According to a new report from the CMO Council, CMO intentions for 2024, senior executives and boards of directors are looking for more operational efficiencies and cost reduction in 2024, but that’s not all. The four main expectations of marketing are:
- Revenue growth (54%)
- Operational efficiency and reduced costs (51%)
- AI-driven efficiency (41%)
- Creation of brand and customer value (38%)
The result will be hyper-personalized engagement that leads to loyal, high-value customers. What technology do they think will help them achieve these goals? That’s right, generative AI.
Revenue growth is a top priority
It’s no secret that marketing needs a seat at the management table. But to do that, it needs to show what impact it has on revenue growth. Some marketers (65%, according to this study) believe that marketing should own and optimize the company’s revenue generation engine.
It makes sense. Marketing is the first line in attracting and winning new customers. He plays a key role in supporting sales activities and customer success through lead and inquiry generation, account-based marketing, content development and other marketing activities. But if this is true and necessary, why are marketing budgets continually being cut (Gartner Reports that marketing budgets have fallen to 7.7% of the company’s overall turnover) and resources laid off?
It’s difficult to build a well-optimized marketing engine when you can’t afford the marketing technology you need to deliver these hyper-personalized experiences or when the necessary customer data is distributed across siled teams and systems.
In the CMO Council study, 62% of marketers said their lead generation and engagement strategies were underperforming, and 70% said they lacked confidence in their sales model and marketing. Some of these challenges are technology-related, but not all. The relationship between teams is essential to success, and if marketing wants to lead, it must build that relationship.
Is generative AI to the rescue?
It is impossible today to talk about marketing without talking about AI. No one would leave you. AI – especially generative AI – is here to save the marketing team. Fifty-seven percent of marketers in this study say generative AI tools, applications, and analytics deliver the most value and ROI in 2024. Next comes data platform and customer insights (49%), productivity, processes and workflow (32%), and customer journey analysis (27%).
Here’s the interesting part though. These marketers believe that most of the value they will get from generative AI will come from content creation and optimization, followed by productivity and efficiency. Personalization comes third, followed by predictive analytics. The report states:
With content, CMOs expect generation AI to help brands be both competent and adaptive to connect and engage more individually across cultures, borders, shopping graphs , psychographics and requirements of partners and localized marketing channels.
AI generation can also minimize human errors, inaccuracies, hiccups, gaffes, snafus and mistakes in marketing communications images, videos and text.
It is useful to leverage generative AI for content, and most businesses become familiar with this technology by using it for content creation. But are there better uses that could help marketers in bigger ways?
I look at the tools sales teams receive which include generative AI. Tools like Salesloft, Outreach, and 6sense provide sales teams with deep customer insights through tools that analyze account data and provide summaries and meeting insights. Yes, it also helps with content creation, but for me it’s the ability to find this information much more quickly through prompts that is most important.
Marketers need these features in their own tools too, and I haven’t seen them yet (tell me if I’m wrong). Instead of relying on canned reports, why can’t marketers ask questions and let AI do the hard work of analyzing and putting it all together? Then, allow the marketer to select what information to act on and help create the framework for a campaign to achieve this. Sure, there’s content creation in there, but that’s only part of what’s going on, and it’s not the first thing.
For example, check out what Box CEO Aaron Levie recently told Phil Wainewright about how he envisions generative AI for businesses like his:
We are one of the world’s largest repositories of unstructured data and content, and AI is now the first revolutionary technology, Gen AI in particular, that can literally read, listen, watch all this information, understand it and treat them, let you ask him questions. For us, it’s because of this incredible gift of technology that we can now deliver so much more value to our customers. Compare that with, literally name any other software company, and I think you’d be hard-pressed to find another company that benefits as much from this technology as Box.
Think of what Tribble gets by with generative AI: create responses to calls for tenders via a chat interface within the tools that sales teams use on a daily basis. Why do marketers need to navigate multiple tools to find insights, analyze campaigns, define segments, write new content, and create marketing campaigns?
The content stack is right this functionality should be bundled into a single interface to create personalized experiences. We need to apply this insight to marketing more broadly and do it in a way that enables marketers to work with chat interfaces.
My opinion
I started this article by explaining how marketers are expected to drive more revenue growth and operational efficiencies and how many of them see AI as the answer to what they need to do. But marketing is focusing on AI for the wrong reason. If the main benefit marketing gets from generative AI is content development, they’re missing out on a huge opportunity. But it’s not necessarily their fault.
Martech vendors implementing generative AI are promoting it for content creation. When they start using it better in their tools, perhaps marketers will understand the value they can actually get from it. So here we wait, martech sellers.
