Rohit Prabhakar

I build agentic revenue systems for Fortune 50 companies

AI Impact on Digital Marketing Strategies

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The world of digital marketing is rapidly evolving, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly important role. AI technology has the potential to revolutionize how brands engage with their customers, predict customer behaviors and preferences and optimize content delivery. In this blog post, we’ll look at how AI is transforming digital marketing and discuss the opportunities it presents for businesses in today’s world. Yes it will mature more in coming months and years but here are the areas where it is already making impact!

Processes Automation

One of the most important ways in which AI is impacting digital marketing is its ability to automate processes related to personalization, targeting, and segmentation. By leveraging machine learning algorithms, marketers can identify patterns in customer behavior data more quickly and accurately than ever before. This means that marketers can create highly customized campaigns that are tailored to each individual customer’s needs and preferences.

Customer Insights

AI also has the potential to change how marketers measure success by offering insights into customer behavior that may not have been visible before. By analyzing large amounts of data generated by customers’ interactions with a brand or product, marketers can gain a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t work within their marketing strategy. This allows them to adjust their campaigns accordingly and optimize future efforts for maximum ROI.

Content Creation Assistance

Finally, AI technology has opened up new possibilities for content creation. For example, natural language processing (NLP) can help target a wide variety of audiences by using language models to provide personalized experiences across multiple channels and platforms such as voice assistants or chatbots. As AI continues to evolve, these applications will become even more sophisticated in the near future – offering brands the possibility of creating truly engaging experiences for their customers. Yes you are right ChatGPT is an amazing contender in the category. Have you tried it? What are your thoughts?

In case you need to understand the difference between AI, ML and Deep Learning. Here is an article you will like to read quickly.

In conclusion, AI is revolutionizing digital marketing strategies in numerous powerful ways. Through automation processes such as personalization and segmentation, improved measurement capabilities for campaigns, as well as creative opportunities for content creation- businesses are now able to access more actionable insights than ever before- enabling them to be more effective at reaching their customers on a deeper level.

Yes this article is partially written by AI!

Innovative B2B Marketing Strategies for 2022

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Many businesses experienced 2021 as a year of great uncertainty and volatility. These situations were fueled by epidemic situations and continued to affect the ways businesses operate globally. Whereas such uncertainties always pose challenges, they also lead to inevitable innovations. Here on this topic, we are excited to share with readers what the future holds with B2B marketing strategies. As you think about your plans for the upcoming years, consider these innovative B2B marketing strategies.

Digital Transitions 

The epidemics have changed the way a business interacts with its customers. The remote interactions have taken the place of in-person interactions. Therefore, the customers now like dealing with a business at the comfort of their home throughout their entire purchase journey. To fulfill this requirement, they request a high-quality digital experience.

  • Now 90% of B2B customers start their purchase journey by searching for a provider online.
  • Customers are already done with 50% of their purchase process before making their final selection for a potential provider.
  • 73% of the customers are millennial, and about a third of them are the sole decision-makers.

The concept has turned from digital marketing to market in the digital world. If your business has not yet realized your customer’s journey in the complete online manner or you haven’t adopted a digitalized marketing strategy, don’t be late anymore. Doing so is now too vital to ensure your business meets all the expectations of your B2B buyers and your service remains relevant in the digital market world.

The Opportunities

  • Upgrade your business website to meet customers’ expectations with their online journey. The website works as the most prominent tool for any business sale promotion. It is the biggest marketing asset in the current market that works over the internet mostly.
  • Build your website for optimum mobile experience as Google now ranks that website on the top mobile-friendly in the SERPs. Thus, most customers are online for their purchase needs using their mobiles only. So you have to ensure they have the best online experience when they visit your website.
  • Explore and refine digital event opportunities because they will not get off the market anytime soon. There are also hybrid events on the rise that facilitate both in-person and digital options together. 

Customer-Centric Content Prioritization

When you create content that assists your B2B customers in making decisions, you showcase your expertise and values. This shift towards a digital purchase journey makes customer-centric digital content more crucial to ascertain business growth. 

