an incredibly finite ability to understand people at scale. This is okay for lots of use cases; we’d go nuts otherwise. But people are weird and diverse and they change over time. Imagine instead a machine-human team working together to understand that the right segment for given marketing goal isn’t a broad, generic interest group. Instead it’s dozens or hundreds of specific subgroups that could be addressed in a more targeted and effective way — or a single person.
Content that adapts. Get ready for Deep Learning (another class of machine learning algorithms, based on neural nets) to push the art of the possible forward in sophisticated language and image experimentation. Combined with advances in Reinforcement Learning and an ability to adapt based on incremental human feedback at scale, we’ll see a new kind of ability to create compelling digital content and experiences that improves over time. It won’t take away jobs on the creative team; it will take those jobs in whole new directions.
DoNotReply@: Are you kidding me? Why the hell wouldn’t you want to talk to a customer who wants to talk to you? And yet this is the standard response email address that goes on nearly every email campaign out there. Absurd. While the current crop of bots are totally lacking, get ready for profoundly more intelligent frontline helpers (do not call them bots) that can understand human queries, address them in real-time in a thoughtful way, and route them to the right humans when it matters. Machines and marketers/sales working together create the space for dialog and relationship-building with customers — at scale.
The New Dream Team: machines + humans. With machine-driven intelligence at the center, marketing (and sales) orgs will either adapt and thrive or they’ll keep doing what they’ve always done and fall behind. Advantage will go to teams ready to adapt workforces, roles, culture, and incentives, collaborating with and learning from intelligent tools. The differences between the old and new will be stark and measurable. The winners will leverage these new capabilities to attract the most important precious resource of all: customer trust. Trust will flow to the companies that earn it authentically, and flow away from those who continue to mindlessly pitch their wares.
A very different model of marketing is coming and will directly, deeply challenge the current major incumbents and how marketing gets done alike. Intelligent at its core, the new marketing engine won’t just incrementally improve things. It’ll change the game for the better, for good.
