By Arun Pattabhiraman
Harnessing the power of AI can help brands succeed in their quest to decode the consumer psyche and achieve personalization at scale. With advances in AI and the availability of reams of data, we are on the cusp of an AI-driven transformation. Modern consumers interact with brands across many new digital channels, with social media increasingly becoming the central pillar of these interactions. Customers speak directly to brands and tell them about their needs and preferences. Consumers also expect brands to learn from these interactions, with over 61% expecting brands to provide personalized experiences. To effectively deliver a great customer experience, we must capture this data with privacy safeguards and unleash AI to generate real-time insights and leverage those insights to create personalized experiences at scale.
Embracing AI for Creativity
Traditionally, creativity in marketing was a costly undertaking. To create a simple video campaign, you had to hire an agency to develop a script and hire a director, actors, musicians, etc. And each iteration was just as costly.
The AI generation has changed the game. Now marketers can create experiences in real-time. With a suite of more than 20 GenAI tools, design teams are now able to launch new creative projects in days instead of months. We can create stunning visuals with the right prompts by leveraging GenAI tools like Midjourney, Dall-E, etc. with quick and inexpensive results. Likewise, content teams can run content experiments themselves. They can use AI tools like Synthesia or Elevenlabs to quickly produce beautiful videos. With AI, we are limited only by the limits of our imagination.
AI, an essential tool for real-time personalization
As real-time personalization takes center stage in consumer engagement, AI has solidified its position as an indispensable tool for modern marketers. Today, nearly 80% of industry experts incorporate some form of AI technology in their online marketing activities.
AI helps us optimize every touchpoint. First, AI helps us identify user demographics: for example, in a B2B company, the message for management is different from that for practitioners. Or if you’re a B2C business, you’ll want to use different messaging for Gen Z audiences and middle-aged adults. Based on user behavior, AI helps us personalize and optimize campaigns in real-time based on user interactions. As customers interact with businesses across more channels, such as WhatsApp, Discord, Reddit or Instagram, they expect businesses to deliver a great experience on their channel of choice. AI can help deliver a consistent experience across all channels.
Research shows that nearly 9 in 10 marketers (89%) see a positive ROI on personalized campaigns. For reference, in 2020-2021, a leading global hotel chain managed to improve its customer engagement speed by 35% while ensuring a high level of individual personalization based on customer history, by adopting a AI-powered customer management and social listening, resulting in tangible business impacts on an international scale.
Analyze consumer sentiment, predict trends and develop data-driven strategies
Armed with a comprehensive, unified view of their customers, facilitated by AI-powered tools that quickly analyze data from various online channels, industry leaders are actively adjusting their campaigns in response to the latest consumer interactions. This ensures optimal allocation of resources to the most effective channels and messages at all times. For example, AI in social listening provides marketers with comprehensive analytics of brand mentions, customer interactions, social media and walk tendencies; this information enables rapid, data-driven decision-making. This potential has led companies in industries as broad as banking, food and beverage, and consumer technology to proactively adopt AI trend monitoring, allowing them to stay on top of consumer trends and to capitalize on emerging opportunities in real time. With significant improvements in AI’s predictive analytics capabilities, marketers have greater opportunities to leverage predicted trends, competitor activities, and consumer behaviors to identify new opportunities, assess business viability. entry into new markets and sustain their activities in the face of market developments. dynamics and potential crises.
We are at the intersection of AI-driven marketing and customer experience transformation. Ultimately, AI will transform every dimension of branding and customer engagement. The AI market in marketing, estimated at $15.84 billion in 2021, is expected to grow nearly sevenfold to $107.5 billion by 2028. Despite these promising prospects, nearly two specialists of three marketers fear that AI will replace their marketing strategy. jobs in the next five years.
The author is the CMO of Sprinklr