  • 41% of the customers read certain content first before contacting a business.
  • About 70% of customers search and read content directly from a business website.
  • 77% of B2B businesses follow a Customer-Centric Content marketing strategy.
Innovative Marketing Strategies

The customers now prefer to seek more and more content online. If your business fails to showcase its expertise with content marketing strategy, you will miss a grave business growth opportunity. Moreover, strategic and relevant content helps your customers understand that you understand and care about their needs at each step of their purchase journey.

The Opportunities

  • By conducting a content audit, you will understand what sorts of customer needs are being encountered with your current content and where you can make modifications.
  • Make content targeting each step of the purchase journey. Therefore, consider hitting the correct range of content to meet customers’ expectations anywhere in their purchase process.
  • Invest in search engine optimization and marketing to confirm your customers find your content online and make connections with you through it. 

 Ai-Enabled Marketing

Automated B2B marketing initiatives based on AI and machine learning is already benefiting marketers with more effective and faster insights and analytics. AI can assist with everything from targeting the right audience to segmentation, personalization, lead scoring, and content marketing insights.

  • 2/3 of the B2B marketers have been taking steps to evaluate and implement AI for marketing and sales initiatives.
  • AI and machine learning are here to generate more than $1.4 trillion in value by helping marketers solve marketing and sale concerns over the coming three years.
  • The implementation of AI by marketers soared between 2018 to 2020. It took a jump from 29% to 84% within these two years.

Corporate data and analytics have become gravely sophisticated, and they are converging with AI to unlock new customer insights so marketers can drive new marketing opportunities.

The Opportunities

  • Leverage AI’s predictive capabilities for analytics. The use of website cookies to track user activities has now become a customer privacy concern. New regulations resist you from doing so. AI can come in handy to fill that void by utilizing predictive analytics to tell marketers what customers are doing online.
  • AI content strategy tools offer a plethora of customer intent data. It helps target the right audience looking for your products in the market.
  • Custom-made campaigns based on AI can help reach people who conduct specific keyword searches when visiting a website. Therefore, this data can help you target potential customers using custom-made marketing campaigns.

Final Takeaway

The coming time is going to be exciting for innovative B2B marketing strategies. The marketing world is becoming increasingly digital. Also, it’s turning personal too. Hence, AI-driven initiatives provide more meaningful insights and help marketers create more effective and targeted campaigns and strategies. The key lies in figuring out how we can integrate these modern-day trends to lead us to our desired enterprise goals.

Top 5 Benefits of Implementing Marketing Technology in Your Business Strategy

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Technology is moving faster than ever before and with this customer’s expectations are getting higher too. MarTech marketing technology is becoming key for organizations to meet and exceed customer expectations. MarTech helps organizations fill the digital gap created due to the rapid advancement in technology and evolving consumer behavior. The advancement in artificial intelligence, analytics, and automation helps marketers catch up with recent market trends and speed up the organization’s changes. This blog will discuss the top five benefits of implementing MarTech in your business strategy.

Data unlocking with analytics tools

In this fast-changing digital world, data is the key to sustainable growth for a business. With access to more data than ever before, marketers now can unlock data that most well-funded organizations just a few years ago. The data has now become the resource that needs analysis and refinement to deliver the best for a business. This is why the analytics industry is estimated to grow 10-15 % by 2022.

Analytics tools have now become necessary for companies to add in their marketing technology to utilize data fully. With this, an organization can increase the ROI and effectiveness of its marketing strategy. Due to this, companies are now bringing analytics into the center of the decision-making process to remove any bias and become data-driven to serve their customers better. Change in an organizational culture where data can be utilized to improve and optimize social media marketing, SEO, PPC, and email personalization.

Marketing automation for increasing efficiency

Brands need to maintain their strong presence in consumers’ minds to influence purchasing decisions. But due to so much noise in the digital world, maintaining a strong presence now becomes a challenging task for marketers.Automating the marketing efforts has become important for brands to scale up their efforts and engage consumers in this digital world. Move forward from one size fits all marketing policy to cut through the digital noise. Customers are moving away from products and ads that they don’t find interesting or improve their lives. Automating the market processes allows marketers to connect with consumers in a more personalized way that offers real value.

Marketing automation is improving the productivity of the business by 15-20 percent. Marketing automation is a critical component that helps in increasing and scaling the scope of campaigns. The number of people doesn’t limit a marketing campaign’s success as automation allows in increasing the digital world’s brand footprint and provides better ROI. automation is enabling the organization to sustain its relationship with the existing customers and attract new ones.

