5 (Surprisingly Easy) Ways to Scale Marketing With AI
Published Aug 1
Scaling your marketing operations is a necessity in 2024, regardless of your industry. Staying competitive and efficient separates the winners from the losers, and AI tools can be your secret weapon. While AI isn’t a magic bullet, it can work wonders if used correctly. Today, experts will show us five ways to scale marketing with AI. You’ll also learn how Superside, with our AI-enhanced creative and consulting services, can help you streamline processes, improve data analysis and personalize customer experiences.
The AI boom is here. But, honestly, most of us are still trying to figure out the best way to use AI and leverage its potential from initial ideation through to campaign measurement.
This was one of the main points of discussion at our recent virtual event, The Infinite Canvas Summit—how can we use AI not only for design but also to scale marketing?
Thanks to the insights of our expert hosts, Saima Rashid, SVP Marketing and Revenue Analytics at 6sense and Lauren Crichton, Marketing Director at Sana, we have the answer now. Let’s explore 5 ways to scale marketing with AI that actually work in 2024 and beyond.
The Evolution of AI in Marketing
After completing over 1,000 AI design projects, we have learned a thing or two about saving money, time and resources by combining AI with the expertise of our creatives. Internally, Superside has successfully integrated AI into different design and marketing processes, allowing us to have more control over certain operations while also maximizing efficiency.
But following the latest AI design trends is not always easy—humans, people with lives, experiences and knowledge, are still the cornerstone of all our operations, which also affects marketing processes like AI in change management.
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As Crichton pointed out during our Infinite Canvas event, it’s impossible to prematurely assume that we know exactly what we’re doing when it comes to AI, but this doesn’t mean that finding the right path is an impossible task.
Balance between experience and AI is necessary, and that’s the foundation of starting to successfully scale marketing with large language models and AI prompts and tools.
4 Benefits of Scaling Marketing With AI
Why use AI to scale my marketing operations if they are already running like a well-oiled machine? Well, the evidence is clear–there are countless benefits to using AI in marketing, but I’ll give you just four to get started:
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5 Ways to Scale Marketing With AI in 2024
It’s time to cut to the chase–we’ll now go over five demonstrated ways to scale marketing using AI. But first, some background and context related to our speakers.
Rashid, works at 6sense, a company that helps B2B organizations eliminate guesswork and proceed with confidence by leveraging the power of AI, big data and machine learning.
Superside has partnered with 6sense in the past for creative tasks–we built up event engagement for them with AR, resulting in massive engagement and fast turnarounds.
On the other hand, Crichton works at Sana Labs, a company transforming how organizations learn and access knowledge. At Superside, we use Sana internally for knowledge management, and we couldn’t be happier with the results.
Now that you have enough context, let’s dive in! If you missed our Infinite Canvas Summit, make sure to read our recap, which includes expert AI tips.
1. End-to-end AI-driven marketing workflows
Integrating AI into workflows (whether we talk about marketing or creative workflows) is never an easy task–we need to learn how to do it and then see the ROI of completing this not-so-monumental task.
Saima Rashid, SVP of Marketing & Revenue Analytics at 6Sense
6sense is unique because we were built on a data foundation. AI has been integral to our operations from the beginning, starting with predictive AI ten years ago to understand which companies are in the market.
The reality is that companies can use fully integrated AI-driven marketing workflows to manage their marketing processes, ensuring efficient pipeline generation by automating tasks. This is what Rashid did at 6sense, which allowed the company to be more proficient in tasks ranging from identifying market opportunities to crafting personalized outreach.
Here’s how the process worked:
1. Predictive AI: First, AI is used to identify companies that are in the market by analyzing vast amounts of data, which is then used to forecast potential customers.
We then incorporated descriptive AI to determine why these companies are in the market and what signals they are showing. This evolved into prescriptive AI to guide our next best actions based on data and signals.
2. Descriptive AI: Then, the AI understands why these companies are in the market by analyzing their behaviors and signals.
3. Prescriptive AI: After that, the AI determines the best next steps by translating data and signals into actionable insights.
4. Generative AI: Finally, we get to our favorite part–Sana then uses AI to create personalized marketing content and communications to engage potential customers, ensuring a human-like touch in interactions.
