Welcome to the 2024 State of AI and Personalization in Marketing Report – Part 1!
In 2023, marketers faced shrinking budgets, higher scrutiny on ROI, and the explosion of Al. While last year’s report predicted marketing teams would become more agile as they embraced automation, the 2024 State of AI and Personalization Report reveals that turned out to be a dramatic understatement. We’re being asked to do more with less, and at a faster pace than ever before.
However, along with those challenges comes an exciting opportunity for all marketers in all industries. With tedious time consuming tasks being eliminated every day by Al, we have more time to focus on important strategic decisions and campaign optimization. With this newfound time, optimization will set apart the elite marketers from the average marketers in 2024.
In the spirit of constant evolution and optimization, DESelect collected insights from marketing experts around the world about how they are adopting Al and new personalization strategies. We looked at the challenges they face, the impact of those challenges on their businesses, and how they think about the current tools available to them. The results were truly thought provoking.
In Part 1, we cover the insights uncovered around AI, and in Part 2 we cover the insights around personalization. Al stole the spotlight in 2023, and the opportunities for marketing applications have many marketers wondering how different 2024 and beyond will look. To give you an idea of how your peers are planning to use marketing-focused Al tools in their job, we asked over 300 of them how they already utilize this technology, the results they’ve seen so far, how to measure them, and what the future holds.
We hope you are able to use the learnings from DESelect’s annual “State of Marketing Al and Personalization” report to shape your own marketing strategy. Finally, here’s to all of us marketers who survived 2023 and are committed to getting 1% better each day in 2024.
To get the most out of this report and your AI and personalization efforts in 2024, we invite you to watch our webinar on demand and continue to Part 2 here.
Key Takeaways - 2024 State of AI in Marketing
2024 State of AI and Personalization Respondents Snapshot
What is your opinion on the concept of Artificial Intelligence in marketing?
Over 63 percent of marketers are interested in Al to assist in day-to-day responsibilities, whether for personal workloads or across their team. Notably, while the general public tends to have some distrust in Al, only seven percent of marketers are skeptical of its value.
How would you rate the effectiveness of AI in improving your marketing strategies and outcomes on a scale of 1 to 5?
Marketers are already seeing an impact from the Al they use. 40 percent say Al adoption has met expectations, impacting various marketing functions across the campaign lifecycle, and an additional 27 percent say it exceeds expectations.
Compared to roughly 13 percent who are disappointed with their experiences, there is plenty of value to leverage from Al.
What area of marketing are you most excited to see AI enhance?
Al can touch on every dimension of the campaign lifecycle, and it’s no surprise the top three areas show a desire to form deeper connections with customers.
ChatGPT took the business world by storm in 2023, and similar content generation solutions will likely attract marketers’ interest as ways to quickly craft resonant copy. Look for design solutions to complement these as well, lowering the barrier to entry or relieving current designers of many repetitive tasks. Predictive Al already has exciting use cases that drive personalization, analyzing historical data and creating content/segments based on anticipated behavior. Further applications to customer journeys and send times promise more engaging experiences than ever before.
Similarly, audience segmentation, already a process benefiting from automation, will see further efficiencies arrive in the coming years. Pinpoint insights from data analysis and processes that make joins, querying, and deduplication easier promise to create segments primed for action.
How has the use of AI impacted your ability to target and engage with your audience?
Fifty-one percent of respondents haven’t experienced Al capabilities for audience segmentation yet, either because their job description doesn’t require it or lack of access. Among the other half, over two-thirds have created either more responsive audiences or made the process easier.
However, the rest encountered the opposite experience – Al that made an important process more unnecessarily convoluted. The results of these complications often spell delayed campaign launches, inaccurate targeting, and other mistakes that impact marketing ROI.
Have you encountered any ethical considerations or challenges related to the use of AI in your marketing strategies?
Luckily, the vast majority of respondents haven’t yet found ethical challenges when using Al in their marketing strategies or operations. However, the 13 percent who did listed interesting considerations to ponder.
Have you personally used AI tools or technologies in your marketing efforts?
2023 marked the year Al went from scifi concept to the mainstream. Putting this mass adoption into a figure, about 62 percent of marketers have experience with Al marketing tools.
As knowledge of Al becomes more integral to marketing efforts across industry, geography, and experience level, marketers will need to learn this technology to not only create impressive results but stay competitive in a job market that is simultaneously skilling up.
What specific AI applications or techniques are you currently utilizing in your day-to-day marketing activities?
As mentioned, content ideation and creation has become a prime application of Al for marketers. Over 58 percent have used ChatGPT, Google Bard, or a similar LLM to power messaging and communications.
