Senior Marketers: Will AI Marketing Steal Your Job?

Check any major digital marketing media site and you will see two letters being bounced around with vigour; AI, otherwise known as Artificial Intelligence.

Amongst all the noise, there is one thing for certain, it’s development and application is set to make a huge change in almost every industry and the way we live. However, there is much debate around if and how this will impact marketing managers jobs. In this article we will take a look at what AI could really mean for senior marketers and marketing technology.

What is AI? Why might it be a Threat?

For those unfamiliar with the term, SAS defines AI as:

“Artificial intelligence (AI) makes it possible for machines to learn from experience, adjust to new inputs and perform human-like tasks. Most AI examples that you hear about today – from chess-playing computers to self-driving cars – rely heavily on deep learning and natural language processing. Using these technologies, computers can be trained to accomplish specific tasks by processing large amounts of data and recognising patterns in the data.”

In other words, AI has the potential to make the human element of many professions obsolete. We have already seen this in some areas of marketing such as automation tools, which deal with tasks including social media posting and the filing of customer relationship management.

Conversational Marketing

When was the last time you had an interesting conversation with a robot?

Although in recent years chatbots have been limited to simply picking up keywords and referring you to pre-set answers, this is changing at a rapid pace. The introduction of AI to chatbot technology is leading to intelligent conversations between customers and businesses.

Conversational marketing is set to make a huge splash in marketing technology in the coming years. The combination of AI with chatbots will mean customer queries can be answered more accurately and quicker than ever before. This allows businesses to process customers through the sales cycles quickly and qualify leads at an unprecedented pace.

Boosts in Efficiency

As marketers, AI marketing is likely to make our jobs substantially easier, helping us to organise our time, workload and boost efficiency in the workplace.

Virtual assistants have already been rolled out on devices such as smart phones and voice-controlled assistants. Although these have already shown some promise in boosting efficiency. AI incorporates machine learning marketing into usage that will start to become more accurate, completing their jobs better and faster than ever before.

These super intelligent virtual assistants are already working seamlessly to schedule meeting, book flights and taxis, transcribe meeting notes, make reservations and set up notifications for important engagements.

As AI becomes more advanced due to significantly improved processing power, they will learn users’ preferences better and grow to meet needs on a deeper level.

Deeper Insights

It is undeniable that marketing has become a data driven profession.

Insights into our target audience are likely to improve as AI works tireless to both collect and analyse the data we hold. This isn’t necessarily something new, we already see a high level of data being collected and communicated.

However, by combining customer data with user habits AI will also be able to offer better insight into how we can improve our marketing efforts to increase success. For example, where we currently see information on customer demographics, habits and interests we will start to see actual instructions on how we can gear our marketing better to attract those customers to buy.

Automation

Marketing automation is no new thing in marketing technology, but it is about to get a lot smarter.

Where we can already use technology to automate many marketing processes such as social media posting, email marketing and to some extent customer service. AI is going to change this to become a lot more personal.

“61% of marketing leaders expect AI to have a substantial or transformational impact on hyper-personalisation of content over the next five years” – Salesforce

The applications are endless. We are likely to see AI identifying customer issues quicker than ever before and even dealing with them in an automatic and intelligent way. We are also likely to see machine learning marketing making current automated tasks perform better, such as identifying audience sentiment on social media and adjusting content to perform better.

Better Content will do Better

From a content marketing perspective, AI is likely to have a huge impact on content marketing and the way in which it benefits our businesses.

Machine learning (part of AI) is already used by platforms like Google and Facebook to workout which content users want to see and engage with the most. As machine learning becomes more advanced, so too will the algorithms they use to identify which content to promote.

Practically this will mean that rather than using tricks to boost content discoverability, simply creating engaging, useful and relevant content will help you grow your business exponentially.

Will AI replace Marketing Managers?

So, the question still stands, will AI steal your job?

The answer is that it is very unlikely.

Although AI undeniably puts some marketing jobs under threat, these are going to be process focused roles. As new applications become smarter we will see a shift of marketing professionals into more strategic roles, an area which is already widely filled by senior marketers.

It is unlikely that AI will ever take the place of those in strategic positions. However, we will see some changes in these roles such as instead of managing large teams of marketing juniors you may work with smaller teams that control and feed objectives into ‘AI machines’.

In fact, AI is more likely to have a positive impact on senior marketer roles and marketing technology, helping them to focus on the bigger picture and providing them with more time through increased efficiency. It will allow senior marketers to focus on strategy rather than the execution of daily tasks, as AI will help find and complete information faster to boost efficiency.

It is clear that AI is going to have a huge impact on the way that we all work and live. Those aware of these changes will be able to position themselves in areas where their skills will be best fit in the new market. We are excited to see how AI marketing will improve the world we live in and change it for the better.

To learn more about how artificial intelligence in digital marketing is already being used, have a look at programmatic advertising on our website and how we use it to drive success. Keep watching this space for more articles on this topic!