This AI process resulted in numerous benefits, including the reduction of manual effort by automating the entire marketing workflow, ensuring uniformity in outreach and follow-ups, and, the jewel in the crown, the easy scaling of marketing with AI with increasing data and customer interactions.
About three years ago, we integrated generative AI into our product. Now, it's not just about using cool new technology; it's about generating a pipeline with an end-to-end AI-run workflow. We have a saying, 'AI that generates pipe, not hype,' and we're fully committed to it.
As shown by 6sense, companies adopting an end-to-end AI-driven marketing workflow can significantly enhance their marketing efficiency and effectiveness, generating a robust pipeline and ensuring consistent engagement with potential customers.
2. Automate repeatable and time-consuming tasks
I know we sound repetitive when we say that AI can automate repetitive processes, but it’s the truth! Rashid said that 6sense leverages AI automation to handle repetitive and time-consuming tasks, allowing the most valuable part of the business, the humans, to focus on other high-value activities.
AI automation didn’t happen overnight. We've been doing this for years, building not just our playbook, but also our confidence in letting AI handle more use cases. From the beginning, we saw the trend of B2B inflation—more touches to win deals and more contacts in the buying group.
Automation with AI in marketing involves streamlining standard outreach efforts, follow-ups and re-engagement campaigns, which is particularly necessary in B2B industries, where the increasing demands for speed are tangible.
To do this, 6sense followed 5 steps:
1. Identify repetitive tasks: It all started by pinpointing tasks that are repetitive and time-consuming for the marketing team, such as webinar follow-ups and standard outreach efforts.
2. Deploy AI for standard outreach: The company then used AI to handle follow-ups for events like webinars, automating outreach to all attendees and ensuring timely and consistent communication.
3. Focus on high-value leads: AI can identify and prioritize leads that show higher engagement or intent, ensuring that business development representatives (BDRs) focus on the most promising prospects.
Buyers are demanding a more personalized experience and faster responses. This reality necessitates leveraging AI to scale our efforts since we’re not getting an additional budget for more headcount or programs. Step one for us was to automate repeatable tasks for our BDRs, like webinar follow-ups.
4. Automate reengagement campaigns: 6sense implemented AI-driven playbooks to reengage closed-lost opportunities, ensuring consistent follow-up and increasing the chances of converting these leads over time.
5. Build confidence over time: Once the company saw the results, it gradually increased AI’s responsibilities as the team gained confidence in its capabilities, starting with simpler tasks and progressing to more complex use cases.
We started with use cases like automating webinar follow-ups, allowing AI to handle standard outreach and identify attendees interested in follow-up meetings. One of our most successful use cases was 'awaken the dead,' where we reengaged closed-lost opportunities from six months ago, automating playbooks based on the reasons for the deal loss.
Following this AI automation process in marketing has helped 6sense reduce the workload of human teams, ensure consistent and timely follow-ups and scale their marketing operations without the need for additional budget or headcount.
By automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks with AI, marketing teams can significantly enhance their efficiency and scalability, opening new possibilities for companies that need to move fast and cover the growing demands of B2B marketing.
3. Enhance knowledge management and retrieval with AI
Sana uses AI to capture, transcribe, summarize, index and retrieve verbal knowledge exchanged in meetings. All these tasks sound simple on paper, but they are time-consuming and require a well-trained workforce to complete them.
Knowledge retrieval is something we're quite obsessed about at Sana. Our thesis is that the real value of workplace AI is when it has context on all of your company's most up-to-date knowledge, including verbal knowledge.
This approach lets employees access and leverage invaluable company data effectively, enhancing decision-making and efficiency in fast-paced environments.
We believe that so much invaluable company knowledge is exchanged verbally in meetings rather than in written documentation. In fast-moving scale-ups, many updates and tactics are shared in quick calls or Slack messages rather than formal documents. At Sana, we see meetings as an untapped source of new company data.
As Crichton mentions, for Sana, the implementation of AI to enhance knowledge management was a game changer. Here’s how it worked:
1. Capture verbal knowledge: Sana implemented AI tools to record and transcribe verbal communications during meetings. This ensures that all spoken information is captured accurately.
2. Summarize and index: Then, the company used AI to summarize key points from the transcriptions and index them for easy retrieval. This allowed employees to quickly find and review important information from past meetings.