Increasing engagement with management tools

Social media has become a great medium for businesses to connect with customers and increase sales. Even after this huge popularity, some businesses are failing to make an impact on these digital platforms. With the right management tools, creating fresh content, responding to customer queries, and increasing brands looks like an easy and achievable task. Marketers need a MarTech stack to fill in the customer expectation gap; automate and optimize customer interactions with brands over social media platforms.

Social media management tools help in publishing and schedule posts when there is maximum engagement. Automatic reposting of high engagement content to increase reach and monitoring competitors to find the latest trends and topics to improve business marketing strategy. Social listening becomes an important tool for brands to understand and analyze what people are saying about their brand, products, and competitors. With these valuable and unbiased insights, businesses can improve their marketing and business strategies.

Improving customer experience

Marketers are expected to focus largely or entirely on customer experience with the brand in the next two years. Today’s consumers are more inclined to buy from brands that offer better engagement, relevance, and personalized solutions as per their needs. This seamless customer experience is hard for companies to achieve without a MarTech stack. Artificial intelligence helps organizations analyze and process vast customer data to give that personalized experience to their customers. In a survey, many marketing executives have shown concerns that their organization is not mature when it comes to providing a personalized touch to customers. This is a clear indication of organizations’ slow response and how critical marketing technology is to meet customer expectations. 

Without the MarTech stack, organizations will become an impossible task to track the buyer’s journey. Marketing technologies are empowering the organization to analyze the customer data and forge connections in real-time. A streamlined ecosystem ensures that every customer gets a seamless and personalized customer experience.

Improving ROI and productivity

Organizations are looking to streamline their processes and become more efficient in managing their digital assets with the help of digital asset management. Marketers are creating digital content like images, videos, audio, and other content to target every stage of the buyer’s journey. It is vital to create an easily accessible and organized digital library to track all these digital assets. The DAMs are helping marketers avoid duplication of the content and save valuable time while searching media assets. Digital asset management technology provides a way to give highly relevant content that gives the personalized experience consumer demand.

Experts believe that DAM software is estimated to 30-35 percent growth by 2024.

In addition to providing increased efficiency, this software enables organizations and marketers to track usage and digital assets’ ROI. These valuable insights are empowering CMOs to optimize their marketing strategy to get better ROI from further media creation. 

Final words

MarTech stack becomes essential for brands to achieve rapid progress in this digital consumer landscape. It has become an essential tool for the organization to get valuable insights from the data and to optimize for a better customer experience in real-time. AI and ML enable organizations to improve the efficiency of marketing campaigns and maintain that personalization touch that today’s customer demands. With that personalized touch, MarTech helps bring the brand closer to consumers, improve the ROI on marketing initiatives, drive more sales, and delight their customers.

Leading Digital Transformation (Step 5)- Empower and Remove Barriers

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Removing Barriers

Image Source: NYTimes

The purpose of this stage is to overcome barriers to Digital Transformation. It is crucial to remove barriers to change, change systems or structures that pose threats to digital transformation. These barriers could be structure, skills, systems and supervisors. Three main best practices for removing barriers to change are:

Educate & Engage

When major changes are initiated we need to think about new behavior, skills and attitudes that are required in the new world. A good training with right kind of experience enables digital transformation in a big way. Always remember that encouraged and empowered employees make an enterprise win!

Inform & Negotiate

Every transformation will have it’s fair share of problem stakeholders. A huge category of such problem stakeholders can be influenced directly and indirectly. These stakeholders are not just against the change but also have huge organizational influence. There is no way that your change will be successful without including them in the process. Understanding the real needs/fears of such stakeholders is very critical as you try to negotiate with them to be the supporters of your change.

Every time after a successful negotiations I feel like this

Sucessful Digital transformation Negotiation

Ignore

Some of the problem stakeholders are completely against the change but don’t have huge influence on the organization. The best strategy for such stakeholders is to give them very high level information and keep them out of your routine. You may like to negotiate with such stakeholders but that may not be the best use of your time!

