Are you exploiting the power of AI?

Understanding customers as individuals and delivering personalised experiences

By Mel Day, CEO

Sharpen your insights with AI

The IBM Institute for Business Value, in cooperation with Oxford Economics, recently interviewed 2,091 Chief Marketing Officers across 20 industries and 112 countries. The resulting report discusses how today’s CMOs can drive growth and change – and every month during 2020 I’ll be focusing on a different aspect.

First up is AI, and why recruiting an AI-focused CMO is so important. But before that, here’s why the report is so important.

Experience-based Marketing

In the modern marketing age, CMOs are facing a new mandate to reimagine their role across the company. The challenge: to set new standards for how marketing gets done. Companies are evolving from product-led to experience-led businesses, and 84% of CMOs surveyed think their current business models may be threatened.

As brand guardians and customer ambassadors, CMOs need to constantly analyse how to help their organisations compete better by increasing value. One form this can take is creating exceptional, personalised customer experiences; and transforming management culture to think and operate in truly customer-centric ways. This is a big ask, and a considerable number of CMOs say their companies are struggling.

As previously mentioned, the first aspect we will look at is AI – and why hiring a CMO with a focus on Artificial Intelligence is so important.

The Growing ROI of AI

Leading marketers are starting to use AI to crack this nut, and the IBM report expects marketing’s use of AI to rapidly escalate over the next few years. Tiers are split into three levels of progress: aspirational (1), practitioners (2) and reinventors (3).

On an aspirational basis, CMOs are trying to capture the big picture as well as the details. CMOs should create a comprehensive map of their customer journey to understand how customers engage with your company and the people, process and systems that support those touchpoints. In addition to this map’s many benefits, it can reveal where an AI investment could deliver a more personalised customer experience.

Practitioners looking to translate data into insights require the ability to extract meaningful insights from data separates – this is the key facet which separates reinventors from practitioners. CMOs looking to deliver this for their company should deploy AI to access structured and unstructured data both across the organisation and externally. This can uncover the invaluable customer insights you need.

Reinventors should use AI to fuel creative solutions. This will allow CMOs to make informed decisions by leveraging AI to uncover new considerations and new opportunities. AI can enhance your creativity by rapidly surfacing possibilities that might be impossible to glean with traditional methods.

Emotional Artificial Intelligence?

Every tech CEO and CMO should be analysing their current marketing output and determining which bracket they fall into: Aspirational, Practical or Reinvention. Whilst those tech firms which actually create AI are in the Reinvention category, it’s pretty clear that most non AI tech firms will be in the practical stage at best – and in all likelihood the Aspirational phase.

This is where Marketing Moves can help. We have built up the UK’s largest network of tech marketing professionals who specialise in AI. If your company needs to up its AI game, you simply cannot afford not to recruit a specialist AI marketer.