It is no secret that artificial intelligence is increasingly shifting away from fiction to reality.
In marketing specifically, there has been an increased interest in artificial intelligence since marketers have realized how intelligently harnessing the increasing streams of customer data can redefine customer experiences.
Artificial intelligence has become more important to organizations and marketers in a bid to remain ahead in the current dynamic market space.
A recent MIT global survey involving 600 executives revealed that 9 out of 10 entities are currently using artificial intelligence in an attempt to boost their customer journeys.
What’s more, studies suggest that three-quarters of enterprises boost revenue with AI-powered marketing.
Netflix has predicted that its AI-driven personalized suggestions will save it one billion dollars in revenue each year by staying away from canceled subscriptions through keeping customers engaged with relevant content.
Marketers’ demand to see and receive proof that artificial intelligence fulfils its promises helps in fueling its adoption.
Early AI adopters have demonstrated how artificial intelligence in marketing makes them extra effective, productive and efficient through accelerating, scaling and simplifying marketing endeavors while getting rid of numerous complexities associated with marketing nowadays.
Similarly, Netflix’s recent benchmark analysis amounting to 3.8 billion, marketing interactions throughout various verticals and channels revealed that AI-driven marketing campaigns boost revenue and customer engagement three times and seven times respectively.
This is done by assisting marketers to be more relevant in their content, more effective with the way they interact with each customer and more targeted.
Here are the main five forecasts relating to what 2019 has in store for AI in marketing.
1. AI will coordinate the Entire Customer Journey Intelligently
Marketers first employed AI in various areas such as audience targeting and audience expansion.
In 2019, artificial intelligence will significantly power the complete customer life-cycle, specifically from the acquisition of customers to engagement then retention.
Forrester recently forecasted that “more than 20% of marketing platforms will use AI to optimize midcycle engagement”, specifically for business-to-business marketing.
The number can be expected to be more for business-to-consumer (B2C).
What’s more, artificial intelligence (AI) will shift from only impacting customer experience edges including dynamic content insertion to coordinating its core.
What does this mean for marketers?
AI-driven decision engines can help in solving the growing sophisticated customer journey through personalizing, guiding, and optimizing each aspect of the clients’ self-guided journeys using your brand.
Up to now, only those solutions with artificial intelligence, particularly at their core that can help in unifying all the incoming customer data and utilize its insights in orchestrating decisions in real-time can accomplish this task.
SEE MORE: Artificial Intelligence in Marketing – 6 Examples Making an Impact
2. CMOs will Prompt their Teams to Scale
As marketing entities’ revenue and demand targets continue to increase, CMOs are expected to place more emphasis on using technology to meet such demands.
CMOs will trigger their teams to run additional campaigns, include more personalization as well as diversify their approaches by being smarter with resources.
Marketing entities are anticipated to quickly realize that artificial intelligence can effectively assist them in streamlining and scaling how they operate.
What does this mean for marketers?
Artificial intelligence can be a partner that expedite and amplifies your marketing strategies by optimizing and automating cross-channel, multistage, hyper-targeted marketing programs.
This effort will enable your team to produce more and move faster as well as allow you to locate more growth opportunities.
SEE MORE: Using Artificial Intelligence to Improve Your Content Marketing
3. Marketers will become Creative on How they Utilize AI
As marketers start understanding how AI can improve and boost their efforts, expect to see them employ artificial intelligence in creative ways and begin to break status quo marketing techniques.
After the original artificial intelligence learning curve and the duration of laying out the groundwork with people, processes, and strategy, marketers will begin pushing the limits of their programs and experimenting with novel approaches.
What does this mean for marketers?
Away from offloading routine marketing tasks to artificial intelligence, marketers can take up the opportunity to reformulate their customer engagement plans.
With artificial intelligence, novel campaign ideas go live in a short period without the need for significant resources.
SEE MORE: 4 Effective Ways you can Integrate AI into your Marketing Strategy Now
4. Marketers will Embrace AI Fully More
Marketers need control of their marketing programs and have to describe their marketing investments.
However, the initial breed of AI marketing called for marketers to take a leap of faith.
This explains why the recent Business Insider Intelligence report discovered that “when asked to choose which trending technology they felt most unprepared for, 34% of global marketing executives chose AI.”
The growth of artificial intelligence in 2019 and beyond is expected to be driven by “explainable AI,” especially in which marketers can identify the aspects that impact predictions and can regulate parameters that guide artificial intelligence.
What does this mean for marketers?
AI adoption will accelerate.
Seek AI solutions that provide marketers with the level of visibility and control into the workflows and AI algorithms needed.
5. AI Marketing will offer ROI
Back in 2018, Gartner analysts forecasted that “by 2020, AI technologies will be virtually pervasive in almost every new software product and service.”
Currently, this prediction is coming to pass with an increase in the number of marketing software providers–incumbent and emerging—integrating artificial intelligence into their product strategies as well as pivoting their messaging in a bid to claim AI abilities.
In 2019, expect to see additional emphasis on the separation of fringe AI solutions from real AI solutions.
Gartner has begun assisting marketers in identifying noteworthy artificial intelligence (AI) solutions through launching the first Cool Vendors report, specifically on AI for marketing.
What does this mean for marketers?
As the “AI” phrase becomes standard, marketers are anticipated to find it more difficult to recognize real AI solutions that are capable of solving their problems effectively.
Marketers require being increasingly vigilant when it comes to testing the claims by vendors to get rid of masked AI solutions.
Finally, 2019 will be a crucial year in which most marketers will eventually realize the ROI of AI.
In fact, you can expect to see AI’s tangible benefits move the technology into the mainstream.
Images: Flickr Unsplash Pixabay Wiki & Others
