AI for the CMO: Accelerating growth, creativity and efficiency

With AI reshaping the business landscape, CMOs can leverage emerging AI tools and models to address potential gaps and limitations and design more effective marketing campaigns driven by innovation. Several key areas where AI can be a game changer are as follows:

• Data analysis: Interprets and connects massive amounts of customer data for more meaningful decision making and valuable insights
• Rising consumer expectations: Enables scalable one-to-one personalization, leading to real-time experiences that were previously difficult to deliver
• ROI mapping: Optimizes budgets and investments, linking marketing activities directly to business outcomes
• Speed to market: Streamlines creative production, reducing time and costs to deliver more efficient campaigns

Additionally, AI can significantly advance broader marketing business goals with scalable content creation and tailored brand messaging, resulting in greater reach and personalized customer engagement. 

“AI can really move the needle on getting the right messages to customers across various touch points,” says Colestock. “These touch points are increasing every day, but we can deliver relevant messages to our audiences according to their personal preferences, including their buying behavior and interests. Younger generations that are digitally native are now starting to embrace conversational AI and chatbots when they need customer support to answer their questions.”

Predictive analytics for revenue acceleration is another crucial reason to integrate AI within marketing goals. It optimizes campaigns by identifying high-value segments and buying signals to optimize media spend, aligning marketing efforts with sales and engagement goals to achieve a stronger return on investment.

Given AI’s vast potential, marketing leaders can leverage the technology in many ways to manage desired outcomes and increase efficiency and insight in their campaigns. However, several barriers can prevent the effective deployment of AI tools, including:

“Leveraging real-time data is crucial to deliver hyper-personalized experiences,” says Floryan. “If you are using week-old data for campaigns and a lead gets converted to a customer during this time, you are at risk of sending a communication that signals that you may not know your customer, leading to a loss of trust with your brand.”

Data is the fuel to AI, and having clean, real-time data is key. Introducing integration and having a unified data model enables greater automation, generates personalized user experiences and provides marketing performance metrics for valuable insights.

“It is mandatory for marketing leaders to avoid Band-Aid solutions and address the root problem,” says Floryan. “Organizations often water down content and send generic messages because their teams lack real-time data at their fingertips and do not trust its accuracy to deliver personalized communications. This is a common symptom of technology and data silos, making it difficult for teams to fully leverage AI.”

When designing and implementing an AI strategy, the most crucial step for marketing leaders is to identify the symptoms of technology and data silos and address them as follows:

• Audit current marketing tools to identify existing integrations and gaps.
• During the audit, note AI capabilities that are already built into the tools, as these offer an accessible starting point to begin using and learning AI.
• After completing the audit, develop a systematic roadmap to introduce AI gradually, allowing sufficient time to test these AI approaches and build upon the learnings.
• Run ad tests, set KPIs, train staff on additional capabilities and appoint an AI champion to bridge marketing and technology teams.

“Transformation is an ongoing process, and it looks different for each organization,” says Floryan. “Your marketing technology should support your people and your business processes. AI is best utilized when paired with human abilities, so finding technology solutions that support your team wherever they are in their transformation journey is important.”

While AI tools and solutions can seem challenging at first, the technology has vast potential which is rapidly evolving and reshaping creative work and marketing execution. AI is rapidly transforming the landscape of creative work within marketing by reducing timelines, lowering costs, automating routine tasks and expanding creative possibilities. Integrating AI within creative and marketing strategies acts as a catalyst for business growth through innovation, such as:

For any use case to be successful, prompts must be refined, and the asks and expectations of AI tools and applications must be clear. Every good prompt should follow a structure that includes several key details and directions.

The takeaway

AI-driven marketing should be viewed as a long-term investment, focusing on ROI, cost savings and boosting brand loyalty within the target audience. The foundation for leveraging AI successfully is quality data. And from there, it is always advisable to start small with a phased roadmap and address risk, privacy and brand safety.

The challenges and complexities in developing an effective enterprise AI strategy may seem overwhelming, and marketing leaders may need additional support in determining the appropriate AI deployment strategy. But once that strategy is properly aligned, CMOs can see quick and consequential benefits from AI solutions that enable more effective communications, develop a stronger understanding of their customers and ultimately create better connections with the business.

Ready to get started? RSM’s experienced AI advisory team understands the enterprise AI journey and the foundational elements necessary to generate increased value and reduce risk. Contact our team to learn more about how AI can transform your key business operations.