Artificial intelligence (AI) is a game-changer in product marketing. With advanced technologies like generative AI and natural language processing (NLP), corporations and enterprises can revolutionize their marketing strategies, enhancing customer experiences and driving business growth.
Whether you’re a product marketer aiming to boost your strategies or a business owner eager to harness AI for improved marketing results, this blog offers practical strategies to elevate your marketing efforts.
Key highlights
- AI is most effective with repetitive or data-driven tasks, creating personalized customer experiences, and identifying metrics to inform marketing decisions and strategies.
- Implementing AI in marketing is a practical and achievable goal. It involves assessing and understanding current strategies, selecting the right tools, integrating them into existing workflows, training the team, and measuring the impact of the AI tools.
- Measuring the success of AI in marketing requires tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) and adjusting based on insights and results.
Let’s take a look at these in more detail.
Understanding AI in product marketing
Before we can truly comprehend the impact of AI on product marketing, it’s critical to understand what product marketing and AI is. Product marketing focuses on personas, positioning, messaging, sales enablement, and how to use those insights to promote and sell products to customers.
AI, on the other hand, is essentially the intelligence of a computer or machine and is related to the development of machines that perform human tasks. Generative AI is a subset of AI and involves algorithms that generate code or content, such as ChatGPT or Dall-E.
Preparing for AI integration
Before integrating AI into your marketing efforts, think critically and strategically about how, where, and with whom to integrate AI tools and how to roll out AI in the most thoughtful, optimal, and strategic way to ensure success and alignment. To do so, follow the below:
- Identify your organization’s business objectives, goals, success metrics, and critical challenges.
- Outline your product marketing team’s goals and deliverables and how they align with the organization’s business objectives.
- Map out the current workflow and tasks of the product marketer’s goals.
- Consider which of the tasks are the ideal use cases for AI.
- Once you have identified the strategic use cases to implement AI, consider who your stakeholders are. Who are the leaders, procurement, finance, or advocates to be involved? Who on your product or content marketing team will lead the integration?
- Finally, what results do you want from implementing AI? What defines the success or failure of the new vendor tool? How will you measure those results?
Let’s see this in action…
Imagine that you’re a product marketing director at an ed tech Series D startup.
Step one: Your company’s objective is ARR and growing customers.
Step two: Your product marketing team’s major initiative is to conduct market research to identify customer satisfaction scores, feedback responses, and market trend analysis and use that data to drive enablement and user engagement. Key metrics include daily active users, monthly active users, and feature usage rates.
Step three: You map out each step in the market research process, which includes creating and conducting surveys, looking through win/loss interviews, and distilling insights.
Step four: You realize that there are specific steps where AI can be implemented, such as collecting data or scraping the web, identifying customer sentiments and emotion detection, creating smart surveys, and providing real-time analysis.
Step five: To implement or pilot a new AI vendor, you know that you need several people on board, including the CEO, the CFO, and your manager, the Head of Marketing. You also identify Jane as the lead to implement the AI vendor on your team.
Step six: As you build your business case for the new vendor, consider key metrics and factors, such as ease of integration, data and security compliance and insight accuracy.
By gaining a comprehensive overview and understanding of their organization’s needs, their team’s capabilities and workflow, strategic use cases for implementing AI, and the measurement systems they will need to implement, organizations can successfully integrate AI into their marketing strategies.
4 steps to implementing ai in your marketing efforts
Implementing AI in your marketing efforts requires careful planning and execution. Here are four key steps to help you optimally integrate AI into your marketing strategy:
Step one: Assess your current marketing strategy
Review your marketing plan and examine the market. Identify areas where leveraging AI could give your marketing a serious boost.
Map out existing workflows: Map out your team’s key deliverables and projects, identify the tasks, and pinpoint areas in the workflow that can benefit from AI.
Seek input from business leaders: Talk with your company’s leaders and key stakeholders to get their perspectives and gather insights. It’s important to ensure your marketing plans sync with the business’s broader goals.
Review market trends: Keep a close watch on what’s happening in your industry, keep tabs on what consumers are into, and stay in the loop about any new technologies that could shake up your marketing game.
In real life: Imagine that you are a product marketer for a health tech SaaS company.
Your current marketing strategy for the year might include how to create hyper-personalized marketing based on key personas or ICPs, identifying conversion customer journey mapping and customer segmentation, and implementing customer chatbots, video, and SEO search initiatives.
Step two: Select the right AI tools for your needs
Do your homework to find the right AI tools and vendors that match your marketing goals and who you’re trying to reach. When making your choice, consider the following:
Product marketing manager’s input: Include your product marketing manager in the decision-making process when selecting AI tools to ensure that the tools you choose meet their specific goals and needs.
