In times of fierce competition, marketing has gained ground to become an increasingly important function in organizations.
And for good reason.
With buyers that are more skeptical and discerning, organizations are struggling to make their mark, increasing their product’s visibility, and converting leads to revenue.
How can marketers tackle this challenge?
More effective campaigns!
Which brings us to the question –
What are the ingredients of a successful campaign?
- Knowing the campaign objective
- Understanding the audience
- Charting out relevant campaign effectiveness metrics
- Tracking those metrics
- Generating insights in a manner that is time sensitive
- Packaging communication into creative devices that fulfill the core objective
One size fits all OR data-driven differentiation?
It’s important to note that while the ingredients of campaign success remain constant, metrics to track would vary by channel, campaign theme, customer segment targeted etc. Measuring these correctly requires vast amounts of data.
The technological revolution and digital integration have made large amounts of data regarding consumers available to marketers, how to best leverage this data and differentiate it to optimize campaigns and scale up the numbers is a code that enterprises have not cracked yet.
This leads to greater, bigger challenges.
Exploring the Challenges
The challenge of standing out
In the current environment of what one might consider too much data, a potential consumer is bombarded with communication from many brands, across a variety of channels.
Let’s go back in time briefly. In 2007, Yankelovich, a market research firm estimated that a person would at least come across 5000 ads in a day. Cut to 2021, it was estimated that an average individual is bombarded with as many as 10000 ads a day.
If you decide to recollect the ads seen throughout the day, can you put a finger on how many you saw?
If that is tough to wrap your head around, take it up a notch and think of the number of channels these ads can be found on.
Channelling it right
In the past, organizations could focus their efforts on one or two primary channels. ATL and BTL campaigns had separate objectives, worked independently. This can be seen in the examples discussed previously as well.
However, in times of digitization and with campaigns being largely integrated and now being fragmented between multiple channels like social media, YouTube, TV, podcasts, streaming services, and other online and offline media, organizations need time-sensitive, consumer-centric communication to get a head start on their competition.
What really sticks is the function of how well they cut through the clutter and get their demographic to sit up and take notice.
With granular insights lacking, most organizations will fight a losing battle with consumers’ 10 second attention spans in a dynamic digital environment.
Starting off on the right digital foot
Speaking of dynamic digital environments, for the last decade, DTC brands have transformed consumers’ expectations of what a good customer experience entails.
Using this as primary flex, newer niche DTC players are luring consumers away from legacy brands through their own e-commerce. While many legacy companies have made strides in e-commerce, creating relevant and memorable omnichannel experiences is still a work-in-progress for most of them.
In order to do this well, legacy CPGs need to create personalized experiences based on their customer segmentation data, something that is possible only if the data is decoded correctly.
Scaling up for DTCs
While DTC players use e-commerce to pivot consumers away from legacy players and can do so effectively due to personalization, the luxury of smaller data sets is something that DTC brands have only until they scale.
In the absence of tools and a framework that enables DTCs to derive insights from large amounts of data, personalization might just become a relic of the past for DTCs as they scale up.
But the answer to navigating these conundrums is simple.
AI (Artificial Intelligence).
Diving into the WHY
By applying AI in marketing:
- The process of decoding consumer journeys, designing buyer profiles, sentiment analysis becomes faster and more efficient.
- Armed with data-driven insights marketers can not only define the needs of the campaign, the segmentation approach as well as the metrics but also subsequently track and measure those metrics more efficiently.
- This can go a long way in understanding how much incremental sales and lift the campaign has achieved, while giving organizations an in-depth analysis of touchpoint effectiveness and ROI to help optimize the investment made in the campaign.
There are other, long-term benefits as well!
AI is instrumental in optimizing marketing spend
AI helps you factor in a variety of characteristics such as location data, brand awareness and perception, past purchasing behavior and more, to create relevant communication towards your target audience.
These insights can help marketers gain sound knowledge of what has the most impact. Budget allocation decisions are made more efficiently, and organizations can avoid wasting their budgets on low-ROI campaigns.
Integration with AI helps with better proactive decision-making due to forecasting
AI-powered applications can help you hit goals and KPIs with increased consistency. Self-learning apps can be customized and iterated with respect to changing environments and needs enabling organizations to derive extremely accurate forecasts.
Marketers can leverage AI to curate highly personalized customer segments and content
AI helps you derive specific insights that percolate to your target’s specific characteristics. This helps you define broader profiles and develop relevant, meaningful content and messaging for your target group. Usage of AI ensures that your targeting is more accurate as well, increasing the chances of conversion.
AI can be the all-encompassing solution to scaling up ROI from campaigns
High levels of customization and relevance in campaigns, deciphering and tracking the right metrics helps organizations convert more customers. The value gained from spending on the campaign thus increases, increasing the ROI.
AI-driven insights can lead to creation of better products
Armed with specific insights from vast amounts of relevant data, companies can gain an insider’s perspective into customer needs and preferences. This can further help companies to influence the larger strategy, create product roadmaps that lead to increased customer satisfaction.
Moral of the story?
These benefits are a mere drop in the ocean and marketing leaders know it.
Testimony lies in research that suggests top-performing companies are more than twice as likely to use AI for marketing. (Source: Adobe)
With AI, analyzing the impact of various touchpoints and uncovering which permutations and combinations of activities is most likely to steer campaign success becomes an easy job.
Apart from boosting top line by robust campaign success, AI helps organizations qualitatively scale up their brand value as well.
In a sea of information, when marketing leaders and companies need to compete, campaign, customize, connect- for market share, for visibility and the consumer’s unflinching loyalty, AI is the key that can enable them to get an edge and achieve campaign success time and time again.
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