Over the last few years, we’ve entered a new wave of AI-enabled marketing capabilities. What were easy-to-implement point solutions for generating headlines, prioritizing advertisement keywords, or automating A-Z testing are now mainstream. With generative AI solutions such as ChatGPT becoming available, marketers must consider a new era of digital transformation impacting their branding, lead gen, and other digital marketing efforts.

Instead of marketers asking how to use an AI or ML to do a task, they need to ask a different question.

Here’s the question I would ask. “Given a set of AI capabilities, what workstream should marketers create to experiment and develop new competitive capabilities?”

In other words, marketers should look beyond plugging in AI and ML capabilities to make a campaign more scalable and efficient. Now is the time to reverse the thinking of how marketers design campaigns, starting with AI and ML data-driven creative abilities and then building marketing experiments around them.

AI transforms marketing well beyond automation and ML

I see AI marketing capabilities as building blocks. Today, there’s an opportunity to string them together into a differentiating capability. Over the next decade, AI marketing platforms will transform the marketing department’s role, capabilities, and operations.

Here’s an overly simplified view of how tech, experiences, data, and now AI are transforming marketing.

• 1990s – Traditional marketing enabled by technology
• 2000s – Digital marketing becomes a new media channel to reach customers
• 2010s – Omnichannel experiences and marketing automation capabilities become mainstream
• 2020s – AI and ML transform marketing

The 1990s-2010s saw an expansion of marketing’s charter to digital channels, and the 2000-2010s is when tech, data, analytics, and operation provided scalability and efficiencies.

AI is a game changer in marketing.

Marketing’s differentiation beyond the table stakes of technical, analytics, and operational capabilities comes down to creativity. Now, AI is expanding and democratizing the creativity skill set, creating an opportunity for a new way for smaller companies to compete with larger brands or, perhaps, larger brands decimating smaller competitors. Time will tell.

Three examples of AI’s transformational impacts

I reached out to my network to find easy ways to use AI and ML in content marketing, lead generation, and data-driven sales for SMBs.

When smaller businesses can leverage a technical capability, it’s often an indicator of mainstream adoption and an early indicator of transformational opportunities. I believe the same is true for AI, and here are three examples of where AI is driving transformation in marketing and sales:

1. From content production to personalized journeys via AI and ML – “AI is emerging as a go-to tool for content marketing and helps all types of content, like copywriting support, video production, and graphic generation, to become more efficient,” says Carlos Meza, CEO & president of Crowd Content. “AI & ML also empower the understanding of customers’ online behavior, analyzing tons of data points and providing recommendations on improving the customer journey.”
2. From SEO keywords to AI writing assistants  – “Gradually introduce AI and ML-driven tools into your content mix, from leading SEO and content gap analysis tool through OpenAI and GPT-3 generators,” says Mario Peshev, CEO, DevriX. “Don’t expect to match human-level content quality yet, but AI content can still populate metadata, excerpts, or additional paragraphs for ongoing updates without a hard mental toll on your writing and editorial staff.”
3. From prioritizing sales leads to AI virtual sales coaches – “The applications for AI in sales have only begun to scratch the surface. In the coming years, we’ll see new use cases—starting with virtual training and coaching,” says Andre Black, CPO at Allego. “Coaching is in demand, but few sales managers have time for it with large, dispersed teams. As a solution, more sales teams will use AI-powered virtual actors to simulate live conversations for practice and feedback in 2023.”

The speed of how fast AI is going from point solution to value differentiator in marketing is astounding. It reminds me of Ferris Bueller’s famous quote, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Marketers, it’s time to do more than look around.