- Marketers need to be curious.
AI isn't a magic bullet, it doesn't fix everything.
But finding solutions that are powered by AI
that do things more intelligently
can give you a massive competitive advantage
in the marketplace.
(bright music)
- So Paul, can you tell us how marketers can get started
with artificial intelligence?
- Yeah, I tend to look at three main steps.
The first is,
think about all the things you do as a marketer.
So let's say you're an inbound marketer in an agency
or with a brand.
If you make a list,
and you could just do this in an Excel spreadsheet
if you want to or in a Google sheet,
just make a list of all the activities you do
every week or every month.
So it might be develop email subject lines,
build an editorial strategy,
figuring out when to send,
monitor performance,
whatever it is, just create your list.
Then go through and put a column
for how much time you spend every month doing that thing.
Then make a leap of faith that someone,
whether it's an existing company you work with
or another software company,
has built a more intelligent way to do that.
Take the things that you spend the most time doing.
They will usually be very data intensive,
very time intensive.
Look at those things and go see
if you can find something to pilot.
Because AI isn't a switch you flip.
We don't just like all of a sudden go find a way
to do everything more intelligently.
We do it at a use case level,
a single activity level.
And so find the things that you're spending a ton of time on
that are very inefficient
that might be able to be done better.
So the first is time intensive, data-driven activities.
Look for smarter ways to do it.
The second is think about all the data you have access to
as a marketer.
So you may have your CRM system, your automation system,
your call tracking system, conversational (indistinct),
all these sources of data.
And try and figure out,
are we able to leverage all that data
to better personalize, to tell a better story,
to better engage with consumers?
And then the third,
and actually what ends up probably being
the best way to start,
is go talk to your core tech platform companies,
because you don't wanna have to go buy
15 or 20 new software tools
to do each individual thing smarter.
What you want is to make bets on the platform companies
that are taking a very strategic approach
to building smarter features within the product
that you can then use more intelligently.
- And do you see any kind of obstacles and things
that people should look out for
as they're thinking about those sorts of things?
- I think they try and...
Well, one, they don't understand what AI is
and they just asked for AI.
So first it's education on what it is.
Then they probably try and achieve too much right away
versus small scale pilot tests.
So I think the smartest route is to find the thing
that is kind of a quick win
that you can build support around
and you have a greater probability of it making an impact.
So an example might be media buying.
So if you're spending $5,000 a month,
or 10,000 or 50,000,
and humans are doing it all,
and they're the ones making the changes
to the media buying plan,
and they're the ones moving the resources around,
and they're the ones figuring out which creative to offer
and which audience segments to target,
none of that is a human better than a machine at.
And so if you're spending a ton of money,
go try and find a way to have that done more intelligently.
And you can probably have quick wins,
even if you just start with one division of your company
instead of like the whole thing.
So that's an example of try and find something
where the probability of it being better
than what you're doing is pretty good
and the investment required to figure that out
is pretty little,
versus going and trying to tackle some massive undertaking
that would take a year and then you'll find out,
well, that didn't work,
and half a million dollars later
we don't believe AI is gonna work
and now the C suite doesn't wanna hear anything
with AI in it.
- Yeah, I think that's a great point about finding one area
and then sort of rolling it out across an organization.
Again, thinking of the analogy to electricity,
it's like bringing in an electrician into a factory.
And just because you hire an electrician,
he still needs to understand every single role within that
and how to best apply a more intelligent automation
to that role.
- Yeah, and I think the key ends up being
marketers need to be curious.
AI isn't a magic bullet, it doesn't fix everything.
But finding solutions that are powered by AI,
that do things more intelligently,
can give you a massive competitive advantage
in the marketplace.
And so for the marketers who are curious,
who try and find ways to go explore,
find better solutions, find more information,
develop a better confidence around what it is
and how it can be used,
those are the marketers
that'll probably excel in their careers
and build competitive advantages for brands.
- And are there any particular resources
that you would recommend that marketers kind of look into
if they're trying to learn more
about this? - Yeah, I mean, selfishly,
that's why we built the Marketing AI Institute for.
So we created that in 2016 as just a content hub
built by PR 20/20 and underneath PR 20/20,
and then actually split it out in January this year
as its own entity,
and then we launched the Marketing AI Conference,
which will be July in Cleveland.
So that's what we built.
Now, where we learn from, honestly,
there aren't that many marketing resources for it.
So HubSpot's doing a lot more with it
I know through our Academy, making an effort,
it's part of this series,
like making an effort to really educate the marketplace
on what it is and how it can be used.
A lot of individual brands are doing similar things.
So SAS companies that are powered by AI
are trying to create more demand for smarter solutions,
so you see a lot of it there.
But the places we tend to go is Google has ai.google,
and it's literally just a free resource center
to teach about AI.
Microsoft teaches about AI,
IBM has a ton of free resources and demos.
So I would say go to the big companies that are building it,
who are betting their future
on consumers demanding smarter solutions,
and a lot of them are creating resources
to help educate the market so there is demand.
It's why Microsoft runs their Microsoft AI commercials.
They're trying to differentiate
that these are smarter ways to do things.
So yeah, I think once you're curious about it
and you start looking around,
you'll start seeing a lot of resources out there
for marketers to learn from.
- Yeah, we're definitely fans
of the human-centered machine learning blog
that Google has out there,
which, you know, is being very careful about avoiding bias
and things like that within machine learning.
- Which is a whole nother topic. (laughs)
- Definitely.
- It's not perfect, AI is not perfect,
but it's a unique opportunity I think,
for many of us we won't see something like this
in our careers again.
That really gives us the chance to leap forward
in our capabilities and our knowledge.
(bright music)