How your Enterprise can leverage AI for Marketing

We know that the holy grail of marketing is Personalization. The likes of Seth Godin (here) and McKinsey Global Inst (there) have spoken at length about it. The likes of Amazon and Netflix have been driving it at scale for some time now. Then, as a marketing leader of a Fortune 500 enterprise, how can you drive personalization at scale, and across omnichannels?

Here’s the TL;DR version:

“Personalization can reduce acquisition costs by as much as 50 percent, lift revenues by 5 to 15 percent, and increase the efficiency of marketing spend by 10 to 30 percent.” - Matt Ariker, Jason Heller, Alejandro Diaz, and Jesko Perrey, “How marketers can personalize at scale,” Harvard Business Review

Rethinking Marketing in ‘The Age of the Customer’

We have entered the Age of the Customer. As this Forrester report suggests: the only sustainable competitive advantage is knowledge of and engagement with customers. The successful companies will be customer-obsessed, like Amazon.com, Macy’s, and salesforce.com. To emerge as a customer-obsessed enterprise, the key is to understand customer needs, and wants and be able to predict behavior. And this quest starts with the foundation of every marketing strategy: Customer Segmentation

The critical step of Segmentation is followed by Targeting and Positioning. It is the STP (Segmentation-Targeting-Positioning) which has seen the most innovation over the years, with emerging technologies leading to advanced analytics capabilities.

Audience segmentation is the topmost priority, with 72% of executives stating that they are using their data to support this activity. It is viewed as a standard tactic by even the most laggard of companies.- The New Marketing Reality report, produced in association with IBM Watson Marketing

Changing the ‘Data-rich; Insight-poor’ equation

Fortune 500 enterprises have vast amounts customer data at their disposal. Therein lies the opportunity for you to understand customers’ behavior based on their past purchases. Predictive Analytics solutions have been deployed for the past couple of years to generate customer insights and understand their propensity to buy to some extent.

Getting to Personalization

The next gradual step after Predictive Analytics is Prescriptive Analytics, that has been ushered in by the aggressive adoption of Artificial Intelligence, specifically Machine Learning. Therein lies the huge opportunity for all you marketing leaders of Fortune 500 enterprises. This is where you can go beyond generating customer insight to recommending the Next Best Actions; i.e Personalization. With massive customer data and advanced analytics tools and techniques, you can very well get to personalization at scale across omnichannels.

Embracing Machine Learning

One of the noteworthy enterprise products I‘m closely following is Cerebri AI. Their SaaS measures and monetizes individual customer journeys to generate Next Best Actions and helps drive personalization at scale. Cerebri AI is currently working with Fortune 50 automotive and financial services companies in USA and Canada. Check out the demo below:

Use Cases for CMO’s

As noted earlier, AI is a powerful tool for personalizing product recommendations by analyzing aggregated customer data to understand individual customer preferences and deliver the Next Best Actions to make their customers successful. Check out some of the other tools below that you can deploy to drive personalization at scale.