3. Retrieve and analyze: After that, Sana enabled AI to retrieve relevant meeting summaries and analyze the content to provide actionable insights. For example, it can suggest rebuttals based on previous discussions or draft emails with relevant agendas and source citations.
Capturing and indexing verbal data from meetings can make employees more effective and efficient. When building our second product, Corsan AI, it was crucial that the AI could transcribe, summarize, index, retrieve, and analyze meetings just like any other knowledge asset, such as a document or a PDF.
4. Integrate with existing tools: The company ensured that the AI integrates seamlessly with existing communication and documentation tools such as Slack or email to capture all forms of verbal and written communication.
5. Provide superhuman recall: Following this process equipped employees with the ability to recall detailed information from any meeting, enhancing their ability to make informed decisions and improve their performance.
As Sana grows, AI can now handle the increasing volume of verbal knowledge without the need for additional resources. Moreover, the integration of AI helped employees save valuable time by accessing indexed meeting information, improving their decision-making with data that supports more informed and strategic steps.
For example, imagine a sales rep working on a new inbound deal with two weeks between the intro call and the discovery call. Sana AI can help by summarizing the first meeting, suggesting proactive rebuttals based on the prospect's pain points, drafting an email with an agenda for the upcoming call, and providing all the source citations. This gives every person in the company superhuman recall, allowing them to act on it to improve outcomes.
By enhancing knowledge management and retrieval with AI, companies like Sana can ensure that invaluable verbal communications are not lost but are captured, analyzed and utilized effectively.
4. Use AI for content drafting and refinement
Crichton mentions that Sana can leverage AI to generate initial drafts of marketing content, allowing human marketers to focus on refining and perfecting these drafts.
I think one of the best things content creators and product marketers can use AI for is generating initial drafts. However, I have yet to experience a situation where I can publish AI-generated content without any form of editing or refinement.
Using AI for content drafting not only speeds up the content creation process but also enhances the skills of the marketing team by fostering a deeper understanding of content quality and standards. Here’s how Sana did it and how other companies can do it too:
1. Generate initial drafts: Sana used AI to create first drafts of various marketing materials, such as blog posts, social media updates and product descriptions. The company ensured that the AI had access to the latest tone of voice documents and examples of past successful content.
2. Refine and edit: Human marketers review the AI-generated drafts, refining and editing them to meet the company's high standards. This process helps identify areas for improvement in terms of sentence length, tone, structure and level of detail.
Even if the AI has access to your latest tone of voice documents or past examples, you might still feel that the content isn't quite good enough. That's okay because this process forces you to think critically about what needs improvement—whether it's sentence length, tone, structure, order, references, or level of detail.
3. Iterative improvement: Afterward, the company encouraged an iterative process where marketers analyze why certain AI-generated content doesn't meet expectations, leading to continuous improvement in both AI prompts and human editing skills.
4. Improve prompt specificity: It’s also always important to train marketing teams to provide more specific prompts to the AI, enhancing the quality of initial drafts. This skill also translates to better delegation and management of tasks within the human team.
For me, this speeds up the process of arriving at something I truly want, even if I end up doing the writing. A tangential benefit is that it makes us better managers to our human team members. The more specific you are when prompting the AI, the better the result, which is also true when delegating tasks to junior team members.
5. Foster better management skills: Finally, Sana used the insights gained from refining AI-generated content to improve how tasks are delegated and managed within the marketing team. This process helps marketers articulate their expectations more clearly, benefiting both AI interactions and human collaborations.
This resulted in increased efficiency, as the content creation process was accelerated by having a solid starting point for drafts, overall quality improvement of the content and consistency, as the AI analyzed the company’s tone and style. Most importantly, it led to scalability.
Seeing AI-generated content that isn't quite right teaches you something about your content aspirations that you haven't been able to put into words. This introspective process can make you better at supporting your human team members in their processes as well.
By using AI to generate initial drafts of marketing content, companies can scale their content creation efforts efficiently while maintaining high-quality standards, which is, in our opinion and experience, one of the best ways to scale marketing with artificial intelligence.
5. Enhance lead management and conversion with AI
Another great application of AI in marketing is enhancing lead management and conversions in different processes. Rashid mentions that 6sense uses AI to manage initial touchpoints with inbound and high-intent outbound leads, freeing up BDRs to focus on high-value activities like personalized engagement and phone calls.