Foresight into likely buying scenarios has also become important, with 44 percent wielding predictive analytics when creating customer journeys, audience segments, lead prioritization, churn forecasting, and more.
Marketers also adopt Al to simply make the repetitive easier to deal with. 36 percent take advantage of Al for the purpose of task automation – freeing up time to work on initiatives that make an impact.
Are you planning to increase your investment in AI-powered marketing tools or technologies in the near future?
2023 was the year Al demonstrated value, and 2024 looks to become a year of frenzied adoption. 85 percent of marketers plan to adopt Al at some point, and 67 percent want to adopt within the next 12 months. Considering 27 percent of those surveyed work for organizations with more than 500 employees, it’s impressive even enterprises, with their lengthy, bureaucratic buying processes, are prioritizing swift action on Al adoption.
The largest segment, 40 percent, say they want to adopt Al as soon as possible. Marketers (of course) know trend setters are the ones who benefit in the long run, as they have extra time to practice and modify before the rest of the market catches up. Al can be the kingmaker, with early adopters seeing a significant competitive edge over competitors who don’t adopt as quickly and lose productivity or revenue opportunities.
Which of the following factors would most influence your decision to invest more in AI-powered marketing tools?
As with all business decisions, it all comes down to return on investment. Unsurprisingly, 65 percent of marketers are most influenced by the ROI an Al tool provides.
That said, there are two sides to ROI – the revenues produced and the costs to acquire. Of those two sides, cost reduction (38 percent) is preferred to an increase in revenues (27). This suggests smart Al adoption can lead to sustainable growth, and marketing leaders want to set their teams up for any further economic uncertainty with long-term investments.
Are there any concerns or reservations you have about incorporating AI into your marketing efforts?
Another common business concern is how tech adoption impacts operations in the short and long term. Over 54 percent of marketers worry about Al adoption convoluting currently efficient processes, despite benefits elsewhere in the campaign creation process. Similarly, more than 34 percent feel angst over a lengthy or confusing implementation that kills team efficiency in the short term. As just mentioned, expense is always a cause for concern (31 percent), but if Al adoption leads to increased revenues or cost reduction this typically fades.
Interestingly, there’s not as much concern around the actual performance of Al. 27 percent are worried about a disconnect between advertising messaging and the actual output or ease of use the tool provides, and only 13 percent have concerns about an Al tool that isn’t flexible enough to feasibly fit their business model.
Have you explored or experimented with AI-driven content creation or generation tools? If so, what was your experience?
What are your feelings towards ChatGPT?
ChatGPT took the business world by storm this past year, and it’s unsurprising to see the vast majority of adopters find value. You don’t have to be a power user (15 percent) to get help with some content creation and ideation (38 percent).
What are your feelings towards Salesforce Einstein AI?
Salesforce has hyped up its Einstein Al solution, but how do marketers actually feel about its performance?
As Marketing Cloud is more niche for marketers, it’s not surprising to find there’s less knowledge and usage among our random sample of marketers than ChatGPT. What is more surprising – even with less product knowledge, there’s still more users relying on it intensely {16 percent vs 15 percent).
There’s still causal usage for task automation and predictive analytics, but Einstein has fewer detractors as welI. Only 3.6 percent of Einstein users find it unhelpful, compared to 5.5 percent of ChatGPT users.
What is the key advantage of using AI in marketing compared to traditional approaches?
The largest benefit of Al, according to almost half of marketers, is the time saved from having to complete manual tasks. This time saved allows for expansion of throughput, a reduction of backlogs, and fine-tuning key initiatives. On a personal level, automating repetitive tasks creates a more enjoyable job experience.
About half that number view Al as any other business resource, designed to either increase revenues or cut costs. There are also others interested in making their workloads either more manageable (16 percent) or impactful (11 percent).
How do you see the role of AI affecting your career over the next 5 years?
Over 47 percent of marketers view the promise of Al as making their jobs easier, and the data across the rest of this report shows those benefits are already becoming evident. While 11 percent may worry about their jobs, technical investment in the right areas makes any marketer indispensable to their department.
The 2024 State of AI and Perceived Value
It’s easy to see why Al broke out in 2023 with solid content creation and other optimizations that make marketers’ lives easier – for the most part. For individual marketers, the value of thorough task automation is somewhat offset with worries about a more competitive job market. As more and more businesses adopt marketing Al solutions, brands will have less and less of an opportunity to craft a distinct competitive advantage through hyper-efficiency and supreme ROI as their competitors crowd the trend.
Go to Part 2 of the report and dive into what your peers said about personalization next. And don’t forget to check out the webinar on demand where we cover the report findings in detail.
To learn how DESelect can help you create premium customer experiences that drive revenue, brand loyalty, and ROI, we invite you to schedule a meeting today.
