The Transformative Impact of AI on Go-To-Market
Artificial intelligence (AI) has exploded in go-to-market over the past few years. From simple chatbots just a few years ago to sophisticated predictive analytics and machine learning today, AI is transforming these functions. According to McKinsey's recent research, we're now entering the era of generative AI. This new capability will enable marketers and sellers to generate novel, human-quality content and insights at unbelievable scale.
The Steady Rise of AI Adoption in Marketing and Sales
Early use cases focused on automating repetitive tasks to free up human time and effort. Chatbots and virtual assistants now handle 50% or more of customer service interactions at many companies.
In sales, AI helps automate previously manual data entry like contact data updates in CRM systems. It also takes on time-consuming research to enrich prospect profiles.
AI and machine learning have also proven invaluable for gleaning data-driven insights. Predictive lead scoring uses ML algorithms to determine the hottest prospects based on attributes like demographics, behaviors, and past sales data. Website analytics AI can rapidly test and optimize page layouts and content for higher conversion rates.
While revolutionary, these applications still function within predefined constraints. Generative AI blows the doors wide open on what's possible.
The Dawning of Generative AI
Generative AI refers to ML systems that can create completely novel, high-quality output based on data patterns. The most hyped variant uses natural language processing (NLP) to generate human-like text.
Models like GPT-3 can write news stories, poetry, code, and more from just a few words of prompt with no human intervention. The generated material is coherent, grammatically correct, and often indistinguishable from human writing.
Creative applications for generative AI seem endless. Some models generate realistic photographic images and video from text captions. Others craft logos, websites, music, voiced content, and even computer code on demand.
Rather than just analyzing data for insights, generative AI can create brand new content, designs, sounds and more. This represents an enormous opportunity for marketing and sales.
Per McKinsey, 44% of marketing leaders anticipate adopting generative AI for content creation within two years. Another 40% expect to use it for designing assets like ads, websites, and product renderings.
Let's explore some of the incredible ways generative AI could transform marketing and sales functions.
Revolutionary Applications of Generative AI for Marketing
Generative AI has the potential to enhance marketing productivity and creativity at every stage.
Brainstorming and Ideation
Ideation is crucial for positioning brands, developing campaigns, and creating engaging content. But it can be time-consuming and challenging to generate numerous creative directions through traditional methods.
With generative AI, marketers can rapidly develop positioning statements, campaign themes, taglines, and creative briefs to explore multiple options. The AI can also produce full brand guidelines complete with sample ads, imagery, and tailored content.
This exponentially expands the creative possibilities early in the process before making final selections.
Asset Design and Content Development
Creative teams can leverage generative design tools to quickly explore visual concepts. They provide countless on-brand images, logos, graphic layouts, and videos to spark innovative ad and content designs.
For content production, AI copywriting systems allow fast creation of website pages, blogs, social posts in different voices tailored to each audience.
Teams can have the AI generate 50+ headline, subhead, and body copy variations for A/B testing. It can also produce hundreds of unique meta descriptions and alt text options for SEO.
Marketing Execution and Analysis
When executing campaigns, generative AI allows vastly more output through automated content creation.
Emails, social posts, landing pages, and more can be hyper-personalized by the AI without straining human resources. The AI can match the tone, structure, and messaging to each customer segment for superior engagement.
Ad buyers can create and test thousands of ad variations against different audiences, content formats, and placement types to optimize spend.
For analysis, generative AI can provide actionable recommendations on how to improve campaigns. It can assess performance data and explain which segments, creatives, or strategies are working or need refinement.
Revolutionary Applications of Generative AI for Sales
Like marketing, sales teams can transform productivity and buyer relationships with generative AI.
Lead Prospecting
Finding promising new leads is essential but eats up seller time. Generative AI can draft customized emails at scale to enable one-to-one outreach.
The AI can generate unique templates and content blocks tailored to each prospect's company, role, pains, goals, and other attributes for a personalized narrative. This achieves a "human touch" at machine scale.
Content Offerings
Savvy salespeople use content to attract, engage, and nurture leads. But developing quality, customized collateral is challenging.
Generative AI can rapidly develop ebooks, whitepapers, assessments, and other gated content tailored to each client's needs. Instead of general purpose, one-size-fits-all assets, sellers can deliver client-specific guidance through AI.
Sales Proposals and Presentations
Crafting sales decks for prospective clients is a manual, iterative process. AI sales assistants can streamline proposal creation.
The system can ingest details on the prospect, their needs, and desired outcomes. It then structures slides, generates copy, and infuses visuals tailored to this narrative to output a draft deck. Humans polish the deck, but the AI creates a compelling first version in minutes versus days.
The Future with Generative AI
As generative AI grows more advanced, McKinsey foresees it becoming integral to marketing and sales stacks. Virtually every process from idea inception to execution could involve AI collaboration.
Of course, it requires a thoughtful approach. AI should augment human creativity and intelligence, not replace it. But there are tremendous opportunities to drive productivity, engagement, and growth.
Leaders who strategically implement generative AI will gain an advantage over competitors still relying solely on manual workflows. They'll break free of conventional constraints to engage customers and prospects in new ways.
Early Adopters Show Remarkable Results
Some innovative brands are already testing generative AI with incredible results:
Dell used AI to create unique, engaging product descriptions tailored to each item's specs, improving traffic and sales.
AI startup Copy.ai created promotional emails for Godfrey's Hotel that doubled open rates and boosted clicks over 75%.
Ecommerce company Every developed 50,000 AI-generated product ads targeting specific user interests for more relevant messaging.
B2B software provider Showtime cut proposal creation from weeks to hours by having AI draft custom client pitches, boosting sales productivity.
These examples reveal generative AI's tremendous potential to enhance human creativity and productivity. As the technology rapidly advances, its applications will only expand.
Key Takeaways on Generative AI for Business Leaders
Here are some of the top insights business leaders should keep in mind:
Generative AI marks a seismic shift - it moves beyond analysis to creative synthesis of novel content.
Applications in marketing and sales are vast, from ideation to execution and personalization.
Major productivity and engagement gains are possible by combining AI and human strengths.
However, thoughtful change management is required to integrate AI successfully.
Leading companies are already using generative AI to remarkable effect. Its capabilities will only improve.
Now is the time to start testing and learning how to leverage generative AI for a competitive advantage.
The opportunities for generative AI in marketing and sales are astounding. While early days, leaders who harness this technology judiciously will gain significant first-mover advantage. They will future-proof their commercial operations for the age of artificial intelligence.