Advanced Strategies: AI Giving Marketers ‘Room For Growth’ In Customer Engagement

A new Braze study has come up with perhaps my new favorite line about AI and how standard its use has become. 

“While most professionals say their organizations are already using AI (99%),” the study says, “there’s room for growth when it comes to making use of it to bolster strategic, creative customer engagement.”

Think about that: Even as AI joins the ranks of pen, paper, and phone in terms of how ubiquitous it is in marketing, there’s still so much potential.

This year’s Customer Engagement Review, conducted with Wakefield Research, found that the top challenges facing marketers in terms of creativity and strategic engagement were having to focus on KPIs (42%), spending too much time on “business-as-usual execution and tasks” (42%), lack of tech for executing creative ideas (41%), and difficulty in demonstrating creative’s ROI (41%). AI, the review says, can help.

“In fact, 79% of our research participants say AI can help automate routine tasks and free up more time for creative thinking,” the study says. “Just about half of respondents say they’re using (or planning to use) AI to enhance customer engagement — including to generate creative ideas, automate repetitive tasks, optimize strategies in real time, enhance data analysis, power predictive analytics, [and] personalize campaigns.”

(Source: Braze)

Braze’s study found that less than a quarter (24%) of marketers were mapping customer behavior and sentiment, and shared insight that 85% of those brands that had “successfully embrace[d] the craft of customer engagement to power first-party relationships” according to its Customer Engagement Index had exceeded revenue goals last year.

“Today’s marketers are facing growing expectations from an increasingly connected consumer, who expects value in exchange for their attention,” says Astha Malik, Braze’s Chief Business Officer. “Marketers are utilizing the power of AI to ignite creativity and craft personalized experiences that resonate with today’s consumer. And by tapping into valuable first-party data and fostering cross-functional collaboration, marketers can transform this data into captivating campaigns that build loyalty and growth.”