Four AI Marketing Trends to Transform Your CRM Strategy in the Next Few Years
Artificial intelligence (AI) is not just a buzzword in digital marketing and business strategy. AI helps sales and marketing professionals automate routine tasks and drastically improve customer relationship management (CRM). How will AI marketing change your company’s CRM strategy?
In this article, I talk about the top-4 AI marketing trends and how intelligent systems can redefine customer strategy in the next few years.
AI-enabled marketing systems use techniques such as machine learning, predictive analytics and recommender engines to improve a company’s CRM ans sales process by allowing more precise targeting and personalized, real-time offerings. AI technology for digital marketing starts with automating extensive, repetitive tasks. It allows decision makers to relocate time and human resources toward areas such as social media campaigns, content marketing and customer support.
Four predictions about how AI marketing will evolve in five years
As Ronald van Loon mentioned, AI-enabled marketing strategies are “the must-have thing for companies that want to redirect a personalized message towards the customer in real-time”. Gartner predicts that AI and machine learning (ML) will ultimately shift strategic marketing and CRM away from traditional automation toward deeply personalized customer experiences by 2025.
Traditional marketing automation just bridges the gap between the marketer and the customer, but it does nothing for individualized interactions and deep customer targeting. However, trending AI marketing technology lets humanize lead generation and customer experience strategies and make messaging more personalized and friendly than it was until now.
With this idea in mind, here are four trends about how artificial intelligence technology will disrupt digital marketing and customer relationships by 2025:
Trend #1. Customer loyalty will depend on mapping the right buyer journey.
If you want your customer strategy to be successful, focus your marketing effort on a buyer’s world. You have to analyze a buyer’s interactions and behaviors and find ways to maximize engagement and improve loyalty. This can be done by building life-long, personalized relationships with every customer. Pay special attention to fostering relevant and meaningful communications through social media and mobile push notifications.
Trend #2. AI predictive modeling will focus CRM strategy on the hottest leads and opportunities.
Big Data and predictive analytics will improve the way you target, source, and score potential customers. AI-enabled CRM software will help automatically collect and analyze data from multiple sources for weighting and modeling.
Things like propensity to buy and account scoring will be core components of AI SaaS and CRM solutions in the next few years. Marketers will benefit from account-based insights and predictive signals that will help improve the effectiveness of their video advertising campaigns.
Trend #3. No campaign templates and pre-built setup.
In the next few years we will hardly see CRM systems that use templates and pre-built setup for lead generation and targeting.
Marketers will likely stay away from complex, pre-built campaigns for broad audience targeting. They will focus on building more personalized journeys and experiences by creating targeted, just-in-time campaigns that offer a customer the right pieces of content based on AI recommender systems and predictive modelling.
Trend #4: Real-time communication will continue to progress.
Although trending technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning are in the driver’s seat, marketing professionals still struggle to keep up with customer expectations by using one-to-one communication. With a robust real-time communication strategy in place, they listen and respond while creating a great customer experience throughout the buyer’s journey.
Marketers won’t simply observe what is happening; they must collect customer data about why things are happening. If you don’t have access to this information, you can still lend credibility to your CRM strategy by measuring and analyzing customer-related metrics that matter – contact form submissions and downloads for example. AI tech helps here by enabling dynamic, predictive communication channels with prospects and customers.
Some skepticism about AI and marketing tech
But some marketing experts are still sceptical in that artificial intelligence can humanize marketing and improve customer relationships strategically. They argue that with mobile, social and real-time tech being always on and progressing, people are naturally becoming more demanding and narcissistic.
We – consumers – have an ever-growing need for something special; something that convinces us to buy. And marketers will inevitably build engagement campaigns that guarantee personalized experiences, no matter whether they use AI technology behind the scenes or not.
And this idea is not new. We have been observing this incredible shift towards personalization and automation over the last ten years. Giants like Google, Facebook, IBM and Amazon have invested a lot of effort and resources in collecting data about target customers to integrate cross-channel and omnichannel campaigns, create responsive/adaptive design for landing pages, and ensure dynamic engagement.
AI and ML marketing – changing the game
Artificial intelligence and machine learning take the guesswork out of digital marketing and customer relationships management. This tech helps understand the business process in terms of modern customer behaviours and journeys. By combining intelligent automation and human creativity, AI marketing makes it easier and faster to listen and respond to buyers at the individual level with hyper-personalized real-time communications, making them feel compelled to remain engaged.
AI tech is the game changer for marketers as it guides them through crafting extremely individualized messages, with relevant content in the right channel and on the right device.
Your organization can start capitalizing on emerging AI marketing trends today to improve the way it creates personalized experiences, generates leads and manages customers. This tech-savvy business strategy will ultimately lead to long-term intelligent growth and revenue.
