The Marketing Operations Strategist - How AI is transforming marketing ops – and how to get started 🤖

Hey! 👋

AI is all the rage these days, but much of the hype is all fluff. So I went on a mission to find examples of brands actually using AI (and looked for common patterns in what they are doing), so you can think about how your org can actually benefit from real AI.

Let me tell you more about it after a quick mention from our wonderful sponsors 💖

Now let’s get into the ways you can leverage AI, or at least start thinking about how to build a data foundation that AI could use to your advantage. 🤓

Here are some of my favorite use cases:

1. Lead Scoring and Prioritization

So many current scoring models are either too basic (if field value = xyz, add 3 points to score) or too blackbox (think: 6sense). You can pay for a more complex solution, but many require development experience or data scientists. With AI making strides with intelligent analysis, we can now use AI to take some of the lift off of our shoulders while also being able to adjust fairly easily.

• Concept: Use AI to look at data, analyze it, and then take those judgments to score based on your criteria.

• How it works: Check out how you can use Zapier + ChatGPT or Clay + ChatGPT/Claygent to score leads.

• How you can get started: Look at all of your tools to see if any have predictive scoring (think: HubSpot, Salesforce) or tinker with tools like Zapier + Clay to create your own solution.

2. Marketing Spend Optimization

• Concept: Use AI to review campaign results and tweak spend accordingly. AI can also run campaign experiments more efficiently than many humans. In addition, AI can take your data and surface lookalike audiences, which are companies you haven’t targeted but who have a high propensity to buy based on having similar traits as your closed-won customers.

• How it works: Use a tool like Metadata to automate much of your ad spend. The backend of these tools are a bit of a black box, but costly to recreate in-house.

• How you can get started: See if any of your current martech stack offers this functionality — tools like Demandbase and 6sense may have some of these offerings already, based on your license level. Then, take a look at vendors like Metadata (they are not a sponsor, I just am the most familiar with them and like them) to see if they could help optimize your campaigns/productivity.

3. Content Optimization for SEO

• Concept: Use AI to analyze your web pages and make recommendations or adjustments or SEO optimization.

• How it works: AI tools analyze SEO trends, competitive keywords, and user engagement data to optimize content for search performance.

• How you can get started: Admittedly, this is a newer area to me — so my main recommendation is to check out this article and evaluate the different offerings. 🙂 You also could try to use ChatGPT to analyze your SEO, to test the concept.

4. Automated Prospect/Company Research

• Concept: Let AI search the internet and pull in findings for you, so your SDRs can spend less time manually doing searches.

• How it works: AI searches the internet to find answers to the questions you have about companies or prospects. This tends to work better with account research, but can be used for prospect research as well. Check out this example from Clay. If you can save your SDR a few hours of manual work, that’s more time on live calls/writing emails and, hopefully, more revenue!

• How you can get started: Check out Clay or other vendors…I am the most familiar with Clay, but Apollo and Lusha may be worth looking at.

5. Campaign Forecasting and Trend Analysis

• Concept: Let AI look at your campaign performance, using AI and algorithms to help forecast where you should increase or decrease spend, or which campaigns will resonate with which audiences. These tools can also help with marketing attribution, without needing a data scientist!

• How it works: AI analyzes past campaign data and current trends to forecast performance, optimizing campaign planning and budgeting.

• How you can get started: Read more about how Unilever used AI to forecast campaigns. Unfortunately I’m not seeing a great B2B offering at this time, but you could look into a baby step of using marketing mixed modeling (data science) with a tool like Paramark. Some of your existing tools may have elements of this too, like HubSpot or Salesforce. Ask your vendor customer success manager what their latest offerings are!

6. Audience Segmentation for Targeted Campaigns

• Concept: Use data collection and AI to predict which content should be shown to which audience. Use product usage data to send hyper personalized content to users.

• How it works: Companies collect user data within content or product and use that data, in conjunction with AI, to send the user hyper-relevant offers that tend to have a high conversion rate.

• How you can get started: Check out how Netflix’s audience segmentation using AI allows for hyper-targeted content and campaigns. There are also out-of-the-box AI offerings like Salesforce Einstein and HubSpot Breeze. Work with your product team to see if they collect relevant usage data that you can then use to send more targeting messaging. You can also look into posting hidden fields from your marketing automation platform to your web personalization platform like Adobe Target (using cookies), to personalize your website experience.

7. Churn Prediction and Retention Marketing

• Concept: Use customer activity and AI to predict churn before it happens — ideally deploying additional support and CSMs to prevent churn.

• How it works: AI looks at customer activity data, like purchase frequency, engagement across channels, or feature usage, to flag customers who are likely to churn.

• How you can get started: Read about how successful brands leverage AI to predict churn and increase winback success. These brands have big budgets to have their own data scientists, so their success may not be within reach for smaller orgs yet, but you can look into using tools like Calibermind to get your wheels turning and potentially offload some of the data science work.

These items are just scratching the surface, but they should get your creative gears turning when it comes to thinking about how you could potentially leverage AI at your job!

Learning resource of the week:

Helpful AI tool of the week 🤖

Fyxer.ai claims to save you an hour a day in your inbox by reading your messages, categorizing them, helping you write responses, and basically being your AI executive assistant. This is a tool that is quickly climbing my “test out” list, as I tend to quickly get an unwieldy Gmail inbox. 😅 You’d have to be careful using this with a corporate email due to privacy concerns, but heck — I’m always looking for new ways to save time managing my personal email as well.

What I’m up to/what I’m studying

To be honest with you, things are a bit dicey here in the US. As I’m writing this, I have no idea who is going to win the election — this week, I’ve been putting a lot of my energy into donating and supporting my candidate. We will see what happens, maybe when this sends we will know the result! 😅

Dear Sara ✍️

New to marketing operations? On a team of one at your company? Shy/introverted? Wish you could ask a question to an experienced marketing operations professional, without them knowing who you are? Here’s your chance! Submit an anonymous question to me here and I’ll answer a new question in every issue.

Here’s my answer to a question from last week:

Ooohh, this is a tricky one. If I knew the size of your company, I could be more specific — but I’ll take a stab at what I would expect:

If I had a manager like that in a small pre-IPO startup, I’d be pretty frustrated. Assuming the staffing is appropriate for the size of company, it sounds like they are pushing too much onto you. I do see this a lot within early RevOps groups — the company hires a sales operations leader who doesn’t understand marketing, and that leader has no interest in learning about marketing…so they try to hire a senior marketing operations person to do that part of the job for them. I keep trying to educate leaders at companies that they need to hold the RevOps leader accountable to understanding or at least wanting to learn about all parts of GTM, not just sales.

However…if this is a large, post-IPO company, my expectations would be a bit different. That manager may be overwhelmed with paperwork, politics, or understaffed themselves, which could impact how much is feasible for them to accomplish on their own. I’d take a look at the needs of the GTM org vs the staffing to determine if the manager is just overwhelmed.

Regardless, I think it’s fair to look for a promotion if you are overperforming your current role/title expectations.

Especially after the multiple rounds of layoffs in the last few years, this is something that a lot of people run into and struggle with. Overall, I’d look to get recognition and a promotion if I can, but if not, I’d keep my resume sharp and keep my eyes open for new opportunities. I’m hoping the economy will continue to improve and marketing operations teams will get more resourcing, so tiny teams won’t be as prevalent.

What else do you want to hear about from me?

I have a bunch of content lined up, but I want to hear from you — did you enjoy this issue? Is there anything specific you’d like to hear my take on? Please do reply to this email with any and all feedback! 😄

Til next time,

❤️ Sara