We asked marketing leaders to tell us about their greatest individual marketing challenge. The number one answer? Scaling marketing efforts.
In fact, 62% of all those surveyed for our 2020 Marketing Leadership Benchmark Report listed it as a top challenge.
However, when these same marketers were asked about their top priorities over the next 12 months, scaling marketing efforts didn’t even crack the top five.
Why might this be?
As marketers, we have a world of opportunity. And these opportunities grow with every passing year. New social platforms, new best practices, new tech solutions—each forcing us to think, “if only I had a bigger team, more time, or a bigger budget, I could try all of these.”
When it comes to scaling marketing, artificial intelligence can be the untapped solution to your biggest problem.
How AI technology enables companies to scale
Before diving into marketing use cases, let’s think about how AI is already scaling efforts for companies you interact with every day.
Google Maps, Netflix, Amazon—these solutions you use every day are made possible and are only possible because of AI:
- Google Maps helps millions of users find their way every day. This service works because each direction is personalized and based on context (weather, traffic, and more).
- Netflix creates a unique experience with personalized recommendations based on each of its users. It’s content curation at scale, made possible through millions of data points that humans could never parse through on their own.
- Amazon, the largest ecommerce business in the world, essentially reorganizes their digital storefront for each user every time they reopen the app or visit the website.
Each of these cases is made possible by AI. A team of humans may be able to imitate the experience of Netflix for a few individuals at a time, but it is absolutely impossible to offer any of these experiences at scale without AI.
With that understanding of how AI helps other companies scale their services, let’s dive into how marketers can begin to scale their marketing efforts with AI.
How to scale your marketing with AI
As we mentioned before, scaling marketing efforts is the top challenge facing individual marketing leaders. Yet, they are not making scaling their marketing efforts a top priority in the coming months.
Here are a few examples of how scaling marketing efforts can help you more quickly or efficiently achieve the goals marketers are prioritizing.
Lead generation
Is your website a static asset that generates leads through forms, or is it a robust asset that generates qualified leads by providing exceptional experiences to buyers?
Powered by AI, Drift is one technology that turns your website into a lead generation machine. Specifically, Drift infuses online chat with AI.
Human-manned chat requires a dedicated team with a large headcount to engage with every single website visitor. AI-powered chat makes 1-to-1 conversations possible at scale.
You might think first of unhelpful human-built chatbots, but this is entirely different technology. AI-powered chatbots don’t rely on rigid decision trees, which require humans to make guesses about the questions visitors will ask and set the rules for a response. Instead, AI-powered chat uses vast amounts of data to answer questions with human-like responses; and they get smarter over time.
With your robust, AI-powered Conversational Marketing, you can start to generate leads through conversation.
AI-powered chat scales your marketing efforts by enabling you to engage with every single website visitor.
Customer experience
One fear companies have with passing off interactions with buyers to machines is that they fear it will worsen buyer experiences.
However, why do you always come back to Netflix at the end of the day? Or why do you buy from Amazon when there are an infinite number of stores to choose from?
Undeniably, it’s all about the exceptional experiences they deliver. Specifically, buyers value the personalized experience they get when they open up the Netflix homepage or the recommendations Amazon makes based on past purchases.
Personalization-at-scale is made possible by AI and by the vast amount of data it makes predictions from.
For instance, AI-powered chatbots can 1) engage with every prospect, but also 2) personalize the experience similarly to how Netflix or Amazon do.
A well-designed chatbot will:
- Use existing conversation data (if available) to understand the type of questions people ask.
- Analyze correct answers to those questions through a ‘training’ period.
- Use machine learning and NLP to learn context, and continually get better at answering those questions in the future.
AI-powered chat scales your marketing efforts by providing the personalized experience of a human to every website visitor that engages with the chatbot.
Revenue generation and acceleration
Not only can AI-powered chat deliver an exceptional experience for buyers, it can also generate pipeline for marketers and accelerate revenue.
How?
Not only is the experience personalized, but with AI, the chatbot knows when to serve the right message at the right time to achieve your desired result. If that means passing off the highest quality leads to a human at a certain point, then it can do that. If you want the chatbot to schedule meetings based on your reps’ calendars, they can do that too.
Based on the infinite amount of data you have access to, but don’t have time to review in real-time, the chatbots predict when a successful interaction is most likely.
AI-enabled chat scales your marketing by engaging with buyers at their moment of highest intent. They then pass off leads to humans at the right time.
