Start with your most time-consuming, data-heavy marketing tasks. Audit what data you already have in your CRM and automation tools, then run a small pilot like automated media buying. Skip the temptation to buy dozens of new tools and work with vendors you already use.
Questions this video answers
2016.
January (stated as "January this year" in the video).
Scheduled for July in Cleveland (as stated in the video).
Chapters
Marketers need to be curious. Like AI isn't a magic bullet, it doesn't fix everything. But finding solutions that are powered by AI, that do things more intelligently can give you a massive competitive advantage in the marketplace.
So Paul, can you tell us how marketers can get started with artificial intelligence?
Yeah, I tend to look at three main steps. The first is think about all the things you do as a marketer. So let's say you know, you're an inbound marketer in an agency or with a brand, if you make a list, and you could just do this in an Excel spreadsheet if you want to, or in a Google sheet, just make a list of all the activities you do every week or every month. So it might be develop email subject lines, build an editorial strategy, figure out when to send, monitor performance, whatever it is, just create your list, then go through and put a column for how much time you spend every month doing, doing that thing. Then make a leap of faith that someone, whether it's an existing company you work with or another software company, has built a more intelligent way to do that. Take the things that you spend the most time doing. They will usually be very data intensive, very time intensive. Look at those things and go see if you can find something to pilot. Because AI isn't a switch you flip. We don't just all of a sudden go find a way to do everything more intelligently. We do it at a use case level, a single activity level, and so find the things that you're spending a ton of time on that are very inefficient, that might be able to be done better. So the first is time intensive data driven activities. Look for smarter ways to do it. The second is think about all the data you have access to as a marketer. So you may have your CRM system, your automation system, your call tracking system, conversational, like all these sources of data and try and figure out are we able to leverage all that data to better personalize, to tell a better story, to better engage with consumers. And then the third, and actually what ends up probably being the best way to start is go talk to your core tech platform companies, because you don't want to have to go buy 15 or 20 new software tools to do each individual thing smarter. What you want is to make bets on the platform companies that are taking a very strategic approach to building smarter features within the product that you can then use more intelligently.
And do you see any kind of obstacles or things that people should look out for as they're thinking about those sorts of things.
I think they try and, well one, they don't understand what AI is and they just ask for AI. So first is like education on what it is. Then they probably try and achieve too much right away versus small scale pilot tests. So I think the smartest route is to find the thing that is kind of a quick win that you can build support around and you have a greater probability of it making an impact. So an example might be media buying. Again. So if you're spending $5,000 a month or 10,000 or 50,000 and humans are doing it all, and they're the ones making the changes to the media buying plan and they're the ones moving the resources around and they're the ones figuring out which creative to offer and which audience segments to target. None of that is a human better than a machine at. And so like, if you're spending a ton of money, go try and find a way to have that done more intelligently and you can probably have quick wins even if you start with like one division of your company instead of like the whole thing. So that's an example of try and find something where the probability of it being better than what you're doing is pretty good and the investment required to figure that out is pretty little versus going and trying to tackle some massive undertaking that could take a year. And then you'll find out, well, that didn't work and half a million dollars later we don't believe AI is going to work. And now the C suite doesn't want to hear anything with AI in it.
Yeah, I think that's a great point about finding one area and then sort of rolling it out across an organization. Again, thinking of the analogy to electricity, it's like bringing an electrician into a factory. And just because you hire an electrician, he still needs to understand every single role within that and how to best apply a, a more intelligent automation through that role.
Yeah, and I think that's like the key ends up being marketers need to be curious. Like AI isn't a magic bullet, it doesn't fix everything. But finding solutions that are powered by AI, that do things more intelligently can give you a massive competitive advantage in the marketplace. And so for the marketers who are curious, who try and find ways to go explore, find better solutions, find more information, develop better confidence around what it is and how it can be used, those are the marketers that will probably excel in their careers and build competitive advantages for brands.
And are there any particular resources that you would recommend that Marketers kind of look into if they're trying to learn more about.
Yeah, I mean, selfishly, that's what we built the Marketing AI Institute for. So we created that in 2016 as just a content hub built by PR2020 and underneath PR2020 and then actually split it out in January this year as its own entity. And then we launched the Marketing AI Conference, which will be July in Cleveland. So that's. We built now where we learn from. Honestly, there aren't that many marketing resources for it. So HubSpot's doing a lot more with it. I know through Academy Making an Effort. It's part of this series, like making an effort to really educate the marketplace on what it is and how it can be used. A lot of individual brands are doing similar things. So SaaS, companies that are powered by AI are trying to create more demand for smarter solutions. So you see a lot of it there. But the places we tend to go is Google has AI, Google, and it's literally just a free resource center to teach about AI. Microsoft teaches about. IBM has a ton of free resources and demos. So I would say go to the big companies that are building it who are betting their future on consumers demanding smarter solutions. And a lot of them are creating resources to help educate the market. So there is demand. That's why Microsoft runs their Microsoft AI commercials. Like they're trying to differentiate that these are smarter ways to do things. So, yeah, I think once you're curious about, you start looking around, you'll start seeing a lot of resources out there for marketers to learn from.
Yeah, we're definitely fans of the human centered machine learning blog that Google has out there, which, you know, is being very careful about avoiding bias and things like that within machine learning.
It's a whole nother topic. It's not perfect. AI is not perfect. But it's a unique opportunity. I think for many of us, we won't see something like this in our careers again. That, you know, really gives us a chance to leap forward in our capabilities and our knowledge.
