Align your platform, data, and processes

Many companies are considering and integrating AI into their marketing strategies and overall business functions. While every organization is unique, the primary goal of integration is to increase efficiency, gather valuable insights, and improve marketing results with less effort.

In this article, the second in the series, we outline important steps and factors to consider when choosing the right AI solution for your marketing ecosystem. Building on our previous article about setting the right goals for AI integration, this article emphasizes the importance of choosing AI tools that are tailored to your specific marketing environment and help you achieve your desired results. Masu.

Choosing the right AI platform

First, make sure you choose the right tool for the job. While a few platforms are getting a lot of attention in AI, thousands of others can provide writing assistance, content and image generation, predictive analytics, and more.

Based on your goals, create a short list of some of the biggest challenges that AI can help your team solve. Here are some ideas:

• You can more easily spell check your writing and correct errors.
• Turn meeting minutes into project summaries and action items for marketing campaigns.
• Generate campaign concept ideas faster.
• Analyze datasets quickly using natural language prompts.
• Create first drafts of marketing content such as blogs, emails, and brochure copy.
• Convert a single image into multiple versions of multiple channels, all with different size requirements.
• Generate personalized product images.
• Predict customer churn using predictive analytics.
• Route customers to different automated journeys depending on their situation. Engagement and behavior.

Based on the example above, you can use several types of AI tools depending on the challenge you choose to focus on. For example, a tool like Grammarly might be great to employ as a general spell-checking and writing tool, but you'll need to use another tool to analyze your dataset. However, understanding customer churn and directing them to the appropriate automated journeys requires another service.

Once you've identified and prioritized the areas of marketing where AI would be most useful, it's time to take a closer look at the platform. Consider the following criteria:

• Scalability, or how well you can support your organization beyond initial proof of concept and testing.
• Integration with your existing martech stack minimizes efficiency losses due to switching between applications.
• User-friendliness, or how well your current team and any new team members joining in the future can utilize it in their daily work.
• Privacy and security, and the safety of feeding your company's data to the tool's machine learning models and other AI processors.
• Compare the total cost of ownership, or how much money you save or profit from using the product, to the cost of implementation and maintenance over time.

Existing products may not meet your use case, security, or other marketing or technical requirements. Therefore, the choice between building a custom solution or purchasing an off-the-shelf solution can be complex and unique for each company.

Custom-built platforms can provide customized functionality and tighter control over data privacy. In contrast, pre-packaged solutions can provide faster time-to-value and ease of implementation due to existing API connectors. However, proprietary systems can lead to higher long-term costs and less influence over product development.

Let's dig deeper: How to decide which generative AI tools are right for your organization

Organize your data (lake) house

When introducing AI into business settings, “garbage in, garbage out” is important. Even intelligent systems are useless without quality data to learn and adapt. Therefore, AI requires data to work effectively, and the health of data storage platforms such as data warehouses and lakes has a significant impact on outcomes.

It's also important to ensure that the data you need can be easily accessed and shared across systems while protecting consumer privacy and sensitive business information. As a result, general-purpose AI solutions may not be as good a fit for your business as solutions tailored for enterprises or custom applications developed with these factors in mind. Given the increased regulatory focus on data processing practices, it is important to prioritize practices and business security considerations in your data strategy.

Let's dig deeper: How to ensure your data is AI-ready

Understand and map process changes

Integrating AI into MOps workflows requires a clear understanding of your current processes and identifying where changes can have the greatest impact. A good starting point is to map the current state against the desired future state, including AI.

Once you start doing this, you'll see room for improvement in the following ways:

• Bottlenecks that can be alleviated through increased automation.
• An area that lacks sufficient resources to perform the required work.
• Instances where generative AI tools can do more work with fewer resources.
• Opportunities to automate reporting and analysis tasks that help marketing teams get better recommendations.

Guide your team through the transition using an interactive process that uses testing and proofs of concept to learn and gather feedback from all stakeholders. Adopting such an approach will help you avoid making large-scale, untested changes that may not be successful, and will ensure that the people needed to support the long-term implementation of these changes resistance to change can be minimized.

Incorporating AI into your marketing efforts involves more than just technology selection. That includes preparing your company's data infrastructure, understanding process changes, and getting your team ready for the transition. This approach uses AI to revolutionize his MOps and enhance ROI and customer interactions.

In the next segment of this series, we'll look at how these components come together to implement AI into your marketing strategies and projects.