Rethinking AI Implementation: Emphasizing Results Over Tools

“In what ways are we leveraging AI to enhance marketing outcomes?”

Increasingly, marketers are finding this question to be a source of anxiety, as it is posed more frequently by executives. The lack of a coherent narrative about their team’s marketing technology (martech) development leads to defensiveness. Additionally, articulating the tangible benefits of AI proves challenging, as measuring AI’s implementation and its effects on performance is complex.

Nonetheless, this tough question presents a chance to showcase the authentic influence AI has on customer interaction and marketing results.

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Changing the conversation: From tools to results

At the end of the day, the utilization of AI and any martech tool should focus on creating superior content, not merely increasing output. This content must resonate with the audience, swiftly addressing their needs and guiding them toward the products and solutions they seek. These results have long defined effective marketing practices.

Rather than concentrating on the tools themselves, marketers ought to discuss how AI propels results and enhances the customer journey. This approach necessitates a thorough evaluation of AI’s position within your martech landscape. It involves recognizing its current effects and pinpointing areas ripe for enhancement.

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Grasping AI’s current role in martech

Begin by examining how the introduction of AI into marketing transforms the martech ecosystem. Numerous marketers continue to use familiar tools but with enhanced functionalities powered by AI that provide increased speed and personalization. Vendors are keen to highlight how AI has historically played a role in addressing our marketing challenges. Identify where and how AI is presently adding value to your martech arsenal.

This evaluation aids in formulating your “AI impact narrative,” which should emphasize how AI enhances marketing effectiveness and conversion rates. Like all marketing metrics, it should center around customer needs and motivations. Frame your narrative around three main advantages:

• New capabilities.
• Enhanced customer engagement.
• Expanded team opportunities.

AI-enhanced capabilities: Broadening possibilities

For many years, AI has been integrated into martech, from email to search and analytics tools. It’s the driving force behind most personalization, scoring, and segmentation capabilities found in marketing automation, email marketing, CRM, social media, and SEO platforms.

What novel capabilities does your tech stack offer that are enabled by AI and other data-driven solutions? Consider these questions:

• Can you now evaluate your leads more effectively or with greater detail?
• Do you access various data sources across different platforms or systems?
• Can you create personalized content on your site or landing page using first-party data?
• How frequently is your chatbot utilized, and how often does it lead to product page visits, demo requests, or downloads?
• Are AI-powered algorithms forecasting future behaviors, generating content ideas, or analyzing social media sentiment?
• Are you leveraging early-stage behavioral data (intent and consideration) to tailor experiences in later stages (decision and loyalty)?
• What insights have you gained from large-scale A/B testing?

Utilize historical performance data to illustrate outcomes across the customer journey, demonstrating incremental improvements over previous years. Integrating across platforms may also result in added boosts to conversion and engagement metrics.

This is how to communicate the narrative of AI’s contribution to your marketing efforts without deviating from the fundamental goal of marketing: crafting exceptional prospects and customer experiences.

Boosting customer engagement through AI

Engagement is assessed at the content level: How effectively did each segment or persona respond to different content elements? Marketers are increasingly leveraging generative AI to speed up content creation and production, which can inadvertently lead to an overabundance of generic material. Hopefully, you’ve shifted focus from chasing quantity in outreach to prioritizing quality in resonance.

There’s a constant push to incorporate generative AI throughout all stages of content production, from ideation to development of video, imagery, and even avatars. While executives may recognize how generative AI can expedite processes, it’s crucial to remind them that human creativity is essential in formulating customer-centric, data-informed strategies. It is the human connection that ensures campaigns resonate and inspire action—something generative AI cannot authentically or reliably achieve alone.

However, generative AI can be a formidable ally for boosting engagement when combined with an intelligent strategy. It can facilitate the creation of tailored assets for various personas and allow for real-time personalization, thereby amplifying the effectiveness of experiences and advertising.

Optimally, you can demonstrate (via AI-empowered analytics tools) that different segments exhibit varied response rates and engage more deeply with tailored content. Not all segments exhibit the same purchasing patterns or spending behaviors. Nevertheless, lower-spending segments can still be a vital piece of the puzzle, particularly if personalized content can convert more of them.

Incremental improvements drive marketing success and should be central to the AI impact narrative. Evaluate this improvement using productivity, performance, and quality indicators such as:

• Time saved.
• Increased output (e.g., generating five variations of an asset for testing).
• Cost reductions (e.g., creating simple in-house images or videos).
• Uniformity in tone, style, and messaging.

Empowering marketing teams through AI opportunities

Reflect on how AI creates avenues for your team’s growth, skill enhancement, and job satisfaction. Many of us are keen to learn about AI and its applications, but finding time for structured training can be a challenge.

As a marketing educator, I’ve observed that individuals prefer concise, actionable training resources, especially when they can apply these skills to utilize tools and platforms more effectively. Topics like prompt crafting and employing AI for data analysis and deeper personalization remain highly relevant. Concentrate on where AI can amplify human creativity and efficiency.

Moreover, AI-driven productivity and training solutions can significantly free up everyone’s time. For instance, I appreciate AI-generated summaries for meeting notes, which allows the note-taker to engage fully with the discussions instead of spending excessive time organizing and summarizing.

AI assistants empower project managers to dedicate more time to strategic decision-making and planning next steps.

Integrating AI into the executive dialogue

Marketers are increasingly integrating AI into their endeavors. They directly engage with generative AI and depend on AI tools for data analysis and content personalization. Research from Gartner consistently highlights the growing embrace of AI by marketers.

Instead of shying away from the question of AI’s role in client connections, lean into it and incorporate it into your executive communications. Making AI visible and integrating it into current metrics and assessments demystifies its use while illustrating your dedication to advancing in the martech landscape.

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