Our AI assistant handles all inbound inquiries as the first touch, and it also leads outbound prospecting on high-intent accounts. This allows BDRs to focus more on calling prospects, improving our conversion rates. We refined our approach use case by use case, learning and adapting over time.
This clever approach ensures no lead is left unattended and leverages AI for efficient lead qualification and follow-up, improving overall conversion rates. Here’s how the approach works:
1. Automate initial touchpoints: Sana deployed AI assistants to handle the first touch for all inbound leads and high-intent outbound accounts. This ensures that every lead is promptly engaged with a relevant and high-value call-to-action (CTA).
2. Focus BDR efforts on high-value tasks: After completing the first step, AI allowed BDRs to focus on personalized outreach and phone calls by offloading initial email engagements to AI. This division of labor maximizes the BDRs' efficiency and effectiveness.
AI acts as the BDR that never sleeps, ensuring no qualified account is left behind. If leads or accounts show high intent but your team can't keep up due to scale and capacity, AI can step in to manage the demand that marketing generates. Start with existing problems like scale, capacity and quality, then test and iterate new use cases.
3. Utilize AI for follow-up and reengagement: Then, 6sense implemented AI-driven follow-up strategies for leads that were previously unresponsive or lost due to timing or budget constraints. The company used specific messaging based on past interactions to reengage these leads.
4. Iterative approach to AI use cases: Refinement is always essential when it comes to AI. The company started with a few specific use cases and gradually expanded based on results and learnings. It’s always necessary to continuously refine the AI's performance by testing and iterating on different strategies.
5. Leverage AI for Insights and Recommendations: Finally, Sana used AI to gather and consolidate account and contact insights from various sources, providing BDRs with comprehensive data to inform their outreach strategies.
This approach allows BDRs to focus on other high-value activities, ensures all leads are engaged promptly and consistently and enables the marketing team to handle a larger volume of leads, thus scaling marketing operations.
I believe AI can autonomously generate 13% of your pipeline. BDRs appreciate spending more time personalizing and researching, supported by AI serving up account and contact insights in the CRM. This consolidates data from multiple sources and recommends the best actions, enhancing efficiency and effectiveness.
6sense successfully found a way to leverage AI for initial touchpoints, follow-ups and comprehensive data insights, ultimately resulting in win-win situations for everyone in the marketing team.
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Looking at Future AI-Powered Marketing Strategies & Trends
It doesn’t end here–there are countless ways of scaling marketing with AI, and the future certainly looks promising. Here are three use cases that will become more relevant as time progresses:
- AI in customer segmentation: Using AI to segment audiences is a turning point for businesses, as machine learning algorithms can analyze vast amounts of data and identify patterns to categorize customers into distinct segments. For example, AI can analyze purchasing history, browsing behavior and social media activity to create detailed customer profiles, which can then be used to tailor marketing campaigns to specific audience segments.
- AI chatbots and virtual assistants: AI can be a major disruptor in enhancing customer service and engagement through chatbots and virtual assistants. Deploying AI-powered tools to handle customer inquiries, provide support and engage with users in real time significantly improves efficiency. Recent studies show that AI chatbots in business allow organizations to redirect 64% of agents' efforts toward addressing complex problems, a significant increase from the 50% achieved without AI. Virtual assistants manage to decrease inquiries by 70% across phone calls, chats and emails. Additionally, 23% of customer service organizations use AI digital assistants as their primary means of communication.
- AI for programmatic advertising: Automating ad buying and placement through programmatic advertising involves using AI to purchase and place ads in real time. AI is becoming the superpower of programmatic advertising, with new AI ad creative tools and processes emerging every day. Statista Market Insights expects that 70% of digital advertising will be automated by AI by 2028.
Revolutionize Your Marketing With AI-Enhanced Strategic Solutions From Superside
Learning from the best is the best way to avoid common pitfalls, especially when discussing revolutionary technology like AI. At Superside, our digital marketing consulting services are at your disposal to help you start building your marketing pipelines, this time with the power of strategic AI consulting.
Time to transform your marketing game—let Superside help you lead the way with AI-powered strategies to scale your efforts and streamline every creative need.
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