But all this started to change with automation which signaled the start of bringing scientific order into marketing by organizing consumer data sets. Artificial Intelligence (AI) though promises a much more exciting phase of quantifying the unknown and futureproofing marketing decisions with much more elaborate data sets. There you go, not so simple, yet so very exciting.

How AI Affects Marketing

We live in a fully digital world and the affairs of this world are such that every action leaves a traceable footprint. For example, reading this article goes into your digital history. The same thing happens when you watch a video, download an app, or even purchase an item online.

The good thing about all these is that vital information about your online habits is being collected and processed in the hopes of understanding your consumption behavior. Hopefully, this will then serve as a model which will help in predicting your future preferences.

Now, let’s take a moment to remove the lens from your back and then direct it to the world. There are about 3 billion active internet users who have a similar digital footprint. Imagine if you had just a fraction of these people as your clients. Is it possible to glean vital information from their history?

Yes. This is just what AI and big data promises marketers.

Some AI Techniques Which Will Impact Marketing

It is well established that there’s no rule of thumb approach to running a business since each organization has its unique challenges. However, there are four commonly-adopted statistical techniques to AI, broadly classified into the following areas – Supervised, Unsupervised and Semi-supervised.

1.     Regression

This involves predictions about the future value (usually of sales or revenue) based on previous data. For example, predicting height from weights of individuals, or of sales price of products.

2.     Classification

Here, you group the data you have at hand and assign it to a category. For example, you group customers who buy baby items under the “parenting” tag.

3.     Clustering

Here, you scour streams of data to identify common patterns, mostly based on the consumption behavior. Example, understanding or deriving ad spends effectively by distributing target audience into cluster segments.

4.     Reinforcement Learning

This involves allowing the machine learn in an enabling environment in the hopes of optimizing a process. In this case, the online store is the environment and the goal is to optimize sales.

While Regression and Classification fall under the category of Supervised Learning, Clustering is a classic example for Unsupervised Learning and Reinforcement learning for Semi-supervised Learning.

Why AI Would Revolutionize Marketing

With the help of advanced concepts of Machine Learning, you can explore a myriad of data about your clients and then use the information gleaned to serve these customers better. Before now, this was deemed impossible due to the effort required to see it through. However, AI made our machines smarter and they are now positioned to further the cause.

Peter Thiel in his book, “Zero to One”, clearly demonstrated that machines are excellent at going through billions of terabytes of data in search of patterns. Humans, on the other hand, are less adept at this, but we are good at analyzing these patterns. Hence, the collaboration. AI has a lot to offer your business. The paragraphs that ensue will explain a few of these benefits.

AI Will Enhance User Experience

Whether you’re selling goods or you’re providing professional services, one popular quote you must’ve stumbled across is “Customer is KING!” Your goal is to make the experience of your client top-notch. This will not only ensure repeat orders, it will propel the customer to spread the good word about your brand.

Businesses are now going a step further, chatbots are not being used as the default means of communicating with customers. These chatbots are predesigned to relate to customers based on the data available. In addition to this, the emergence of Augmented Reality promises to personalize the experience of clients even further.

AI Will Significantly Reduce Your Marketing Budget

It’s not always possible, but marketers strive to produce campaigns which will appeal to a wider audience. In marketing, “One man’s meat is another’s poison” doesn’t count. Every person has to love the deliciously prepared meat or tofu perhaps. There’s no sure way of knowing what will get the attention of your audience. However, AI attempts to do this.

When a digital marketing campaign is launched, there are metrics which, when monitored, provides valuable insight into how well the campaign fared. Over time, these metrics will help you identify what customers react positively to and this will help you create well-tailored ads which drive your point home. Rather than sending out 10 ads, you send just one (based on the analysis of ten other ads).

Conclusion

Without a doubt, AI is an integral part of any successful firm’s marketing unit. Check out Amazon, Tesla, Google, Facebook, even Nike. AI is an all-encompassing solution which will be of immense benefit to your organization. The concept of AI transcends sales or leads, it is what brings about a customer-centric approach to business. While awareness maybe limited and adoption still slow, many a Marketing Decision Maker would definitely be open to the infinite possibilities in integrating AI into their everyday decision making.

Complex it may be. Whoever thought that the future would one day belong to the present or perhaps the present be the future itself. Well, now that we are done with the tough parts, let’s just chew over this.

Still confused? Or maybe just apprehensive about taking your first baby steps in AI. We at Biztruss would love to help you with this.  So while you get busy with your awesome AI plans, we’ll get busy with rolling out our next superblog here. So long then!

The post Why Your Marketing Unit Needs to Be AI Ready appeared first on Biztruss.

