There’s only one reason companies invest in marketing: to influence a sale. You can call it brand awareness. You can call it the customer experience. But in the end, all roads lead to revenue—or in wonkier terms, long-term profitable growth. Conventional wisdom holds that the better you are at personalizing your marketing outreach, the more successful you’ll be in converting a sale. The rise of AI-powered marketing automation and personalization tools is testament to the desire to get ever closer to capitalizing on customer behaviors, preferences and brand interactions. With such tools widely available and the cacophony around technology innovation such as generative AI, it’s worth asking the question: What’s possible, what’s practical and what’s prudent?
AI in marketing automation: A (very) brief history
AI-powered everything remains a fast-evolving field across industries and applications—marketing personalization included. Early marketing automation tools were rules-based, with predefined rules triggering automated actions. They didn’t learn on their own. They didn’t adapt without human intervention. Machine learning (ML) made that process more dynamic and responsive as algorithms were set in motion that could analyze mountains of data and identify patterns. Natural language processing, around since the 1960s (!), got a boost from ML and took it a step further, with AI-driven chatbots and voice-activated assistants that could understand and respond to people’s queries.
By the mid-20-teens RankBrain, Google’s ML-based search engine algorithm, had refined search results (no matter how weirdly our queries were worded). The company’s smart bidding tools for advertising made audience targeting infinitely more timely and precise. Of late, generative AI has rocked marketing’s world with its ability to produce content, images and code in seconds, all at the behest of a simple prompt. This is by no means a definitive history of AI in marketing automation, but you get the gist—innovation comes with the territory. The tools used to part people from their money get more sophisticated by the day.
The AI | marketing automation | marketing personalization convergence
The world has embraced AI-driven technologies, or at least resigned itself to them. Marketing automation and marketing personalization are so intertwined that we’ve come to expect a certain level of “me-ness” in every online interaction—so much so that we’re a bit irritated when we get fed information we view as irrelevant. If it doesn’t suit our interests, our style or our way of interacting with the world, we’re quick to delete, swipe, ghost and cancel. But it’s a fine line that marketers walk as they navigate just how personal personalization should be. It’s also a risky one, as governments pass legislation such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) that prohibit use of information that people haven’t explicitly approved for commercial use. Nonetheless, legal, ethical marketing personalization remains the Holy Grail of marketers looking for the sweet spot between individualized and invasive.
What’s possible: Marketing automation + personalization
AI-powered marketing automation tools and marketing personalization strategies can benefit marketers and their prospects alike. Marketing automation best practices are already well-established, and they’re taking shape for personalization tactics. Let’s look at the benefits of pairing the two from the “right” point of view.
- Right person – AI has been a boon to customer segmentation, enabling marketers to make ever finer distinctions by analyzing complex data sets to sort prospects by demographics, challenges, behaviors, preferences and other markers that identify them as a likely fit for the services or products on offer.
- Right content – Personalized emails, dynamic web personalization and individualized product recommendations are just a few of the ways AI has influenced marketers’ ability to display unique content to people based on their interactions, inclinations and inspirations.
- Right place and time – All the ads, social posts and assets in the world won’t make a difference if they’re delivered when and where no one’s looking for them. AI-infused marketing automation tools can track and analyze visitor behavior across channels to deliver precisely targeted content based on predetermined behavioral triggers.
- Right support – The customer experience extends well before and beyond the sale itself. Sophisticated AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants should be considered part of the B2B marketing automation and personalization mix, if for no other reason than their ability to engage customers who are reaching out, rather than those marketers are reaching for.
- Right strategy – AI is a powerful partner when it comes to data analysis, helping marketers make fine-tuned adjustments to their outreach based on real-time information. It’s a hallmark of predictive analytics, too. The speed with which AI can serve up accurate, actionable insights is a cornerstone of B2B marketing automation and personalization today.
What’s practical: How to use marketing automation tools to craft and scale the customer experience
There are myriad marketing automation platforms available today, and developers continue to innovate in terms of features, integrations and ease of use. All-in-one consumer and B2B marketing automation platforms streamline omnichannel campaign execution. Many integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems for centralized data management. Specialized tools automate specific channels or workflows, such as email or social media. Both typically incorporate testing options, analytics and reporting capabilities, integrate with third-party business and commerce apps, and strive for intuitive usage features such as pre-built workflows and drag-and-drop capabilities.
