AI plays a crucial role in marketing by enabling businesses to automate and streamline various marketing tasks, such as content creation, lead generation, segmentation, personalization, and scoring. Over the past 20 years I have had the pleasure of transforming how hundreds of companies leverage CRM and marketing automation tools.
Marketing departments have undergone significant changes over the past decade due to rapid technological advancements, evolving customer behavior, and shifting business priorities. Marketing professionals have had to become data specialists, social media platform experts, and omnichannel content creation gurus. AI has played a key part in helping marketing SME’s scale.
Here are 10 key ways AI is helping modern marketing departments evolve to become more tech-savvy, data-driven, customer-centric and more closely aligned with sales. I have also included links on how to unlock some of these features with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, Customer Insights & CoPilot application suite. However, it is worth mentioning that Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing was only released in 2018 and is still rapidly maturing within the established marketing ~10,000 application landscape.
As a result, here are my top 5 AI marketing features that will transform how you work as of today:
Personalization
AI-powered algorithms analyze vast amounts of customer data to identify patterns and preferences, enabling businesses to deliver more personalized experiences. This intern leads to higher engagement, loyalty, and ultimately, more sales. Learn more about Customer Insights and Predictive Data Models.
Content Creation
AI can be used to generate content and ideas such as product descriptions, social media posts, and even complete articles. This can save time and resources while still producing high-quality content. Microsoft's "content ideas" framework is built on a GPT-3/4 and trained on a vast number of text samples from the internet. Learn more about Microsoft's content ideas framework
Customer Segmentation
AI analyzes and unifies customer data to segment customers into different groups based on demographics, behavioral, trends, and preferences. This enables businesses to deliver more targeted and relevant marketing messages. You can now use natural language sentences and simple words to specify the attributes and logic for a segment or audience you are targeting. Note using natural language, users can create a segment by simply typing “Show me contacts who were born between 1970 and 2000 and make more than $50K”. Learn more here
Predictive Analytics
AI helps businesses predict customer behavior and then scores it accordingly against various complex analytical models. This enables businesses to optimize their marketing focus, strategies and then to simplify the sales transition process. Learn more about Predictive Lead and Predictive Opportunity Scoring
Market Analysis
AI-powered analysis can derive insights from market data, such as competitor pricing, customer preferences, and sales trends. AI-enabled systems can monitor markets allowing marketing teams to respond quickly to dynamic conditions. Learn more about Customer Insights 3rd Party Data Enrichment Features
Here are my top 5 AI marketing trends and features to keep a lookout for:
Search Engine Optimization with AI Automation
Marketing teams have a constant battle staying relevant especially with rapidly changing SEO sites and algorithms (e.g. Googles "helpful content" changes). AI SEO tools will be key over the upcoming years and will enable marketing professionals to rapidly change and adapt how they are found online.
Ad Optimization
AI algorithms analyze customer data and optimize ad targeting, placement, and timing, resulting in more effective and efficient advertising campaigns. However, there are major enhancements on the horizon in making these ad's more relevant to consumers. Even though cookie tracking may be dying, but the devices you use and the apps you install are all collecting meaningful data which can be harnessed to serve you with more accurate adds.
CDP with built in AI & Data Governance
Customer Data Platforms may be a great way to house all of your customer data, however data cleanliness, governance and lineage are still major challenges that marketing organizations have to deal with. There is a significant opportunity to imbed AI tools directly into CDP's to ensure data is "auto governed" and maintained.
Short form vertical videos
Short form video content (think TikTok) is proven to drive higher levels of engagement. To the extent that Instagram released "Reels" and YouTube released "Shorts" to compete with the brand as it was getting so much traction. AI video content creation platforms are taking the market by storm. These platforms enable users to quickly create highly consumable content.
Pay-per-click and performance based advertising
Tracking your marketing performance by "impressions" can be frustrating. Over the next few years we will see more performance and reward based advertising services. This means advertisers will be compensated when a click or purchase has been made. However, this will require clear audience tracking mechanisms and transparency around conversion rates will greatly benefit from AI.
In conclusion, we are in an era where creativity, technology and data are being accelerated by AI-powered marketing tools. These tools are also revolutionizing the "smarketing" process by streamlining mundane tasks, improving lead generation, and providing insights into customer behavior and market trends.
With the ever-evolving capabilities of AI, businesses can stay ahead of the competition; amplify their sales potential and maximize the value from their traditional CRM sales tools.
If you would like to see any of the top 5 AI features within the Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE (CRM) Marketing platform, please let me know.
Written by Richard Dennis – Digital Business Transformation, D365 CRM & ERP Implementation Specialist.
