By Denise Persson, Chief Marketing Officer, Snowflake
Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionised the world of marketing, and now, generative AI promises to disrupt it further. While conversations around generative AI naturally veer towards productivity, another huge benefit tends to be overlooked: creativity. The best marketing campaigns combine data insights and creativity, and that’s where one of the many generative AI opportunities is for marketers.
According to Gartner, 63% of marketing leaders plan on investing in generative AI in the next 24 months. But this doesn’t mean that marketers have to upend the way they work and focus all of their efforts on the technology. AI should enhance the work marketers have already put in. In particular, generative AI holds the potential to revolutionise four specific areas: creativity, predictive analytics, manual processes and personalisation.
Kickstarting creativity
The role of generative AI will be crucial in the creative process, allowing teams to pressure-test ideas along the way. That doesn’t mean AI will do it all; instead, it will augment the way marketers have always worked. As any marketer knows, creativity thrives when people come together.
Once a team has an idea for a campaign, for example, generative AI can be used to build on this idea by suggesting punchier headlines that will drive online engagement or resonate further with the target audience. Teams can iterate different versions of an idea until a new campaign is born while maintaining the human touch throughout the process. As the technology evolves, generative AI will have a place at the table within everything from content creation to creative design.
Transformation predictive analytics
AI and machine learning (ML) are already allowing marketing teams to predict demand in different territories months in advance, helping business leaders adjust marketing investments to the right level. Generative AI will transform this process, acting as a ‘co-pilot’ for marketing teams to make the technology more intuitive to use. This will accelerate the use of predictive analytics initiatives in many organisations, offering insights into everything from emerging opportunities to how to optimise marketing budgets.
Speeding up processes
Predictive analytics powered by generative AI will help teams identify emerging opportunities, optimise marketing budgets, and make informed decisions about future campaigns. The ease of use of generative AI offers the potential to accelerate time-intensive tasks, such as identifying a list of influencers for an upcoming campaign.
With generative AI, the list can be pulled together in seconds and then reviewed – saving marketing teams several hours of their time which can be used to focus on creative, higher-impact tasks. In the future, every marketer will be supported by generative AI, fed with proprietary data, offering answers to any question in real-time.
Automating personalisation
Generative AI will enable marketers to deliver personalised campaigns at a previously unimaginable scale and speed. Campaigns can be tailored to specific audiences using data from organisations’ customer relationship management (CRM) systems. With Document AI – where ML systems ‘read’ documents – teams can even use unstructured data such as emails from prospects to train personalisation models.
Well-trained generative AI tools will be able to personalise creative assets such as reports or webinars by creating effective, audience-specific landing pages, emails and social posts to hook a specific audience, with A/B testing helping marketing teams to focus on what works.
The future lies in generative AI
Generative AI promises marketers many benefits, but it should be used with care, especially when it comes to ethics, copyright and privacy. Looking to the future, marketers should ensure guardrails are established, which will require working closely with cross-functional teams of security and compliance professionals, data scientists, lawyers and marketers.
We are on the threshold of enormous change in marketing, sparked by generative AI, with some of the innovations in the coming years hard to even imagine at this point. But this technology will boost human creativity and productivity, in a shift that will change marketing for the better.
The potential is huge, and we are only at the beginning of this journey.
