{"id":6887,"date":"2024-03-19T13:35:10","date_gmt":"2024-03-19T13:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tup.kxe.temporary.site\/how-martech-leaders-must-embrace-ai-for-customer-centric-marketing\/"},"modified":"2024-03-19T13:35:10","modified_gmt":"2024-03-19T13:35:10","slug":"how-martech-leaders-must-embrace-ai-for-customer-centric-marketing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/okdesign.ca\/fr\/how-martech-leaders-must-embrace-ai-for-customer-centric-marketing\/","title":{"rendered":"How martech leaders must embrace AI for customer-centric marketing"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Everyone is now a martech leader. Depending on your perspective, that\u2019s either a threat or great news. But in 2024, I\u2019m leveraging it as a call to action to focus more attention on personalized experiences for customers.<\/p>\n

It was always personal<\/h2>\n

For more than 10 years, we all enjoyed being on the frontier as martech came into its own, led by leading voices such as Scott Brinker and dedicated thought leaders in this space. Yes, I\u2019m biased, but that includes industry insights you can learn through this site!\u00a0<\/p>\n

For those of us who were early adopters, it was personal. It legitimized our roles, often as a new breed of cross-functional leaders that translated what marketing wanted but didn\u2019t know how to ask for and implemented what traditional IT didn\u2019t have the capacity or capability to do.<\/p>\n

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But it was never really about the platforms for leading professionals. We focused on the program (campaigns), people and processes first \u2014 and then tried to embrace the platforms that enabled those processes. <\/p>\n

Increasingly, CMOs hired us as dedicated leaders as marketing became the leading user of tech outside product and IT. We were also hired and empowered to train others who wanted to embrace new skills, technologies and career opportunities because the tech capabilities made you stand out.<\/p>\n

Did more martech \u2018lead\u2019 to better customer personalization?\u00a0<\/h2>\n

We enjoyed being a new breed of tech-forward SMEs. With more than 10,000 tools to choose from, it became all about managing the stack. Our budgets and resources grew as we integrated an ever-growing series of applications. <\/p>\n

We then developed into marketing ops leaders, growing our strategic influence by advising the CMO on platforms. We also partnered closely with SalesOps for revenue impact and customer success for customer retention. <\/p>\n

But did we ever make a major dent in the promise of much of this tech \u2014 to deliver more truly personalized experiences to our prospects and customers?\u00a0<\/p>\n

We made progress by many measures, but we haven\u2019t made a dent in the overall problem. Multiple studies tell us personalization still falls into a basic categorization \u2014 delivering content on one basic data attribute, such as age, location or title.<\/p>\n

Being addressed by first name in a mass email \u2014 table stakes in email personalization \u2014 has existed for over 10 years. How many emails are we still getting that reference your name as \u201chello there\u201d or \u201ceveryone?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Only 22% of shoppers indicate they are satisfied with the level of personalization they currently receive, per Twilio Segment\u2019s 2023 State of Personalization<\/a> report (registration required)<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We have a long way to go. <\/p>\n

Despite this lack of improvement in customer experience, we were future-proof because we just needed more investment in martech to achieve that promise. Then AI arrived.<\/p>\n

AI will push us to the next frontier of personalization<\/h2>\n

As early adopters of tech enablement, we rejoiced at this AI influx, not because we understood it completely, but because we built our reputation on the \u201ctech\u201d side of martech.<\/p>\n

Throughout this past year, however, we developed a growing realization that AI can make everyone redundant. AI is democratizing martech for everyone. And, you can even argue that it\u2019s democratizing the whole of marketing.<\/p>\n