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IIM Calcutta and TalentSprint’s AI-Powered Marketing Programme alumni shared how the programme equips them with capabilities. How did the programme impact their careers? Why do professionals trust this programme? And much more.
If we asked a marketer some years back whether artificial intelligence (AI) would ever be relevant for his/her job, chances are we would have got either a confused look or a rolled eyebrow. After all, how can the two extremes of technology and creativity ever find a sweet spot? But it turns out that artificial intelligence (AI) is as relevant and valuable for marketers as all the creative juices, think-tanks, and approaches they have been using all this time.
What artificial intelligence (AI) brings to the marketing table?
It begins by leveraging data and machine learning for crafting better campaigns or accomplishing a brand’s goals. Then, it can be directed towards market research, data science, and real-time campaign analysis. There are many facets where AI brings precision, confidence, and customer-intimacy for marketers, including
- Targeting, personalisation, and programmatic advertising
- Better sales decisions through data-driven insights
- Analysis of complex data sets – faster than a human can
- A swifter launch of more effective campaigns with higher ROI at a lower cost
- Ability to break down complex data sets
- Ability to correlate data with other information
- Campaign integration and effectiveness
- Better customer segmentation and personalization
- Improved depth of marketing data
- Enhanced customer experience
- Dynamic product recommendations
- Dynamic pricing
- Content analysis and improvement
- Marketing performance analysis
As a marketer, at some time, you must have been involved in the design of promotions. Here AI can help understand which customers behave differently and which promotions would work well for which type. This helps to make better budgeting decisions because now there is a good peek into ROI.
Getting to the right customer and handling world-class experiential marketing are two significant areas where AI strengthens a marketer. Also, marketers are starting to explore capabilities to get equipped in prescriptive analytics, data interpretation, modelling for recommendations, integration of customer experience with personalised approaches, content syndication, behaviour prediction, and a lot more. Marketers can use insights from available data, and they can understand how customers perceive their brands. This can create tailor-made communication, test strategies over time, and correct mistakes before it is too late. As to testing, the multi-variant flavour of AI gets an edge over traditional A-B Testing. AI’s most significant value comes from its lack of subjectivity. All the insights are coming from data – which has come from customers and real scenarios.
The new tools and strengths are helping AI to go a step ahead from being predictive to being prescriptive. Constructing good problem statements helps. Marketers can be better equipped when they have clarity on what they want from AI, creating better models than before.
Lead generation, e-commerce, demand forecasting, sentiment analysis, and hyper-personalization are other areas where AI models’ accuracy and speed are becoming hugely relevant.
There is a need for marketers, however, to know how AI functions.
How to be an early mover?
Highly experienced marketers who have benefited from IIM Calcutta and TalentSprint’s AI-Powered Marketing Programme learned how to exploit customer datasets using AI and build powerful insights. So how did the programme equip them with capabilities? How did the programme impact their careers? Why do professionals trust this programme?
All this and more were revealed in a recent webinar by the alumni Ravesha Bakshi, Sr. Marketing Manager, Global Solutions and Innovation, Hitachi Consulting, Ronojoy Bhuyan, Product Specialist, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank and Sneha Mayekar, Former marketer with leading pharmaceutical companies (Bayer, Glenmark and German Remedies). Excerpts.
AI is a significant strength in the current paradigm of marketing. But mastering these capabilities is essential. Mastering AI from the right platform reduces time and effort. It brings a marketer closer to actual edge-building capabilities.
IIM Calcutta and TalentSprint’s AI-Powered Marketing programme aims at helping current and aspiring CXOs, business heads, and marketing professionals build such capabilities and leverage the power of AI in making data-driven marketing decisions.
An expanding intersection
According to a recent Dun & Bradstreet’s survey, three out of four surveyed marketers are currently leveraging AI to manage their database so that they can automate processes and improve their decision-making and customer interaction. In fact, as per the 2021 State of Marketing AI Report (by Drift and Marketing AI Institute), forward-thinking organizations and marketers are using AI to accelerate revenue and reduce costs. As a result, companies are building sustainable competitive advantages for their products and their people. Almost 52% found that AI is very important to the success of their marketing over the next 12 months. About 41% of marketers are achieving revenue acceleration with AI today. And 56% believe that AI will create more marketing jobs than it eliminates over the next decade, while 80% look forward to intelligently automating more than a quarter of their marketing tasks in the next five years.
The ambitions are morphing into numbers and growth too. AI in the marketing market (according to MarketsandMarkets) is likely to reach $40.09 Billion by 2025. This is based on the adoption of customer-centric marketing strategies, an increase in demand for virtual assistants, and increased use of social media for advertising.
With AI, marketers can now identify future customers, predict upsell opportunities, and solve real-world marketing challenges. And to do that, they need to get ready—the intelligent way.
