Marketers Overwhelmed by Data Look to AI for Help

Never in history have businesses had a better read on their customers. With the power to track everything from social media interactions to the time and location of digital touchpoints, companies can create hyper-personalized campaigns tailored to reach any customer at any time. When done right, this level of personalization results in 40% higher revenues, according to McKinsey.

But the deluge of data that fuels personalization often hampers it. According to research by Braze, 80% of marketers say they are collecting more data than they know what to do with. 

As the omnichannel landscape grows, and marketers become reliant on more platforms to reach consumers, data is becoming more fragmented. As a result, only 20% of brands report having a cohesive view of their customers, according to the Braze 2023 Global Customer Engagement Review—and when that blind spot interferes with content customization, it can create significant revenue risks.

Every time a potential customer goes online, they create several data points—from their geolocation to their browser interests. Customers are online almost constantly through their phones, generating more data than marketing teams can manually sift through. 

“The average brand has gone from parsing through millions of data points, to potentially billions,” says Gavin Matthews, Group Product Manager, Ecosystem at Contentful. “There’s no way a human is going to be able to digest that.” 

With its rapid data-crunching capabilities, AI is an obvious solution for marketing teams, and 92% of businesses are already using AI-driven personalization to drive growth, according to the Twilio State of Personalization Report 2023.

Not only can AI quickly filter the data and point teams to the best insights, but when combined with a composable content platform, like Contentful, marketers can tailor and track every component of a potential customer’s e-commerce journey. By partnering with a range of AI-enabled vendors and personalization engines like Ninetailed, Contentful empowers marketing teams with real-time customer insights to inform and automate content decisions. 

Today, personalizing content for various segments means marketing teams are on the hook for a wider range of content. Contentful’s in-house generative AI tools help streamline content creation by enabling automation of copywriting and keyword creation, as well as image sourcing and editing. 

“AI is really good at breaking through the blank-page problem,” says Matthews. “It gives you that creative spark, so you can create content that’s super-engaging without starting from scratch every single time.”

To win consumers’ loyalty, brands need to tailor every facet of the customer journey to the individual—but to achieve that personalization, marketing teams should first prioritize the data points that provide the greatest insight. 

“One of the classic mistakes that marketers make is collecting too much unopinionated data,” says Matthews. “You need to find the five data points that have a significant impact on whether or not a piece of content will perform.” 

Once that data is identified, it’s important that digital teams evolve their A/B testing to examine every component of every experience, and this process should be automated. By leveraging tools that automatically test content with different audiences, marketing teams are better able to offer hyper-personalized content at scale. 

“The most competitive brands we see are personalizing everything about the experience, and that’s leading to really demonstrable outcomes,” says Matthews. “AI can really help scale that process, and make the content creator more efficient.”