artificial intelligence in marketing

In the nearly 50 years since email was invented, people have spent a great deal of time and energy perfecting the ways they send messages to ensure a desired outcome. Maybe the outcome is simply an open. In other cases, it’s a click or a reply.  In every case, though, people have likely completed a number of small experiments until they get the formula that works well enough. Include the recipient’s first name in the subject line, check. Use personable, funny language to grab the recipient’s attention, check. Offer to follow up in a few days, check. Sound familiar? The problem with this approach is, when we’re sending nearly 300 billion emails per day and have more riding on email than ever before, we need to be running far more experiments.  We need to be perfecting each facet of email—or coming close to perfection, at least—to really harness the power of email to drive brand recognition, audience growth, and revenue.  The problem is, there are just too many variables involved for a human to make these perfect decisions themselves. A machine, however, can accomplish this.

How often do you listen to your intuition when making a decision? That “gut feeling” is an essential human function. It’s the sensation from deep within our lizard brains that tells us something feels off, and we might be in danger. It’s helpful at worst, and life-saving at best.  But when it comes to marketing? Your gut feeling is probably wrong.

At the inaugural Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference (MAICON), hundreds of marketers gathered to truly understand AI and learn how to educate their teams, earn executive support, pilot AI projects, and develop a strategy for successfully scaling AI in their organizations.  These 300+ marketers from 12 countries and 28 states learned, networked, and discussed the possibilities AI can bring to their marketing programs. 

Historically, content marketing is a labor-intensive part of any marketer’s job. Content strategy alone is a massive undertaking, with layers of research, planning, and execution that represent tons of hours. Even once you dive into actual writing and promotion of content, you’re still only scratching the surface of all that’s required for successful content marketing. But AI can help make content marketing more profitable by driving costs down and improving performance. Need proof?

TED talks are a great place for AI insights and inspiration, as they feature people with a range of AI backgrounds and experiences. At the time of this writing, a search for “artificial intelligence” on the TED talks website turns up 311 results. In case you don’t have the time to watch them all, we compiled a list of our favorites.

“Artificial intelligence” is at peak buzzword status. As marketers, we see it everywhere: Affixed to the claims of the latest marketing tech, alongside warnings that it will eradicate jobs like content production, and peppered into predictions of coming trends. Many marketers are used to being bombarded with hype about “the next big thing.” In this case, they either become numb to mention of AI because it’s usually not actionable or approachable, or they’re disillusioned because it’s just a catchy term for tools that aren’t really AI.