AI in Marketing by Rakesh Shukla for TWB_
04 Oct

B2B Marketing in the time of Artificial Intelligence: What can you leverage and how

By TWB_ In Strategic Marketing /  5 No Comments

Can AI in Marketing help solve the intense pattern matching that appears to be ‘feel’ or intuition for marketers? A few weeks ago TWB_ hosted automationshift_ India’s 1st CXO Conference on AI. Senior AI leaders from Microsoft, Wipro, Salesforce, DimensionData, Microland etc discussed how AI is being leveraged in the enterprise today. While adoption is seeping in, AI in Marketing is something TWB_’s customers grapple with every day (and we grapple for them).  AI is already impacting marketing, and it’s going to further shape the future of how business is done.

And why not — if Google’s AI can master video games in hours and MIT’s AI can predict action on video two seconds before it begins — could AI not allow marketing teams to focus sharply, acquire faster and service better? As an Agency for Technology Brands, TWB_ can see how the potential of AI is giving way to implementations on it can change branding, marketing, and advertising.

What AI can focus on readily, includes (a) Behavioral modelling and targeting where it can help learn user behaviour and target potential customers based on their internet browsing data (b)  Superimpose perception-reasoning-action cycle to the collect-reason-act cycle. A high degree of automation can already be achieved in capturing customer or prospect data. Data can be transformed into information and eventually intelligence or insight and this is where AI has a key role to play. In marketing, context-act would be some sort of communications that would attempt to influence a prospect or customer purchase decision using a ‘market-of-one’ type personalization.

AI is already in the Marketing mix today

We all know Social platforms use insights to algorithmically curate a news feed. There are however other elements of AI in marketing that are already in play today as well. Here are some focus areas:

  1. Website Design: AI called Molly builds Grid’s websites. A user inputs content into The Grid — like images, text, and calls-to-action — and Molly builds the site.
  2. Content Creation: Tools like Wordsmith and Quill are already being used by the likes of The Associated Press and Forbes to create clickable news content though focussing on data as the source.
  3. Content Curation: AIs such as IBM Watson are making brands learn more about consumers by analyzing behaviour — and providing curated content and recommendations for them. Great examples are Netflix and Amazon curating recommendations. 30% of revenues already come from this curation.
  4. Marketing Automation: AI helps send customized, personalized content. AI such as Boomtrain allows brands to customized email newsletters based on previous interactions. Optimove’s AI is automating the segmentation process to started sending personalized content.
  5. Advertising: Albert AI algorithm can handle bidding, integration, management, and execution of ad campaigns across email, search engines and social media. It is used by Harley-Davidson which credits Albert for 40% motorcycle sales growth, and 566% growth in website visits.
  6. Chatbots: Chatbots’ wealth of information helps marketers and salespeople quickly find and analyze information about their industries and competitors to get their jobs done more efficiently.

Can AI address B2B Marketing?

Challenges of  Business to Business Marketing are different than the B2C marketing though, and they focus on generating business leads and closing on complicated sales cycles. But here too AI is being leveraged and solutions are appearing.

  1. Better Lead generation: B2B lead generation has long been a process of hours of human research into different companies and categorization of people with purchasing influence within each company. LeadGenius AI does exactly this by picking out the top decision-makers with buyer roles in each company and giving a business a direct contact to several potential new clients. Once the potential clients have been targeted, the tool generates a target list and highlights key data points to help you segment your audience and develop personalized messages.
  2. More effective Sales calls: Most of the sales conversation still happens on phone conversations but they are very difficult to track, analyze and improve. However, Qurious a conversation AI solution, is already in deployment with customers. Qurious AI joins in on conference calls, just the same way a salesperson does, but it transcribes the sales calls in real time using natural language processing. The real value is in analysing conversation in real time, understanding topics and keywords in the conversation, finding patterns and triggering scripts in real time that work to close call. For instance, if a potential customer mentions pricing, the name of a competitor or pain points these trigger actions or scripts. This allows even less experienced sales reps to use the same language and patterns in their own efforts as the most experienced reps.

The Future is here

Large companies with big budgets mounds of historical and real-time sales and marketing data will be the first to benefit. But the marketplace will naturally bring down the integration cost and learning curves, and SMBs will be able to access AI’s abilities almost as well as their larger competitors.

 

 

Rakesh Shukla, Chief Executive & Founder, TWB_ I The Agency for Technology Brands I www.twb.in

Rakesh Shukla, TWB_

Entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, Philanthropist, Rakesh Shukla is a 1996 MBA graduate and 1993 BTech. Rakesh Shukla is the Founder & CEO of TWB_ which is the partner for technology & business content for Fortune 500 leaders worldwide. A motivational speaker he speaks on creating success from professional and personal failure. He divides time between his 2 homes in Bangalore and is called the ‘dog-father’ for being papa to the 750 rescued dogs that live with him at the VOSD Dog Sanctuary. Rakesh has featured in 100+ interviews on the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, CNN-IBN, NDTV, India’s national dailies, and at TEDx talks.

 

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30 May

So you think marketing tech services is simpler than tech products? Hell, no.

By TWB_ In Marketing Content /  4 3 Comments
TWB_

_Services

Here’s an example. We’re talking of a fairly large IT services company (we’re talking of north of $100 million) and they have figured they need to move from a pure sales approach to include ‘marketing’. Marketing as in other than events! And now we’re in their board-room about what facets there are and what marketing can do for them. It’s not that it’s not understood — goes without saying they’re a successful company — but the first responses to the marketing plan invariably are:

‘Oh, but your customers are all the flagship technology ‘product’ companies. Do we need all that depth? We just need ‘better presence’ on online — digital media!’

Yes, you do! So of course we investigate more.

  • TWB_: Why do you think so?
  • Customer: Because they are in a fast-moving world. It’s more complex for them. We don’t need to say a lot. Ours is a simple problem.
  • TWB_: But you do so many things in so many verticals already. You need to talk about that. And then you need to talk about the positions you want to move to, since that’s where your customer and market is going.
  • Customer: When they ask us, we’ll do it. We don’t want to do anything buzzy!
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