Marketing can feel like a battleground. With brands competing across countless platforms to capture attention – often on static budgets. Now, marketers are turning to tech and AI to generate customized content and power independent ‘agents’ to help them accelerate prospects through the sales funnel.
There has been a clear shift from experimentation to execution, with generative AI reshaping marketing. Tools like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Stable Diffusion are driving efficiency across marketing, sales, and customer service. And, this shift to embrace AI is helping brands realize significant productivity gains.
A pivot to AI-driven marketing strategy and execution
Pivoting for growth and productivity gains requires a rewiring of both marketing strategy and execution. It means CMOs and growth leaders are having to rethink how they identify new growth opportunities, deliver personalized marketing messages at scale, and increase the lifetime value of customers. The potential for change spans all marketing frontiers. And we’re already seeing CMOs benefitting from multiple use cases. They are actively:
· Identifying new sales opportunities by surfacing patterns in unstructured data Generative AI converts unstructured data—text, images, and customer feedback—into actionable insights. It can help marketers analyze complex inputs such as regional sales performance, customer sentiment, and behavioral trends. And it can surface hidden patterns in social media and customer feedback, to uncover new opportunities to sell.
· Enhancing product discovery with AI-driven targeted promotions – Predictive analytics further refines the targeting process by analyzing past and present customer behavior, enabling brands to anticipate future needs and deliver timely, relevant promotions through preferred channels. These AI-driven capabilities empower marketers to enhance engagement, optimize campaign performance, and unlock new levels of customer connection.
· Expediating time to ideate and creating authentic brand content for all – Generative AI can significantly reduce the time required for ideation and content drafting. By facilitating collaboration around content, a uniform brand voice can be delivered across all channels and across all forms of content. This capability enables teams to significantly enhance the personalization of marketing messages for different customer segments, geographies, and demographics.
·Increasing lifetime customer value with personalization at scale – Using generative AI, marketing campaigns can instantly be translated into as many languages as needed, with different imagery and messaging tailored to specific audiences and customers. Its ability to produce content with varying specifications has the potential to increase customer value, attraction, conversion, and retention over a lifetime. All this can now be achieved at a speed and scale beyond the possibilities of traditional marketing techniques.
The blurring of marketing with sales and customer service
AI’s impact isn’t limited to marketing. Sales and customer service teams are embracing AI too, reshaping customer engagement, and dissolving the boundaries between the two functions. Meanwhile, there’s a continuing power shift from brands to customers– who are getting accustomed to the benefits that come from gen AI, including instant responses, 24/7 availability, and self-serve features. It’s likely that, over time, customers will come to prefer brands that become experts in this tech.
Generative AI is also helping businesses target customers at key lifecycle stages – from initial acquisition, to retention, and repeat purchase. It is facilitating strategic goals like cross-selling and company promotion, helping to ensure marketing campaigns align with wider business objectives. As AI advances, autonomous AI agents will further improve customer interactions, automating complex marketing tasks, and providing an even more intelligent and responsive service. It is working to:
· Improve lead development: Generative AI is helping sales representatives nurture leads by synthesizing relevant product sales information and customer profiles. Alongside, creating discussion scripts to facilitate customer conversation, including up- and cross-selling talking points. It could also automate sales follow-ups and passively nurture leads until clients are ready for direct interaction with a human.
· Increase the probability of sales: Generative AI can identify and prioritize sales leads by creating comprehensive customer profiles from structured and unstructured data. It then acts to suggest actions to staff to improve client engagement at every point of contact. For example, generative AI can provide better information about client preferences, potentially improving close rates.
· Create hyper-efficient virtual sellers: Agents can support highly complex use cases, by recursively breaking down complex workflows and performing subtasks across specialized instructions and data sources to reach the desired goal. These subagents, equipped with necessary domain knowledge and tools, draw on prior “experiences” and codified domain expertise, coordinating with each other and using organizational data and systems to execute these assignments.
Pivoting from experimentation to AI transformation
Realizing the full potential of AI involves more than the CEO turning to the CMO and saying: “Let go!”. It demands strategic leadership, investment, and alignment. This relationship between the CEO and CMO is so important. We know that CEOs who place marketing at the core of their growth strategy are twice as likely to have greater than 5 percent annual growth compared with their peers.
But success isn’t just about alignment at the top. Marketers must integrate AI seamlessly across people, processes, and platforms. This means building well-trained teams that understand how to maximize AI’s capabilities and design AI-powered workflows that enhance efficiency without losing the human touch – all while ensuring agility and an ability to adapt rapidly to new models, insights, and capabilities as AI evolves.
Marketing leaders need to ensure their organizations stay ahead by continuously refining strategies and integrating AI into their broader operating model. Regardless of how generative AI unfolds, one thing is clear: AI-powered marketing creates a flywheel effect. Every improvement in personalization, targeting, and efficiency generates higher returns, faster growth, and lowers costs.
