Hey Smart Marketers!
There are 2 things I like to do in summer: learning and reflecting on the future.
For the learning part, I finally decided to get that Data Cloud certification and so I’ll send a couple of posts in the next weeks about preparation.
Now let me share my thoughts about AI with you…
But first, a question: What’s the difference between a gadget and a technology?
AI has invaded our lives, our inboxes, our playlists, and from a professional standpoint, all of Salesforce’s clouds are touting AI, every keynote is hammering this word… in short, we live, eat, read, and dream AI.
Except…
I refuse to believe that the impact of a technological disruption of this magnitude is limited to suggesting email content or translating a prompt into an audience segment. These are gadgets.
A disruption of this scale, in my opinion, has two main impacts:
- The way customers interact with brands
- The way companies will manage their marketing
Customer/Brand Interactions:
While we still hear about a cookieless future, the reality is that we are moving towards a world where your customers will browse brand sites less and less.
Google has launched SGE (Search Generative Experience).
OpenAI has launched SearchGPT.
Third-party cookies are not going to disappear, but they will track bots… In the long run, use-cases of retargeting site or mobile app visitors will no longer suffice to generate revenue.
So what? Focus on email?
Not sure about that either: AIs exponentially increase the number of emails received by customers and, relevant or not, it generates too much noise for your email to stand out properly.
And let’s face it: soon AIs will completely manage your customer’s inbox and email will be reduced to informational content.
How to communicate with your customers in this world?
Talk to them where they are: the audience crossroads of your personas. This could be Twitch, TikTok, or Roblox.
Manage non-linear conversational communication channels. Like WhatsApp. I’ll come back to this in a future post, but what Salesforce offers via Unified Messaging is so static and linear that it smells like mothballs.
The Evolution of the Marketing Dept for Companies:
Salesforce Marketing Growth Edition is cute… but if we project ourselves with increasingly numerous touchpoints supporting increasingly differentiated content and handling ever-growing data… building journeys is not scalable.
Calling them Flows won’t change a thing.
A major brand is not going to think, test, and maintain 120 journeys per month with the relevant content, not to mention the different versions as initial feedback is collected.
It doesn’t matter that segments, journeys, and even content were created thanks to Gen AI.
What I believe is that the marketer’s job is going to change.
They will have to learn to manage the parallel conversations brands have simultaneously with their customers.
They will need to integrate regulatory, budgetary constraints, tone of voice, real-time stock, consent, and I could list many more topics for several more lines.
And we will be able to do it.
Precisely because AI is not just a gadget to bypass SQL.
AI is the enabler we needed to converse with our customers and fortunately, in the Salesforce world, we’ll be able to lean on Data Cloud.
See you next week!
Other ways I can help you: