This year, marketers are prioritizing AI implementation over all other initiatives, according to a new study from Salesforce published in the ninth edition. State of Marketing report.
With customer standards for customization continue to rise year by year and with marketing technologies constantly evolving, marketers must act quickly to keep up.
Many see AI as a tool to do just that: a compelling solution for deeper personalization and efficiency, and now, creativity at scale with generative AI. Yes
and data challenges (unification, integration and security) are slowing down marketing teams down.
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With insights from more than 4,800 marketers in 29 countries, the State of Marketing The report shows how top-performing marketers are outperforming their competitors by adopting AI and other new opportunities while mitigating these data, trust and security challenges.
Marketers seek more personalized engagement amid rising customer expectations
Increasingly, marketers are aiming for more personalized experiences based on detailed data such as individual behaviors, preferences, interactions or other specific indicators. And they are looking to AI to provide more insights, predictions, automated workflows and content.
As a result, marketers consider a data and AI strategy to be of utmost importance. On average, today’s marketers are able to fully personalize their content across five channels, with the highest performers tailoring six channels and the worst achieving fully personalizing their content across just three.
Channels where content is easy to test and iterate on the fly, like mobile messaging, email marketing, and social media, benefit from the most advanced personalization efforts.
On the other hand, channels requiring more production and planning time, such as audio, organic search and TV/OTT, have the most work to do with 43%, 42% and 41% respectively see full customization.
Marketers Accelerate AI Adoption, But Underperformers Stagnate in the Evaluation Phase
Marketers are pulled in many directions and focused on improving AI adoption. However, they struggle to implement AI and create consistent journeys, among other challenges.
Ironically, AI could be a tool to help teams overcome such challenges.
Salesforce Chief Marketing Officer Ariel Kelman explains how businesses get started,
“A new era of AI, catalyzed by the generative gold rush,” and the technology is being adopted by marketing organizations”he sees it“Marketers are leading the charge in embracing rapid advances in technology to better connect with customers and prospects. »
Marketers are eager to implement AI into their own workflows: 75% of them are experimenting with or have fully implemented AI into their operations. A closer look reveals that technology adoption varies by performance level.
The majority of high- and moderate-performing teams are already rigorously testing, refining, and integrating AI into their operations. Yet more than a third of underperforming companies have not yet passed the review phase.
In fact, high-performing marketing teams are 2.5 times more likely than underperforming teams to have fully integrated AI into their operations.
Until low-performing companies move from passive planning to concrete action, the benefits of AI will continue to elude them.
Marketers are adopting AI to predict, create and integrate at scale
Sixty-three percent of marketers leveraging AI say they use the generative model, while just over half (54%) use the predictive mode. And despite their relative newness, generative AI use cases are already among marketers’ favorites, alongside predictive applications.
As a result, teams are leveraging both types of AI for critical use cases like automating customer interactions and generating content – activities that will increase creativity and accelerate productivity.
Despite enthusiasm for AI, concerns about reliable data remain
Compared to their peers in other departments, marketers are particularly concerned about the lag in generative AI adoption. Eighty-eight percent of marketers fear missing out on the benefits of generative AI, compared to 78% of salespeople and 73% of service colleagues.
Despite this, marketers remain cautious, citing concerns such as data and job security. Compared to their peers higher up the corporate ladder, field team leaders are particularly wary of job stability.
One in four team leaders fear that AI will replace their job, compared to one in five executives.
For their part, CMOs are most concerned about data breaches, with 41% citing data exposure as their top concern, compared to 29% of vice presidents and 32% of CMOs. team.
While data leaks are marketers’ number one concern when it comes to generative AI, not having enough RIGHT data falls to number two.
To capture enough valuable information, marketers primarily leverage customer service data and transaction data, demonstrating their willingness to collaborate with their colleagues in sales and commerce to achieve this. However, unifying this data and other data, such as unstructured data from emails, NFTs, etc., remains a challenge.
In fact, only 31% of marketers are fully satisfied with their ability to unify customer data sources. Additionally, only about half of marketers say their systems are automatically and regularly updated with data from other departments.
Without fully integrated data, marketers’ ability to obtain accurate insights is blunted, leaving basic activities like performance analysis, audience suppression, and campaign creation fueled by outdated or incomplete information. It even jeopardizes marketers’ top priority: leveraging AI effectively.
A closer look at the survey results shows that fully integrated data is more common among top-performing marketing teams, suggesting that investing in unification can give marketers an advantage.
As Kelman explains, “A strong database will be critical to AI success for marketers as they work to bring together and unify customer data for real-time activation.”
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