Related Articles:

8 steps to digital transformation

Leading Digital Transformation (Step 1) Creating Sense of Urgency

Leading Digital Transformation (Step 2) Build a Guiding Coalition 

Leading Digital Transformation (Step 3) Develop Vision & Strategy 

Leading Digital Transformation (Step 4) Communicate and Enlist volunteers

Why I am attending Marketing Technology Conference

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Marketing Technology Conference  is the first ever event for the practice of Marketing Technologies. I go to many conferences but I never write about them and especially before the conference. Few of my friends have recently inquired me on why I am attending the Marketing Technology Conference and what are the benefits I see by attending Marketing Technology Conference (MarTech Conference).

Marketing Technology Conference

Marketing Technology Conference

The first Marketing Technology Conference (MarTech Conference) is very special for me as it is about my passion and it is a conference that I was praying for few years now. So this is my attempt to share with you why I am attending Marketing Technology Conference (MarTech Conference) and why you may also like to attend it next time (they are already sold out). After the conference I plan to post another article on what I learnt at Marketing Technology Conference.

Rising Role of Marketing Technologist

Almost 3-4 years ago I came to know the term that describes the role that people like me play in the business world today. This was the time when I was introduced to the role of Chief Marketing Technologist. Marketing Technology Conference (MarTech Conference) is the first ever conference that will bring all of us in this practice under one roof for a day.

Here are some of great reads on this role that have helped me understand the role better and also educate others on this role and its importance.

Here are some of the profiles of Chief Marketing Technologists who are already impacting the success of some big companies (collected from from LinkedIn Search and Scott Brinker’s blog)

Few of the above Marketing Technologists, CTOs, CMOs are also speakers at Marketing Technology Conference (MarTech Conference)

Scott Brinker “The Pioneer of Marketing Technology”

I was introduced to Scott Brinker’s blog by my previous manager. It has been almost 3-4 years that I have never missed any update from Scott Brinker. I have always tried to attend as many events where I can go and learn from him. He is the person who put this concept together and really guided the entire industry why there is a need of such role and why it is no more a choice. Scott Brinker may have spent hundreds of hours in putting together the vision, thought leadership and detailed plan on how to make this happen. There is not one other than Scott Brinker who is the ultimate expert in this field. Scott is the chair and the key speaker at Marketing Technology Conference (MarTech Conference).

Why I  am attending Marketing Technology Conference (MarTech Conference) 

I have discovered that great people are willing to share their ideas and you can learn only if others are ahead of you. There are many professionals in this space who are definitely ahead of me in this field or atleast they know what I may not know.

Here are the top few reasons why I am attending the Marketing Technology Conference (MarTech Conference)  at Boston.

  • This Marketing Technology Conference is Chaired by Scott Brinker. So obviously this is the best chance to learn from the pioneer in this field.By now you may have already noticed that I am firm follower of Scott Brinker.
  • Connect with peers: Marketing Technology Conference (MarTech Conference)  is the only and the first event in the industry where I can connect with all my peers. A great chance to network, connect, learn, share with them.
  • A great place for personal development in this space.

“A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.” – Will Rogers

  • Marketing Technology Conference (MarTech Conference) is vendor-agnostic hence no hidden agendas & no sales pitches. The reason I got to conferences is to learn and not to buy. It is good to connect with vendors but the main reason I go there is to learn.
  • Broad Agenda : The agenda very well covers the following main questions that most probably each one of us face today:
    • How do we support new marketing strategies with the right technology strategies?
    • How can technology transform our marketing operations and customer experiences?
    • What management practices do we need to govern this new breed of marketing?
    • How do we develop talent and culture to leverage marketing technology investments?
  • Better understanding the complex world of Marketing Technology: As you may already know that the world of marketing technology is getting complex day by day with new products and more consolidations by big companies. If you are unaware, here is the best illustration of the complexity:Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (2014)

    Marketing Technology Landscape

    Marketing Technology Landscape

  • With more in depth understanding of the marketing technology space I will be more equipped to better design my marketing technology stack.
  • Marketing Technology Conference (MarTech Conference) is a great place to share your own challenges with other and help other with the challenges they are facing in this field. A great quote on collaboration