Data security: In today’s world, data security and cybersecurity threats seem just around the corner. Look for AI vendors that protect your private data and follow key compliance policies.
Generative AI capabilities: If creating content is a big part of your marketing strategy, search for AI tools with generative AI features.
In real life: At the health tech company, you need to find AI vendors for customer insights, segmentations, journey mapping, chatbots, and video workstreams.
You may opt for Einstein for Salesforce Marketing Cloud engagement to get customer insights, and Adobe Experience Cloud to create customer journey maps.
You explore Drift for AI-powered chatbots and Vidyard for video initiatives. You make sure that all relevant stakeholders are aligned with the new vendors and processes, and that each vendor passes data security and compliance policies.
Step three: Integrate AI tools into your marketing workflows
Onboard your team to your chosen AI tools and ensure they fit smoothly into your current marketing processes. It’s crucial to foster collaboration between your team and the AI technology for the adoption of tools.
Here are some key considerations:
Foster a learning culture: Encourage a culture of learning within your marketing teams by promoting professional development and encouraging team members to share experiences.
Scale as needed: Consider whether your chosen AI tools can grow alongside your marketing team. Ensure they’re flexible enough to handle more work as your team expands and needs to evolve.
Train your team: Offer comprehensive training sessions to your marketing teams to ensure they know how to utilize the selected AI tools to their fullest potential. This will empower them to integrate AI into their daily tasks and maximize their capabilities.
In real life: You assign Robert on your team to help launch the new vendors and together, your team decides to launch a workshop for the consumer insights team and the customer marketing team to train them on using Salesforce, Adobe, Drift, and Vidyard.
Step four: Monitor and adjust your strategies
Monitor your marketing strategies closely, analyze insights, and be ready to tweak them as needed to improve them.
In real life: Setting a 30-60-90 day review, identify key metrics and room for improvement. You notice that the chatbot receives high customer feedback, but low interaction rate.
You also notice that the video metrics have high engagement, high watch time, but also high bounce rate. Using that data, you can determine new initiatives or strategies.
By following the steps above, businesses can effectively integrate AI into their marketing strategies, leading to improved outcomes and success.
Measuring the success of AI in marketing
In step four, we highlight the importance of monitoring and adjusting your AI strategies, which we dedicate a separate section to.
To gauge the effectiveness of AI in marketing, it’s crucial to measure its impact and base decisions on data. Here are two critical aspects to keep in mind when assessing AI’s success in marketing:
Key performance indicators (KPIs) to watch
Pinpoint the critical performance indicators that match your marketing objectives and regularly check these metrics to gauge how AI influences your marketing outcomes.
Consider tracking the following:
- Customer acquisition: Track new customers gained through marketing campaigns driven by AI. This metric helps gauge how well AI is attracting and converting new customers.
- Conversion rates: Identify the critical conversion metrics for your team, such as the percentage of website visitors or leads that turn into customers. With AI’s help, you can fine-tune marketing campaigns to enhance conversion rates and achieve more favorable outcomes.
- Customer retention: AI can boost customer retention by delivering personalized experiences and tailored communication strategies. Track the percentage of customers retained during a specific timeframe.
Adjusting strategies based on AI insights
Use the insights surfaced by AI to refine your marketing strategies and use the data to make decisions and enhance your marketing strategy and roadmap. Here are some examples of how to adjust strategies based on AI insights:
- Analyze market data: AI tools can sift through extensive market data, covering customer behavior, market trends, and competitor actions. Use this information to pinpoint opportunities and base your decisions on solid data insights.
For example, AI algorithms can analyze customer purchasing patterns, social media interactions, and website browsing behavior. Businesses can uncover trends to better meet customer needs by processing this data.
- Personalize marketing efforts: Use AI’s insights to tailor your marketing efforts to fit your customers’ preferences and behavior. Adjust your messaging, offers, and targeting accordingly, drawing on AI’s data-driven insights.
Suppose AI analysis reveals that a segment of your customers prefers email communication over social media ads, and you adjust your strategy to focus on email campaigns for that particular group.
- Iterate and optimize: Experiment with new ideas, try different approaches, and adjust. Suppose AI analysis suggests that a particular ad campaign isn’t resonating with your target audience as expected. In that case, you can pivot to test a new approach or messaging to see if it yields better results.
Final thoughts
AI is here, and it’s here to stay. However, implementing AI tools requires planning, strategy, and careful execution.
First, understand your business goals and challenges, aligning your product marketing objectives with those goals.
Figure out what your team is currently doing and where AI can best fit in.
Get the right people involved, set clear goals, and make sure you have a way to measure success so you can determine if that AI vendor is the right fit for you.
