https://www.channelfutures.com/wp-content/themes/channelfutures_child/assets/images/logo/footer-new-logo.png
  • Home
  • Technologies
    • Back
    • Analytics
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Cloud
    • Data Centers
    • Desktop
    • IoT
    • Mobility
    • Networking
    • Open Source
    • RMM/PSA
    • Security
    • Virtualization
    • Voice/Connectivity
  • Strategy
    • Back
    • Best Practices
    • Business Models
    • Channel 101
    • Channel Programs
    • Channel Research
    • Digital Transformation
    • Diversity & Inclusion
    • Leadership
    • Mergers and Acquisitions
    • Sales & Marketing
    • Specialty Practices
  • MSSP Insider
    • Back
    • Business of Security
    • Cloud and Edge
    • Endpoint
    • Network
    • People and Careers
    • Training and Policies
  • MSP 501
    • Back
    • 2021 MSP 501 Application
    • 2020 MSP 501 Rankings
    • 2020 Hot 101 Rankings
    • 2020 MSP 501 Report
  • Intelligence
    • Back
    • Our Sponsors
    • From the Industry
    • Content Resources
    • COVID-19 Partner Help
    • Galleries
    • Podcasts
    • Reports
    • Videos
    • Webinars
    • White Papers
  • EMEA
  • Awards
    • Back
    • Excellence in Digital Services
    • 2021 MSP 501
    • Top Gun 51
  • Events
    • Back
    • CP Conference & Expo
    • Channel Partners Evolution
    • Channel Evolution Europe
    • Channel Partners Event Coverage
    • Webinars
  • Channel Mentor
    • Back
    • Channel Market Intelligence
    • Channel Educational Series
Channel Futures
  • NEWSLETTER
  • Home
  • Technologies
    • Back
    • Analytics
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Cloud
    • Data Centers
    • Desktop
    • IoT
    • Mobility
    • Networking
    • Open Source
    • RMM/PSA
    • Security
    • Virtualization
    • Voice/Connectivity
  • Strategy
    • Back
    • Best Practices
    • Business Models
    • Channel 101
    • Channel Programs
    • Channel Research
    • Digital Transformation
    • Diversity & Inclusion
    • Leadership
    • Mergers and Acquisitions
    • Sales & Marketing
    • Specialty Practices
  • MSSP Insider
    • Back
    • Business of Security
    • Cloud and Edge
    • Endpoint
    • Network
    • People and Careers
    • Training and Policies
  • MSP 501
    • Back
    • 2021 MSP 501 Application
    • 2020 MSP 501 Rankings
    • 2020 Hot 101 Rankings
    • 2020 MSP 501 Report
  • Intelligence
    • Back
    • Our Sponsors
    • From the Industry
    • Content Resources
    • COVID-19 Partner Help
    • Galleries
    • Podcasts
    • Reports
    • Videos
    • Webinars
    • White Papers
  • EMEA
  • Awards
    • Back
    • Excellence in Digital Services
    • 2021 MSP 501
    • Top Gun 51
  • Events
    • Back
    • CP Conference & Expo
    • Channel Partners Evolution
    • Channel Evolution Europe
    • Channel Partners Event Coverage
    • Webinars
  • Channel Mentor
    • Back
    • Channel Market Intelligence
    • Channel Educational Series
    • Newsletter
  • REGISTER
  • MSPs
  • VARs / SIs
  • Digital Service Providers
  • Cloud Service Providers
  • CHANNEL PARTNERS ONLINE
 Channel Futures

Sales & Marketing


TopBots' Adelyn Zhou at MarTech Conference 2018

AI Powers Personalized Marketing

  • Written by Tom Kaneshige
  • April 27, 2018
Channel partners well-versed in digital marketing, artificial intelligence and customer data platforms will lead the way to one-to-one marketing.

(Pictured above: Topbots’ Adelyn Zhou on stage at MarTech Conference in San Jose, California, April 25.)

First, a little test. Consider the following passage:

“Kitty couldn’t fall asleep for a long time. Her nerves were strained as two tight strings, and even a glass of hot wine, that John made her drink, did not help her. Lying in bed she kept going over and over that monstrous scene at the meadow.”

Was this written by artificial intelligence (AI) or a human?

“This was written by a computer in St. Petersburg in 72 hours,” says Adelyn Zhou, CMO at Topbots, a community for enterprise AI executives, speaking to marketers at the MarTech Conference in San Jose, California, this week. “As we get better and better over time, you’ll see more and more things written by computers. And now you have tools of copy generation that are helping people – marketers like us – create better headlines, better topics, things like that.”