“Collaboration is important not just because it’s a better way to learn. The spirit of collaboration is penetrating every institution and all of our lives. So learning to collaborate is part of equipping yourself for effectiveness, problem solving, innovation and life-long learning in an ever-changing networked economy.” -Don Tapscott

  • Marketing Technology Conference has a very good line of speakers. Most of them come from different perspectives and can help put together the right & complete picture. Here are some of the speakers on the agenda (Pasted from PR2020 )

1. Scott Brinker (@chiefmartec), Conference Chair & author, chiefmartec.com

2. Mayur Gupta (@inspiremartech), Global Head of Marketing Technology & Operations, Kimberly-Clark

3. Laura McLellan (@lauramclellan), VP Marketing Strategies, Gartner Research

4. David Raab (@draab), Principal, Raab & Associates

5. Paul Roetzer (@paulroetzer), CEO, PR 20/20, author of The Marketing Agency Blueprint and The Marketing Performance Blueprint

6. Jascha Kaykas-Wolff (@kaykas), CMO, BitTorrent

7. Erica Seidel (@erica_seidel), CEO, The Connective Good

8. Jane Hiscock (@janehiscock), Founder & CEO, Farland Group

9. Wes Hunt, Chief Data Officer, Nationwide Insurance

10. Lisa Ritchie, SVP Customer Knowledge and Insights, Scotiabank

11. Travis Wright, CEO, MediaThinkLabs

12. Erik W. Holt (@erikholt), Partner Strategy Leader – Technology/ISV, IBM ExperienceOne

13. Lou Pelosi, Sr. Director LaunchPoint, Marketo

14. Suresh Vittal (@sureshvittal), VP Product Marketing and Strategy, Adobe Marketing Cloud

15. Erik Brynjolfsson (@erikbryn), Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy

16. Sheldon Monteiro (@sheldon_tm), CTO, SapientNitro

17. Sheryl Pattek (@sherylpattek), VP & Principal Analyst, CMO and Marketing Leadership Practice at Forrester Research

18. Jason Heller (@JasonHeller), CEO, Agiliti

19. Sean Ellis (@SeanEllis), Founder & CEO, Qualaroo and GrowthHackers.com

20. Christopher Penn (@cspenn), VP of Marketing Technology, SHIFT Communications

21. Shawn Goodin (@shawngoodin), Director of Marketing Technology, The Clorox Company

22. Michael Krigsman (@mkrigsman), Co-Host of “CxO Talk”

23. Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar), Chief Marketing Officer Extreme Networks

24. Robert Tas (@TasRobert), Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President, Pegasystems

25. Steve Mann (@stevemann), Chief Marketing Officer, Research Solutions, LexisNexis

26. Dharmesh Shah (@dharmesh), Co-Founder and CTO, HubSpot

 Check out Twitter list by PR2020: MarTech Speakers

  • Case studies make great collateral for sales. In the role of Marketing Technologist we play a sales role on a daily basis when we have to influence our colleagues, managers and senior leadership. Case studies are a great asset for winning those pitches.

I look forward to Connect with you

See you at the Marketing Technology Conference (MarTech Conference), I look forward to connect with you and learn from you. Please feel free to reach out to me via

My Background

Today I live on the cross roads of marketing & technology. Marketing Technology is a new practice that is become more and more prevalent today in every company. I would like to share my background so that you can  better understand my perspective on attending Marketing Technology Conference (MarTech Conference)

I started my career as a software engineer. Java, Struts, SQL, Hibernate, Spring, etc. were the technologies that I spent my first 7 years of my professional life. Got a great opportunity and moved into a sales and relationship management, it was fun. It was a period of great learning. Really understood what happens in the business world on a daily basis and the challenges of customer relationship management. Since last 5 years my professional journey took me into Marketing teams. I got into Marketing because of my passion to bridge the gap between tech and business.

Today my key focus is on Digital Marketing Strategy and Marketing Technologies but that is not what I have always done. I understand technology, have a passion for sales and I love marketing. On a daily basis I have to connect these dots and that needs a great amount of understanding of all these fields.

Connect with Me

MyBlog, LinkedIn or Twitter

Some other great posts on this subject:

10 Reasons to Attend the Inaugural MarTech Conference (Aug. 19-20)

8 Reasons Why You Should Register Now for MarTech: The Marketing Tech Conference