How CMOs Use AI to Optimize Marketing Spend in a Challenging Economy
Authors
Gaurav Roy
A passionate and innovative professional encompassing excellence in B2B marketing industry. Develop and manage integrated programs including content strategy, Lead generation approach, Digital and social media strategy.
In this article
Introduction
Sometimes solutions arise just as we run into our problems. That’s happening now with the role of AI in optimizing marketing spend. Call it serendipity, convergence or coincidence, but don’t ignore it.
The business press we all read is filled with news of revenue problems and financial “headwinds” that constrain the resources available to chief marketing officers. For most companies, those are as real as they are painful.
I think that’s today’s problem for many CMOs.
But turn the page, and you’ll find just as many articles about AI. Sure, promises of AI’s potential are excessive at times, but optimizing marketing spend with AI is as real as hammering a nail.
And that’s today’s well-timed solution for CMOs.
Even as marketing resources become constrained, business expectations and OKRs remain high.
Can AI help CMOs here? The simple answer is “Yes.” Let’s look a little closer at the role of AI in optimizing your marketing spend during tough economic times.
Marketing With AI: Cost-Effective Strategies
AI can accelerate your marketing spend efficiency through creation and delivery of content that is tightly personalized and at scale. Your result is higher rates of engagement and conversion with lower manual effort.
That’s AI-driven marketing that’s more cost-efficient and powerful.
- AI-powered programmatic advertising will be nearly half of B2B ad spending this year. Organizations that have adopted AI for their marketing see ROI improvement of 10-20%, according to McKinsey & Company.
- According to research, 76% of marketers say AI boosts productivity, while 52% find it enhances their customer engagement. An AI-powered retargeting ad campaign typically results in customers who are 70% more likely to convert.
- AI tools that write initial content drafts for social media, email and advertising can reduce marketers’ content creation time by 50%.
- AI-driven predictive analytics forecast your customers’ needs and behaviors to help you build and manage forward-looking strategies. Predictive segmentation can improve conversion rates by up to 20% and enhance the effectiveness of your marketing expenses.
The list goes on. AI can also analyze your data and distribute your content. Not only does that free up your marketing teams to focus on their strategic initiatives and human creativity, but it also improves the accuracy of those tasks and offers always-fresh insights into those initiatives.
And it does so with no increase in your workforce.
AI can streamline your marketing workflows, reduce human error and help you make better decisions faster. That means better operational efficiency and better ability of your teams to respond quickly and effectively with in-the-moment insights.
Altogether, these strategic uses of AI reduce your overhead costs and improve the effects of your marketing. In other words, higher ROI with less effort.
Improve ROI With AI-Fueled Insights
ROI is another significant advantage of AI. In addition to understanding vast amounts of data and more accurately targeting audiences, AI can help you learn more about your customer segments and industries. That information helps to focus your programs on account-based marketing (ABM), vertical industries, and regional markets.
With today’s AI, you can also calculate purchase intent or the likelihood of customer churn and inventory turnover. Those insights then inform your proactive strategies to boost conversion rates with data-driven marketing decisions, even from a finite budget.
These AI-powered insights allow you to strategically target the right accounts and predict future behaviors with precision. With Unbound Promote, you can seamlessly integrate these insights into your campaigns to drive stronger results!
What AI Marketing Tools are Available Now?
Credit the entrepreneurial spirit of the tech community to proliferate AI quickly. Some implementations are new functionality in the marketing technology you know. And some are new offerings from emerging AI entrants.
Big and small players are developing much more as you read this. In fact, it may be to your benefit to adopt marketing AI tools early to learn what functions you need and to help your teams incorporate AI into their daily workflows.
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AI Tools for Marketing Spend Optimization
- RevSure promises real-time insights into campaign performance, allowing marketers to reallocate budgets from underperforming campaigns to more successful ones.
- Amazon Ads uses AI to enhance advertising efficiency through real-time campaign creation, deployment, and budget optimization.
- Facebook Advertising Platform uses sophisticated algorithms to enable targeted ad delivery by analyzing user data to predict engagement.
