According to a new report from the CMO Council: CMOs' Intentions for 2024In 2024, C-suite executives and boards of directors expect more than just operational efficiency and cost savings. Here are their top four expectations for marketing:
- Sales growth rate (54%)
- Operational efficiency and cost savings (51%)
- Efficiency through AI (41%)
- Creating brand and customer value (38%)
The result is highly personalized engagement that leads to loyal, high-value customers. Guess what technology helps make this happen? Generative AI.
Increasing revenue is the top priority
We all know that marketing should have a seat at the C-suite, but to do so, they need to demonstrate how they impact revenue growth. Some marketers (65% according to the survey) believe that marketing should own and optimize their company's revenue generation engine.
It makes sense. Marketing is your first line of defense when it comes to attracting and acquiring new customers. Marketing plays a vital role in supporting sales efforts and customer success through lead and demand generation, account-based marketing, content development, and other marketing activities. But if this is true and necessary, why are marketing budgets continually being cut?Gartner Report What if your marketing budget has dwindled to 7.7% of your company’s total revenue and resources are being cut?
Creating a well-tuned marketing engine is difficult if you can't deploy the marketing technology needed to deliver these highly personalized experiences, or if the customer data you need is scattered across siloed teams and systems.
A CMO Council survey found that 62% of marketers say their lead generation and engagement strategies aren't working as expected, and 70% say they lack confidence in their sales and marketing models. Some of these challenges are technology-related, but not all. Getting the relationships right between teams is crucial, and marketing needs to build them if it wants to lead the way.
Could generative AI be our savior?
It's impossible to talk about marketing today without talking about AI. No one would allow that. AI, specifically generative AI, has arrived to save marketing teams. In the survey, 57% of marketers said generative AI tools, applications, and analytics will bring them the most value and ROI in 2024. This is followed by customer data platforms and insights (49%), productivity, process, and workflow (32%), and customer journey analytics (27%).
But what's interesting is that these marketers believe the majority of the value they get from generative AI will come from content creation and optimization, followed by productivity and efficiency. Personalization comes in third, and then predictive analytics. The report states:
When it comes to content, CMOs expect gen AI to help brands become more skilled and adaptive in connecting and engaging more individually across cultures, borders, boundaries, shopper graphic, psychographic, and localized marketing partner and channel requirements.
Gen AI can also minimize human error, inaccuracies, missteps, blunders, confusion, and errors in images, videos, and text in marketing communications.
There is value in leveraging generative AI for content, and most businesses have experience using the technology for content creation, but are there better ways to use it that can help marketers in more meaningful ways?
Look at the tools The sales team Tools that include generative AI. Tools like Salesloft, Outreach, and 6sense provide sales teams with detailed insights into their customers through tools that analyze account data and provide meeting summaries and insights. Of course, they also help with content creation, but the most important thing to me is the ability to find those insights much faster through prompts.
Marketers also need these capabilities in their own tools, but I have yet to see them (please correct me if I'm wrong). Rather than relying on pre-built reports, why not let marketers ask questions and let AI do the heavy lifting of analyzing and putting it all together, and then let marketers choose which insights to act on and create the framework for the campaign that makes it happen? There's content creation, of course, but it's only part of what happens, and it's not the first thing.
For example, Box CEO Aaron Levie recently told Phil Wainwright: Generative AI to help businesses like him:
We have one of the largest repositories of unstructured data and content in the world, and AI is now the first breakthrough technology that can literally see, read, hear, observe, understand, process and question any piece of information. So for us, this is an incredible technology bonanza, and it allows us to provide so much more value to our customers than we ever could before. And I mean, you could literally name another software company and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find one that's benefited from this technology as much as Box has.
please think about it What is Tribble doing with generative AI?: Create RFP responses through a chat interface within the tools your sales teams use every day. Why should marketers have to jump between multiple tools to find information, analyze campaigns, define segments, create new content, and build marketing campaigns?
The content stack is right To deliver a personalized experience, these capabilities need to be brought together in a single interface. This vision needs to be applied broadly to marketing, where marketers can drive the chat interface.
My take
At the beginning of this article, we talked about how marketers are expected to drive revenue growth and operational efficiency, and how many marketers see AI as the answer to everything they need to do. But marketing is looking at AI for the wrong reasons. If the main benefit marketing gets from generative AI is content development, then marketers are missing out on a huge opportunity. But that's not necessarily their fault.
Marketing technology vendors that are implementing generative AI are pushing it for content creation. As vendors start to leverage it more effectively in their tools, marketers may see real value from generative AI. So, marketing technology vendors, we're waiting.