The term Ad tech has been doing the rounds for a while now and in all probability you as a smart marketer may have encountered this term. You might ask, “Isn’t Ad Tech the same as martech?” Well, no. Ad tech is all about placing, buying and selling ads while martech is about creating, managing and optimizing campaigns and strategies to accomplish a goal. In a way, Ad Tech is but a subset of martech.

So what essentially are these magical tools which apply to the integration of marketing and technology? How effective are they? Your queries and more are dissected in the ensuing paragraphs with this primer on the most vital toolkits you can possess in your Martech armory.

HootSuite

Are you tired of running your company’s social media account? Twitter today, Facebook tomorrow, forgetting Instagram posts? HootSuite is here to put you at rest. HootSuite is a social media monitoring tool that allows you to manage all these accounts easily and effectively.

With it, you can create a schedule for posts across all social media platforms of choice, manage content, find and track trends and so much more. You can also use reports generated by its analytics tool to track and measure the impact and success of your social media campaign so as to know the areas you need to improve in.

Google AdWords

Google AdWords is an online advertising platform owned and operated by Google. It allows you to create AdWords campaigns where keywords that you’ve bided on and are relevant to your business ads/links are displayed to users who search for those keywords in Google as part of a search query. This is also known as pay-per-click advertising and Google AdWords is just the right tool to run and manage your PPC campaigns so as to make your business successful.

It helps you to attract more visitors to your site and increase conversion rates, create local and international ads all in an easy and measurable process.

SEMrush

SEMrush is an SEO tool that allows you to build an effective content marketing campaign. From keyword research which allows you to know which keywords are worth bidding on to getting insights and reports on how well your competitors are doing with respect to their campaigns in display advertising and organic and paid search results. You can create and launch local or global campaigns for your website and get all the necessary metrics all from one place. Using this tool allows you to stay ahead of your competitors and anticipate changes in the marketing game.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics tool owned by Google to track traffic, and what visitors are doing on your site and generate reports that will help you in your marketing. It allows you to track current traffic, retain or attract potential customers. It helps us to determine which pages are having the most conversions and doing well and identify poorly performing pages so as to make the changes necessary to content moving forward. Integrated with AdWords, you can review online campaigns. With its e-commerce report feature, you can track sales activities and performances.

MailChimp

MailChimp is an email marketing platform that is easy to use. You can create email campaigns with your customers, know the number of people viewing it and track the links they clicked on. You can integrate MailChimp with Google Analytics to generate more in-depth reports such as sales activities with revenue reports and how your marketing strategy affects your bottom line. You can use the reports generated to tailor emails and ads according to your contacts’ behavior and interests. As a pre-built marketing automation, it allows you to focus on strategy rather than being bogged down by manual tasks.

HubSpot

HubSpot is an inbound marketing automation platform. It is one of the most important tools a marketer can use. It helps companies to grow traffic, attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers. Very useful for social media marketing, content management, SEO and web analytics.

Conclusion

These are an inexhaustible list of martech tools, all of them excellent choices and useful within different areas of digital marketing. They effectively comprise what we call a Martech stack.

While we don’t really play favorites, the listed tools have become default picks. Substitute them with an alternative and you’ll still be fine with your stack. We at Biztruss advocate strongly that your choice of marketing tools should align with what suits your business goals best and can help the most. With the right mix of marketing technologies, strategy and team, you should be able to reach out more to a greater audience and see increased revenue growth. You are also expected to record improved customer satisfaction and in a short while, go on to become a leading force in the marketing industry.

So if you aren’t quite in the Martech zone yet, more than high time you got there. Not quite sure? Drop in a note and we’ll be happy to help.

Title – Your Essential Martech Primer

Meta Description – Martech is a powerful solution that is created by blending marketing and technology. This blog is a primer on the most vital toolkits you can possess in your Martech armory.
Keywords – Martech, Marketing technology, marketing, hootsuite, google adwords, semrush, google analytics, mailchimp, hubspot, martech tools, martech stack, marketing automation

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The discovery of PMF is elusive for most early-stage startups. Industry experts believe that startups need to take twice as much time to validate the feasibility of their product in a target market. In order to get it right, startups need to search for PMF through a series of experimentation, and then build upon the lessons to edge closer to the perfect PMF.

With the discoveries made during the search for PMF, startup founders can avoid the risks of picking the wrong market for their product due to their information biases.

The Intersection of the Product Market Fit with the Growth Marketing Funnel

The Growth Marketing Funnel portrays the most vital elements that stimulate startup growth. The different strata can be described in a simple narrative: to find the perfect product-market match, a company needs to develop a core product value, provide the core value to users as quickly as possible, and then regenerate the users’ experience of the offered core value repeatedly within a given period of time.

