How CMOs Can Innovate with Marketing AI Today

The CMO of 2022 is in trouble. Largely viewed by the C-suite as lacking tech savvy, CMOs are losing their seat at the leadership table. 

CMOs were ranked second-to-last among the C-suite for their tech knowledge, and CEOs identified CIOs and CTOs as twice as likely to play a crucial role over the next two years when compared to CMOs.

The digital divide doesn’t stop there; CMOs themselves may be in denial about their shrinking role. Just 38% of marketing leaders told Gartner they wished to increase their digital know-how over branding and messaging. While branding and messaging are important, CMOs need stronger alignment with revenue opportunities to ensure marketing is contributing to the bottom line.

One powerful way for CMOs to get their seat back at the leadership table is to come armed with data-driven insights from innovation tools such as artificial intelligence. 

Why marketing AI makes sense now

Gartner revealed that while 2022 marketing budgets are still below pre-pandemic budgets, they did increase from 2021. So while CMOs may be sidelined, they’re still on the field. There’s a golden opportunity at play to put cutting-edge technology such as AI to use for marketing. 

AI is increasingly seen by CEOs as critical to digital transformation, and its top use cases are in marketing. AI technologies, such as chatbots, voice interfaces, and NLP (natural language processing), are championed by 82% of CEOs at companies that outperform their peers.

AI is still in its early stages, but if you’re not already using it, you’re late to the game. Innovative CMOs know that now’s the time to make an impact with AI tools and prove to the C-suite that they’re a data-driven marketing leader. 

Here are some of the ways forward-thinking marketers at brands such as Michaels, Vanguard and Marks & Spencer are using AI today to drive incremental revenue via advertising, email, social media, content marketing, and customer experience.

Marketing AI for advertising

When leveraged in advertising efforts, AI can enable your marketing team to quickly and effectively analyze advertising performance, spend, and engagement data at scale. This means your team gains faster and deeper insights to identify what’s working, and what’s not. 

For example, marketing AI tools can:

• Predict which ads are getting engagement before you launch.
• Write ad copy and copy variations in seconds.
• Scale creative across platforms.

Persado customer, arts & crafts retailer Michaels, applied the principles above to drive results for SMS and email campaigns. By leveraging Persado’s Motivation AI platform to predict and generate hyper-personalized language, Michaels increased engagement and loyalty by boosting CTRs by 41% with SMS campaigns and 25% with email campaigns.

Marketing AI for email

What subject lines work best? Who should we send to and when? AI removes the head-scratching and creates precise, high-impact email campaigns.

With AI for email, you can:

• Write email subject lines that have proven to increase open rates.
• Write portions of emails or entire emails automatically.
• Personalize email content for individual prospects or customers.
• Personalize email send times to individual prospects or customers.

Using Persado’s AI platform, clothing and food retailer Marks & Spencer supercharged their email campaigns with personalized language. Persado’s Motivation AI platform uncovered better performing content through language experimentation and M&S used those insights to personalize email copy and subject lines. The result was a rise in conversion rates by 34%.

Marketing AI for social media

AI is used by brands to create social media content and get consumers to engage with it. Social media success depends on authentic human engagement from individuals and brands so the best AI merges machine learning and human creativity. AI just makes the process easier and more intelligent.

By using AI social media tools, you can:

• Determine which posts and types of content work best.
• Develop the right messaging and creative for each platform and user.
• Automatically create social posts and ads.
• Measure brand sentiment, consumer sentiment, and market trends.

Investment management firm Vanguard Institutional is a classic case of using AI to enhance its social media marketing. With Persado’s Motivation AI, Vanguard was able to position messaging on LinkedIn in a more targeted way while staying compliant, boosting highly-targeted B2B conversions on LinkedIn by 16%.

Marketing AI for content marketing

AI-powered language is one of the top use cases for AI. Language AI not only understands natural language in written, video, and audio form, it can also write and speak, opening up AI use cases for content marketers to:

• Personalize the right language to the right users in every marketing message.
• Suggest content topics.
• Align content with user intent.

Middle East banking group, Emirates NBD, used Persado AI to analyze the language and emotions that motivated customers and then generated predictive content for Emirates. The results? Emirates Facebook ad content increase leads by 171% and engagement by 133% with AI and predictive content.

Marketing AI for customer experience

Consumers expect frictionless experiences with brands. It’s impossible to keep up, regardless of your headcount, without technology that can deliver personalization at scale. With AI, brands have the ability to tailor messaging and offers to each and every customer.

Using AI, you can:

• Answer questions and solicit feedback.
• Personalize messaging and offers.
• Direct customers to relevant resources.
• Unify customer data for richer behavioral profiles.

Colombian digital food delivery service, Rappi, was under pressure to connect with consumers on the right channels and meet ambitious customer acquisition goals. They saw a problem in the market with their customers needing to earn credit. So, they stepped up to the plate. With the help of Persado, Rappi introduced RappiPay, a new financial services offering for Rappi’s customers, and a new credit card (RappiCard). With an eye on customer experience fundamentals, Persado’s AI platform tested messaging on various channels with Rappi’s data. Persado used these data insights to create language profiles for RappiPay’s customers, targeting the right consumers at the right time. Persado then generated messages – with clean visuals, clear instructions, and the right emotions to motivate customers – that resulted in a 179% uplift in new card applications.

A chance for CMOs to re-establish themselves

These are just a few examples of the AI use cases CMOs are jumping on today to make a quick impact. More broadly, CMOs are in a position to reinvent what it means to be a marketer. You don’t have to become a machine learning or data science expert to take advantage of what AI enables. You simply need to understand what’s possible with smarter technologies, apply them, and keep learning.

Learn more about the promise of AI for marketing and how you can adopt it using a 10-step playbook in AI for CMOs: The Real-World Playbook for Digital Transformation – a collaboration between MAII and Persado.

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