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AI Tools for Audience Insights and Preferences
- Google Analytics has AI capabilities that provide comprehensive data on website traffic and user behavior, helping marketers understand audience demographics, interests, and engagement patterns.
- Delve AI is an AI-powered persona generator that combines first-party data with social media and public data sources to create detailed buyer personas.
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AI Tools for Automating and Accelerating Ad Buying
- Albert AI is a self-learning digital marketing platform that automates various aspects of ad campaigns, including audience targeting, ad creation, and performance analysis.
- Smartly.io manages cross-channel campaigns by automating ad updates in real-time using predictive algorithms that adjust audiences, ads, budgets, and bids to meet performance goals.
- ADYOUNEED offers end-to-end ad management by creating, testing, and deploying ad creatives across platforms like Google, Facebook, and Instagram.
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AI Tools for Identifying High-Conversion Customer Segments
- Peak.ai uses headless segmentation to gather data from multiple touchpoints, creating a comprehensive customer profile by using AI-driven attributes such as purchase history and churn propensity.
- BlastPoint offers predictive customer segmentation through granular analysis of customer data, allowing marketers to create detailed segments based on behaviors, demographics, and psychographics.
- Heap focuses on behavioral segmentation by analyzing user interactions with websites or apps. It identifies user cohorts based on actions taken, such as page views or transactions.
Leading B2B Marketers Already Rely on AI
Top marketers have been using AI successfully to make the most of their budgets and to improve their ROI. Here are a few:
- Salesforce has been an early adopter of AI in their B2B marketing. They use AI to predict which leads will convert more easily. With that information, the sales teams can concentrate on the prospects with the highest value.
- IBM integrates it’s Watson AI throughout its marketing operations to uncover trends and insights, personalize content, and to handle some customer questions. As a result, IBM has lowered their costs and raised their conversion rates.
- Adobe has advanced its marketing efforts with its own AI platform, Sensei. They mine customer behavior data to forecast future actions and emerging preferences to personalize experiences. They improve their brand experience even while they reduce marketing costs.
- HubSpot uses AI for predictive lead scoring to highlight their most promising prospects. AI also automates their A/B testing of email subject lines and content. With their AI, HubSpot has helped their customers improve their marketing performance.
The Future of AI in Marketing
Marketing AI is evolving rapidly with many intriguing trends and innovations within view as it is quickly employed by an advancing stack of marketing technologies. However, human management and judgment will remain vital to brand consistency and inadvertent AI inaccuracies. Here’s what I’m watching for:
- Generative AI will revolutionize the creation of marketing content with advanced language models like GPT-4 and its successors, which will grow to be more sophisticated and more sensitive to context.
- Predictive marketing analytics will become more accurate in anticipating customer behaviors and market trends.
- AI-powered customer insights will become deeper through development of natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis of customer feedback and social media conversations.
- Smart AI search and SEO will evolve dramatically as AI-powered search engines understand more about user intent and context and marketers adapt to new search algorithms.
- Ethical AI and privacy considerations will expand as AI becomes more common in marketing. I expect that marketers will chase the right balance between personalization and privacy, AI-influenced decisions will need to become more transparent, and regulation of AI in marketing will expand.
Checklist: How to Allocate Your Budget More Effectively With AI
To maximize your marketing budget using AI, look at the fundamentals of AI-powered marketing:
- Precisely target the right audiences: Focus your marketing efforts on the customers most likely to convert, boosting the effectiveness of every dollar spent.
- Improve campaigns continuously: Monitor your campaign performance metrics and adjust your program on the fly.
- Use predictive analytics for future-facing strategies: Improve your conversion rates and be sure that your marketing goes to your most profitable opportunities.
- Automate repetitive tasks to save time and resources: Automates tedious and time-consuming processes like data analysis, audience segmentation, and content creation, freeing up your marketing team to concentrate on strategy and creativity.
- Create hyper-personalization at scale: Use AI-powered tools to create highly detailed customer personas and deliver highly personalized content, product recommendations, and offers.
By understanding and applying AI’s unique capabilities, you and your marketing organization can allocate your budgets more efficiently and effectively. AI-driven strategies help you focus your resources and drive higher ROI. I think today is a great time to start.
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