AI-infused marketing automation tools make scalable personalization possible—and practical, since manual intervention is significantly reduced—by leveraging advanced data analytics and ML algorithms for:
- Marketing campaigns catering to individuals, not amorphous groups
- Personalized content in emails and social media feeds that changes based on individual criteria
- Dynamic web personalization that serves up content specific to the site visitor
- Automated workflows with behavior-based action triggers
- Customer journeys grounded in reality, with touchpoints adjustable on the fly
- Integrated campaigns that flow effortlessly across multiple channels without being repetitive
Here’s what an automated, personalized interaction might look like across channels:
What’s prudent: The pitfalls of AI and personalization
People hunger for meaningful interactions and have an innate distaste for irrelevance. But when brands can reach you anywhere at any time, the wisest take a breath to consider whether they should. We’re already bombarded by marketing noise everywhere we turn—very little of it of consequence. Consider a bucolic neighborhood on a spring day. Birds are chirping. Trees sway in the breeze. Then a car radio lets slip a commercial. A home protection logo winks coyly from the window as home repair vans shout slogans from the curb. There are bumper stickers. Flags. Branded clothing, tires and travel mugs. And you haven’t even left the driveway. The whole world feels like that moment on Game of Thrones when Varys left the Starbucks cup on the feasting table. It’s. Literally. Everywhere. Out of time. Out of context. And people are out of patience.
Now imagine that scene devoid of anything that doesn’t truly matter to you—all that you see and hear speaks only to your joys, challenges and curiosities. Meaningful, yes, but perhaps a little… invasive? Creepy? Personalization has its place, but it comes with its own set of concerns. As marketers weigh how best to use AI-powered tools, some caveats should be considered:
- Data quality – Fragmented data, or data of questionable quality or completeness, can lead to strategies that are misguided from the outset. While smooth-running automation reduces manual intervention, it doesn’t—and shouldn’t—eliminate it altogether. Ensuring data is clean and accurate across platforms requires standardized formats, regular auditing and validation checks, and solid integration between data repositories.
- Lack of human touch – Automation is exactly right for some things—data analysis and purchase recommendations, for instance—but spectacularly wrong for others. Genuine interactions with real people are best for complex problem-solving, relationship building and navigating emotionally fraught situations, among other customer-facing activities.
- Ethical considerations – Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. There are laws in place to protect personal data, but marketers bear responsibility for respecting people’s privacy, too. Trust rests on transparent data practices, airtight security and strict legal compliance.
- Algorithm bias – Algorithms are only as good as the data they’re trained on. Particular attention must be paid to ensure misleading content, false claims and discriminatory outcomes aren’t promoted or perpetuated.
- Mistakes – AI isn’t infallible, and built-in doesn’t mean bulletproof. Generative AI, for instance, has been in the news for inappropriate conversations, hallucinations, intellectual property theft, inflammatory assumptions and flat-out wrong answers to seemingly simple questions or requests. Thoughtful oversight is essential.
- Complex implementation – Introducing a marketing automation platform into an ecosystem already rife with sales, marketing and financial tools can be a delicate proposition. A significant investment in technology, talent and training may be needed to integrate marketing automation smoothly and get the most out of the investment.
Advance your marketing automation and personalization strategies
Marketing automation has been a welcome innovation for harried B2B marketers looking for a better way to execute repetitive tasks. Streamlining processes for social media posts, email marketing campaigns, SMS and mobile push notifications, paid advertising and other day-to-day responsibilities frees time for research, ideation and strategy. AI and ML have ushered in the ability to identify patterns, spot trends and execute the predictive analytics at the foundation of marketing personalization. Individually, they are intriguing. Together, they are powerful.
Adopting AI-powered marketing automation tools and personalization strategies makes individualizing communications at scale possible, for more meaningful, persuasive customer encounters that improve engagement and accelerate sales. If your business is looking to advance its marketing automation and personalization strategies, Elevation’s team offers the expertise and experience necessary for success. Connect with us for a tailored, results-driven approach.