This is just the tip of the iceberg for AI in marketing. AI has evolved quickly over the last few years and is now the heartbeat of marketing tech. According to the 2018 marketing technology vendor landscape report unveiled at the MarTech Conference, AI has become embedded in every major marketing tech system to the point where standalone, predictive analytics tools are disappearing.

Digital marketers now find themselves in a hotly contested race to get AI to deliver on marketing’s great promise of personalization — a feat that spans discovery, content creation and delivery.

For instance, AI can mine videos, images and reviews, and learn how each customer feels about a product at a speed and scale that’s impossible for a human to do. It can create hyperpersonalized content that looks like it came from a human. And it can deliver the right content to the right person at the right time through, say, a conversational bot, which also mimics a human.

“After many years of extravagant promises and monumental disappointments, AI is finally starting to produce real-life returns for early adopting companies,” says Jason Heller, partner, global lead, digital marketing operations and technology at McKinsey & Company. “It might be clunky in some instances, but it’s here.”

Of course, it’s equally important to note that AI isn’t something marketers can do on their own – “You can’t be Don Quixote,” Heller says. AI’s underlying technology challenges loom large, especially concerning systems with customer data, which AI needs to train on.

Many marketers will no doubt turn to channel partners for help. A channel partner can assess a marketing tech vendor’s embedded machine learning model, implement a customer data platform, integrate customer data silos, and continuously tune AI to yield the best results.

Here’s just one example of the power of AI in marketing, courtesy of Zhou:

She says a popular consumer product, say, L’Oreal Revitalift night cream, might have hundreds of online reviews on Amazon and elsewhere, making it impossible for a human to process and distill meaningful insights. For AI, though, processing this data isn’t that difficult.

Distilling meaning is also becoming easier through advancements in AI.

Let’s say AI runs across a review from someone named Tyler, who writes: “I recognize that this product is made primarily for and definitely marketed to women. However, hear me out here, as a guy in his late twenties who’s beginning to notice appearance of fine wrinkles around the eyes and on the forehead, Revitalift night cream knows no gender.”

An AI sentiment analyzer can tell that Tyler is joyful and happy about the product. His language style shows he’s analytical, socially open and extroverted. These psychodemographics flag him as a potential product advocate and inform the type of marketing campaign to reach him. AI can also create the message that will most likely appeal to Tyler — that is, analytical language about the product’s benefits.

“Instead of having to review millions of these individually, you can use text sentiment to figure that out,” Zhou says. “You can also use Pinterest and image-recognition techniques to figure out what type of mood board your different customers like and then intelligently recommend products that fit their style. Those are some of the different ways that you can use machine learning and apply them fundamentally to your marketing.”

Before any of this happens, AI needs customer data to train on. Here’s where the channel partner comes in.

Someone needs to stitch together multiple data sources – terabytes, perhaps petabytes of data – in a way that allows AI models to predict the attributes of a product and offer a personalized customer experience, McKinsey’s Heller says. This means unifying every customer interaction from all sorts of places, such as mobile, web click stream, offline and online sales transactions, internet-of-things sensor data and CRM data, into a customer data platform.

“You now will have the ability at an individual level to take that promise that we’ve had as marketers for God knows, 20-plus years, of real, one-to-one marketing, and actually be able to use signals to determine what is the propensity of a particular individual to purchase a product based on the attributes of that product, the channel that they’re in [and] the sequence of how they’ve been engaged,” Heller says.

Tags: Cloud Service Providers Digital Service Providers MSPs VARs/SIs Analytics Sales & Marketing Strategy Technologies

Related


  • Data center
    Netrality Data Centers Unveils Expanded Partner Program
    Data centers are an integral component of a hybrid architecture.
  • CP-Expo-Logo-1050x618 web
    Day 1 Wraps at Channel Partners Virtual, Big Day 2 on Tap
    With day one of CP Virtual in the books, we offer a recap of highlights and look ahead to day two.
  • ldquoAlliant was fortunate enough to actually be in the control of their production with NetBond so we had already made a sale and we turned the service up to one of our customers We sold the connection to Microsoft Manager It was the very first one sold through the Partner Exchange and we turned it up with absolutely no problem at all It39s a very valuable tool to help add value to the MPLS network that they have Customers today are trying to determine do they keep their MPLS or do they move t
    Why Fortinet for my MSSP?
    With hundreds of thousands of customer nodes under management, and billions of dollars of assets under their protection, the world’s top MSSPs hold their firewalls to extremely high standards for reliability, functionality, and flexibility. Read on to learn why Fortinet stands above the crowd of security vendors when considering solutions to address their complex requirements. […]
  • security centric
    Small and Mid-Size Business Security: 4 Steps to Success
    SMBs are attractive targets for hackers, and in the modern age, weak security can put a stop to both of those things. Not to fear though as SMBs, even with limited budgets and manpower, can significantly reduce their risk by using the right technologies that were designed to work together and offer strong protection while […]

