How Should Marketers Get Started with Artificial Intelligence?

Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared in the Answering AI editorial section of our newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter to get exclusive insights and resources twice weekly (usually Tuesday/Thursday), as well as select promotions.

Today’s Question: How Should Marketers Get Started with Artificial Intelligence?

The short answer is quick-win pilot projects with narrowly defined use cases and high probabilities of success. That’s how you build executive support for the longer term vision and transformation.

From audience targeting, to content strategy, to SEO, media buying, email writing, and predicting conversions and churn, hundreds of activities marketers perform every day will be intelligently automated to some degree in the near future.

When piloting artificial intelligence in your organization, you want to focus on one use case at a time, since AI is built to do very specific tasks. The key is thinking about everything your team does regularly, and then considering two primary factors:

1) The value to intelligently automate all or portions of that activity, with value being defined by potential time and money saved, and the increased probability of achieving business goals.

2) The ability to intelligently automate the activity, based on existing AI tech, or solutions that could be built with the right resources.

Keep in mind, a little bit of AI can go a long way to reducing costs and driving revenue when you have the right data and the right use case. You don’t necessarily need to go from all-manual to fully autonomous in order to see massive returns.

As my friend Christopher S. Penn says in his new book, AI For Marketers (2nd Edition), you just need faster, better, cheaper, and that’s what AI delivers.

Until next time, stay curious and explore AI!

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