Managing the changes brought about by AI applications is the next big challenge for marketers
Artificial intelligence applications are already becoming a mainstay within marketing teams across the globe. With pickup levels of AI marketing initiatives already much higher than you might think.
From interviews with 100 senior marketers from a wide range of industries, we found that 55% of companies are either currently implementing or actively investigating some form of AI initiative within their marketing practices. Meaning, AI is already shaking things up in the industry.
Unsurprisingly, this inevitable rise of AI technologies in marketing is causing a major shift in the way companies work. With more and more companies looking to adopt a data-centric approach to meet the demand for more effective digital marketing.
Nonetheless, there remains to be a clear consensus on the extent of the changes that AI will bring to marketing. Leaving many companies and marketers in the dark…
Chart of the Day: Brands and Agencies Struggle to Trust AI with Budget Allocation
Business success demands a balanced approach when it comes to decision making – objective analysis and subjective experience. Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the hottest tools to improve the scale and quality of our data analysis, but research from Albert Technologies has shed light on what tasks marketers are having difficulty letting go of.
Polling brand and agency marketers on their adoption of AI, both groups agreed that budget allocation was one of their hardest tasks to relinquish. Brand marketers had the most difficulty handing over campaign analysis, while agency marketers wanted to hold on to their audience segmentation.
These attitudes may be the result of AI systems having varied levels of automation. Marketers are likely more open to systems they can use to improve their analysis…
Improve your skills to become a 'T-shaped Marketer' via these free online courses and tutorials
When we look at where to focus our free blog content at Smart Insights, our main aim or filter we use is that the content must help digital marketers plan, manage and optimize their business results or improve their digital skills. This is also what our member content, in our guides focuses on too - starting with digital strategies and planning templates then more specialized marketing tactics like email marketing, social media, SEO, video and many more digital skills.
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Of course, there is a lot of great free, structured online courses around developing digital skills, so we thought it would help to share our thoughts…
Take our short poll to share which skill you need to improve most within the year
This month we're focusing our content on Digital Marketing skills and careers development. As a marketing advice site, we're always creating new resources to help marketers plan, manage and optimize their digital strategy and channel specific tactics. We 20 toolkits spanning from digital marketing strategy and planning, campaign planning to B2B, Agency and much more.
However, to understand what is needed and where marketers need to spend time improving, we need to know what areas of digital marketing are the weakest within companies and personal skills.
To help us understand the skills gap in 2018 please choose the 3 skills which you most want to learn in the year ahead which are also important to your business.
If you can't see the poll, please click here to complete the poll.
We'll be sharing our findings at…
Chart of the Day: A summary of the state of digital marketing skills
I thought this infographic from General Assembly was useful for showing specific skills gaps since it isn't based on a survey, rather it is based on a test taken at the end of a digital marketing qualification. We will be sharing research we have done in collaboration with the IDM on the perceptions of marketers to their careers later in the month.
The top of the chart shows a skills gap amongst non digital marketing specialists that might be expected since those focusing on digital marketing activities will naturally understand digital concepts better. It is arguable whether corporate marketers need to know the details of techniques like search, display and AB testing. However, they will need to discuss such techniques with their teams, so this does hint at a…
Over half of the leading marketing teams report they are using AI in some way, and 57% of teams believe that AI is necessary to support their strategies and sales goals
It’s no surprise that AI technology is all the rage in nearly every marketing department these days. According to Forrester’s report on AI adoption, a shocking 94% of respondents believed that AI-driven marketing would be very valuable to their company. And yet, over 67% of participants also reported they had concerns and obstacles that stood in the way of AI adoption.
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The benefits of AI technology in marketing…
Have you heard of Google Duplex yet? You know, the AI assistant that books appointments and makes reservations on your behalf? Just your next-door robot…
As you may already be aware, Google Duplex is a new technology launched by Google at Google I/O 2018, the company’s annual developer conference. Google Duplex is an AI system that is designed to accomplish real-world tasks over the phone, by mimicking human conversation. Google CEO Sundar Pichai personally demonstrated phones calls made by this digital voice assistant.
The product was demoed by showing a phone call where the AI assistant makes an appointment at the hairdresser’s, by calling them and having an actual conversation. Now chatbots and voice assistants have been around for a while now, so that probably doesn't sound all that intriguing to you. Although, what you may find really intriguing is that…
Why new artificial intelligence matters for business, from global trend to maximizing marketing and operations spend
AI has progressed quite away from its early beginnings, and its prevalence in modern business models has increased exponentially. Yet, despite this, our relationship with AI has been a tumultuous one, with ‘automation’ becoming something of a dirty word for traditional businesses. But AI is here to stay — and for good reason.
This rise in popularity of utilizing AI in business models comes in part from the development of machine learning and natural language processing. It’s this technology that gives AI the power, when utilized effectively, to aid businesses in numerous practical ways. From increasing staff productivity to boosting customer satisfaction, AI has the promise to meet business objectives at a fraction of the time and cost as with traditional methods like phone and email. Here, we’ll go through some…
Chart of the day: Sales and Content Marketing teams are most aligned on sharing customer questions, but least aligned on personas
Shockingly, the research found that content marketers and sales professionals are least aligned on buyer personas, which would seem particularly important for both parties, as something they should be aligned on.
The study conducted by Content Marketing Institute and LinkedIn Research also found that a stronger culture of alignment would be the best way to increase sales and content marketing alignment.
As you can see, buyer persona sharing is not very aligned compared with other activities the survey asked about. Target accounts, how to use content and when to use content, along with typical discussions around customer questions, are by far the most aligned activities. Content marketing strategy appears to be shared with the sales team, it's unclear how much integration between sales…
Chart of the Day: How perceptions of the applications of AI differ between agencies and brands
In our infographic reviewing the applications of AI in marketing, we explore 15 different applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) across the customer lifecycle from media buying to marketing automation and chatbots. It's around a year now since we developed this infographic, so it's interesting to know how widely used AI is, both by businesses and their agencies.
In today's Chart of the Day, I'm sharing some research which helps show how AI is being used for marketing. The sample is smaller than what I would usually look to share and it is skewed since it is a customer survey of Albert and AI tool for marketing, but with relatively few adopters of AI, this is inevitable and I thought the report below might be useful both for agencies and brands to learn about the 'Use Cases' of…