Leave a comment Cancel reply

-or-

Log in with your Channel Futures account

Alternatively, post a comment by completing the form below:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Content

  • Backup Vulnerability: 4 Targets Hackers Might Utilize to Infiltrate Your Backup Solution
  • Exertis Continues Calls for Diversity with LGBTQ+ Discussion
  • Channel Partners Virtual 2021 Is Here — Take Advantage of the Amazing Content
  • Massive SolarWinds Hack Prompts Up to $25 Million in New Security Costs for Company

Galleries

View all

From The Second City: How to Use Improv as a Business Tool

March 3, 2021

Industry Perspectives

View all

5 Ways XDR Can Improve Operational Efficiency for MSPs

March 4, 2021

Multi-Cloud: Strategy or Inevitable Outcome? (or both?)

March 3, 2021

Backup Vulnerability: 4 Targets Hackers Might Utilize to Infiltrate Your Backup Solution

March 2, 2021

Webinars

View all

A Partner’s Perspective on Channel Success in 2021

March 23, 2021

XDR and Why it Matters to MSPs

March 24, 2021

Top Security Trends Impacting Technology Security Providers In 2021

March 25, 2021
  • 1

White Papers

View all

Why Fortinet for my MSSP?

March 2, 2021

Small and Mid-Size Business Security: 4 Steps to Success

March 2, 2021

How SMBs Can Secure Endpoints and Remote Workers for the Long Haul

March 2, 2021

Upcoming Events

View all

Channel Partners Conference & Expo

November 1, 2021 - November 4, 2021

Videos and Fastchats

View all

FASTCHAT: How SOAR Eliminates Security Challenges and Elevates Service Provider Revenues

January 6, 2021

Happy Holidays from Channel Partners & Channel Futures!

December 21, 2020

FASTCHAT: How Old, Unpatched Technologies Are Creating New Security Threats for MSPs and Their Customers

December 3, 2020

Twitter

ChannelFutures

Happy #InternationalWomensDay! Today we celebrate the achievements of women worldwide, and we are proud to partner… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

March 8, 2021
ChannelFutures

#MSPs can help businesses deal with #cloudcomputing and #cybersecurity pain points, says @Dreamix_Ltd.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

March 8, 2021
ChannelFutures

Chinese hacker group #HAFNIUM exploits critical @MSFTExchange Server vulnerability, could impact thousands.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

March 7, 2021
ChannelFutures

Our latest #Cybersecurity Roundup highlights #CPVirtual, @Huntresslabs, @Entrust_Corp and @InsightEnt.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

March 5, 2021
ChannelFutures

RT @Channel_Expo: A HUGE thank you to our amazing #CPVirtual sponsors and exhibitors! 👏 @ATTBusiness @DellTech @8x8 @lumentechco @telarus @…

March 5, 2021
ChannelFutures

.@okta acquiring rival @auth0 in $6.5 billion all-stock transaction. #security dlvr.it/Rtzwdp https://t.co/4LvHCJuwsR

March 4, 2021
ChannelFutures

.@MicrosoftTeams features are coming to @MSFTDynamics365, the company announced at @MS_Ignite. #MicrosoftIgnite… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

March 4, 2021
ChannelFutures

.@PreciselyData acquired by Clearlake Capital, @TAAssociates. #digitaltransformation dlvr.it/RtzbKg https://t.co/1rNYnTScxq

March 4, 2021

MSSP Insider

Newsletters and Updates

Sign up for The Channel Report, Channel Futures Update, MSP 501 Newsletter and more.

Live Channel Events

Get the latest information on the next industry-leading Channel Partners event.

Channel Partners Online

Want more? Find more channel news and analysis on our sister site, Channel Partners.

Media Kit And Advertising

Want to reach our audience? Access our media kit

DISCOVER MORE FROM INFORMA TECH

  • Channel Partners Online
  • Channel Partners Events
  • MSP 501
  • MSSP Insider
  • IoT World Today
  • Webhostingtalk

WORKING WITH US

  • Contact
  • About us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter

FOLLOW Channel Futures ON SOCIAL

  • Privacy
  • CCPA: “Do Not Sell My Data”
  • Cookie Policy
  • Terms
Copyright © 2021 Informa PLC. Informa PLC is registered in England and Wales with company number 8860726 whose registered and Head office is 5 Howick Place, London, SW1P 1WG.
This website uses cookies, including third party ones, to allow for analysis of how people use our website in order to improve your experience and our services. By continuing to use our website, you agree to the use of such cookies. Click here for more information on our Cookie Policy and Privacy Policy.
X