Member Article

Data confusion will hold back AI in marketing according to survey

Over one third (35.9%) of business managers believe they don’t have enough data to use AI within their marketing strategy according a new survey conducted by AccuraCast, Europe’s leading multilingual digital marketing agency.

Artificial Intelligence is revolutionising marketing with an estimated 85% of UK businesses claiming to be ready to invest in it by 2020.

The AccuraCast survey of 1000 respondents discovered the next biggest factors hindering AI investment are: Lack of understanding how AI can help (23.5%), cost of an AI solution (14.9%), time needed to research and implement AI (12.3%) and difficulty integrating data across platforms (10.1%).

Jerome Divecha, Director, AccuraCast offers clear advice to see if AI could help your business make the next big step forward.

“An AI solution can support any area of business that requires faster and smarter decision making. First, you need to determine your goal. What specifically are you hoping to achieve with AI? Obviously, we would all love to get more leads and sales. But you need to go deeper and identify the areas in which AI can make a real difference to your marketing.

The big questions you should be asking are:

What areas of your marketing are the most inefficient? Where in your marketing strategy could you make better decisions? Which of your campaigns have a lot of relevant data that you’d like to analyse?

Once you have identified whether an AI program can help achieve your goal, you then need to check if you have enough data to get reliable insight from an AI. AI is completely reliant on the information you feed it, so good quality data is key. It’s simple – input bad data, get bad results. Modern AI solutions typically require a minimum of a few thousand (~5,000) data points to generate reliable recommendations. The data points supplied to the AI should match the outcome you want. For example, if your aim is to generate more leads, you will need to provide the AI with a few thousand historical leads to analyse. Likewise, if you are looking to increase traffic, you need to provide the AI with data for a few thousand clicks to the website. Once you have collected this data, you need to consolidate and organise it properly. It can then be fed into the AI system.

Chances are, if you are looking to make smarter, more effective decisions, then an AI solution will work for you, so long as you have sufficient data for the system to learn from. If a lack of data is your issue, there are several simple solutions to help you overcome this hurdle.“

Please click the link below to download the full report from AccuraCast including questions to ask when finding a new AI programme and validation of results https://www.accuracast.com/whitepapers/investing-in-marketing-ai/

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Peter Rodgers .