ChatGPT has become the biggest buzzword of the year. And for great reason – generative AI presents a challenge and opportunity on a scale that may eclipse the rise of the internet itself.
Digital marketers, due to their increasingly fast-paced and creative natures, are greatly impacted by the arrival of this ever-evolving technology. For Richard Robinson, Managing Director at Econsultancy, a global provider of digital marketing and ecommerce insights and training, generative AI should be seen as the extension of the marketing professional’s skillset.
While still seen as new or untested by some, 63% of UK marketers have now experimented with ChatGPT or GenAI as part of their marketing efforts, according to Statista. As marketers lean in, experiment, and innovate GenAI’s potential to create unfair advantage will only accelerate. From a buzzword in 2023 to a key strategic tool in 2024, GenAI is fast-becoming essential to every marketing plan going forward.
Use of GenAI mechanisms will help marketing’s efforts to align productivity and holistic thinking with the opportunities of disruptive innovation and accelerated customer demand.
Due to the fast-paced, creative nature of their role, digital marketers have become the frontline of the GenAI revolution of modern marketing. Gone are the days of consumers making bricks and mortar-only purchase decisions in a 38-hour week economy.
Today, marketers are tasked with strategising, planning, implementing, measuring, reporting, and evaluating campaign performance and engagement in an always-on, digitally-charged, 168-hour week. This is where GenAI will come into play in 2024 marketing plans.
Ultimately, the presence of a holistic, AI-enabled marketing strategy and plan will encourage business growth – but to unlock this in 2024, marketers need to upskill, and quickly.
The use of GenAI in marketing
Today the function of GenAI, and AI in general, is regularly misunderstood by marketers. However, reservations about AI undercutting marketers’ roles must be viewed as an opportunity to augment human brainpower, enabling marketers to have even more control of their brands’ campaigns and strategies moving forward.
Generative AI, in turn, can be deployed to reduce a marketer’s time and touches, becoming a powerful strategic tool to unlock greater personalisation, speed and scale. However, in order to leverage GenAI as a key instrument for the end-to-end marketing process, professionals will need to be empowered by leaders to develop the knowledge, skills, and mindset to harness the power of GenAI in their work.
Content creation is one of GenAI’s most used applications today. However, too often this usage is tactical rather than strategic. GenAI’s capacity to streamline content creation and development can enable marketers and creatives to focus their efforts on more strategic aspects of their roles. To facilitate this heightened strategic focus, marketing professionals need to have a more concentrated approach to learning, understanding how and where to deploy GenAI tools to their best ability.
Another of GenAI’s most useful applications for marketers is personalisation. Two thirds (67%) of organisations are exploring the use of GenAI to analyse customer data and offer customised experiences, according to Boston Consulting Group’s April 2023 survey.
Some tools, like machine learning chatbots, can help organisations streamline customer interactions and create a more engaging, personalised experience. Marketers now need to go further and lean into using GenAI plug-ins that analyse patterns and mimic style or structure to personalise customer interactions, to unearth insights and inform future customer engagement.
GenAI will undoubtedly hold a significant place in the marketing plans of 2024, however core marketing fundamentals remain important too. The customer journey, despite its radical evolution, remains key. Identifying and unlocking new and existing patterns of behaviour remain at the heart of every plan, meaning the customer, data analytics and outstanding CX and creativity are still indispensable to successfully executing the most powerful strategies.
GenAI’s ability to grasp patterns of behaviour and generate new personas is fast-becoming a game-changer for marketers, however only 41% of BCG’s survey respondents are exploring this today. In fact, this ability to identify commonalities and analyse customer behaviour during consumer research can become a clear point of advantage supporting marketers with working smarter, not harder.
In doing so, GenAI can be a valuable market segmentation tool. Highly personalised experiences based on individual preferences, interests and behaviours will drive higher engagement and improved conversion rates across never-off touchpoints, fuelling increasing customer loyalty.
Preparing for 2024, now
To win in 2024, my advice for every marketer is to build GenAI into their plans, budgeting ahead for learning and professional development. At Econsultancy, we have already seen this need accelerating in the last four years. In fact, over half (55%) of respondents in 2023 surveyed in our most recent study said they need to add new skills and knowledge every month; a notable increase from 2019, where just a third (33%) said digital marketing skills required updating every quarter.
To set up for future success, marketing teams need to be upskilled now in GenAI, both in terms of competence and confidence. I often say effective digital transformation is 90% people and 10% tech, and the ability for every brand’s human capital to leverage AI applications will help bring more successful campaigns to market, which in the long run will increase the marketing function’s role in overall business success.
The day when GenAI-fuelled marketing becomes the norm may not be here yet but it is now coming into increasingly sharp focus. When it comes to marketers, their digital skills will need to be finely tuned, able to move beyond isolated tactical executions to deliver more strategic solutions, with GenAI fast-contributing to individual professional development and business growth.
While GenAI offers many benefits to optimise and innovate marketing in ways we are only just starting to scratch the surface of, it’s important for organisations to remember that marketing will always need a human touch. The real winners of the AI revolution will be those who are trained up and clued in on how to harmoniously integrate GenAI and human capabilities across all strands of the marketing function for the coming year and beyond.