These elements also tell the whole story of a startup’s growth rate. All the layers bear equal significance and are intertwined in such a way that changes in any layer of the funnel produce a significant impact on the growth rate. For instance, the Activation layer, for the most part, revolves around the ‘Aha Moment’.

This element is intricately connected to the bottom layer, the retention, in the sense that the ‘Aha moment’ is just a moment in the buyer journey, while retention is a recurrent behavior during the buyer journey. In order to induce the behavior, the startup must first induce the ‘aha moment’ where the buyer is able to fully appreciate the core value of the product. An optimized period for the inducement of the ‘Aha Moment’ enhance the prospects of retention.

A startup needs to harness the intricate pattern of interdependence between these various layers to forge genuine growth. While the overarching goal should be to enhance the growth rate, it’s also imperative to improve on each layer separately. Paid acquisition (remarketing), product changes, and expansion of reach to other platforms are some of the measures that can be deployed to hone the layers, especially the ones from the middle to the bottom.

Both the product teams and the growth teams can work in different directions to harness the various layers of the Growth Marketing Funnel to identify the best PMF. While the product team focuses on harnessing the layers by developing and expanding the core value and features that attract people to the product, the growth teams can focus on inducing the experience of the core values in a large portion of the target audience repetitively at optimal times.

Finding the perfect PMF is imperative for the sustainable growth of a startup, and that entails altering the assumptions, processes and team structures that support the organizational framework. Biztruss’ steady hands can help you achieve coherency and clarity as you implement various changes in your quest to find the perfect PMF for your business.

Let’s talk more. Your Product Market Fit may well be only a conversation away!

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This same concept which proved useful in the tech and manufacturing industry has been adopted by other markets and the outcome is the same; design thinking drives innovation. You might be wondering, “what is this strategy?”, “can I apply it to my business?”. Your questions are addressed below.

What is Design Thinking?

Before now, designers tackled projects by focusing on the problem at hand, seeking to solve the challenge by concentrating on the problem. However, design thinking adopts a solution-based style which begins with the end-user in mind. Logic, intuition, analysis, and imagination are tools which are heavily relied upon in creating the desired outcome.

How to Embrace Design Thinking

Even though it is not a silver bullet to all your organization’s problem, design thinking offers an opportunity to collectively create a framework for pursuing innovation. Ditching the conventional linear approach to problem-solving is difficult, however, it is a worthwhile venture. You can start with these three steps.

Empathy

For a human-centered design process to be successful, it is important that the business managers empathize with the customers who utilize these products. This skill becomes particularly useful when the business is on the verge of expanding into new spheres.

Without empathy, gleaning information on the challenges encountered is impossible. Design thinking basically entails asking the right question, meeting the right demographics, in essence, putting yourself in your customer’s shoes.

This strategy might appear plain and ineffective, however, research has revealed that a 50% increase in income has been recorded by companies which adopted this strategy. In another study carried out, lack of empathy was identified as one of the reasons customers patronize other businesses.

Iterative Problem-Solving

The global market is rapidly evolving and it becomes difficult to keep up with the pace if you still spend the bulk of your time on futile ventures. Constantly changing the scope of a problem engenders better results every time. Often, businesses stick with strategies which have shown minimal potential to succeed.

Harvard Business Review carried out a survey and it was seen that about 9 in 10 companies struggled with finding an accurate diagnosis of their problem. Design thinking encourages you to diversify, adopt an iterative approach, and re-diagnose the problem.

Stakeholder Mapping

As a business seeking to innovate, you should form the habit of visualizing the effect and outcome of certain actions and decisions. Ideally, you need to consider different factors such as time constraints, geopolitical factors, religious beliefs, etc.

You should have an exhaustive outline of global stakeholders, their allies and foes, addressing the issues pertinent to them.

Design thinking in its simplest form is a way of solving a problem. Many an organization, straitjacketed by their process-oriented methodology would rather live with a problem than apply an out of the box approach like Design Thinking. Many others treat it as a last throw of the dice, when all else fails. The truly smart ones believe that this is the approach which is the real complement to innovation.

At Biztruss, we recognize the need to apply the right brain in equal measure to address challenges. Whether it is in scoping out a development challenge or in drawing out a Customer Journey Map, a user centric approach sets the tone for designing appropriate solutions for every problem. While the design thinking may not or even should not always have quantified success metrics in keeping with the spirit of its being, it definitely does succeed in opening up minds and avenues, in turn helping unearth new ways of solving problems.

In case you haven’t tried it out yet, there’s always a way you can make a start, just by altering your thought process, just that little bit. That’s what Design Thinking is all about, and that’s what it asks of you.
Till we roll out another blog from our thought factory, continue to think with design. And tell us all about your success stories doing it.

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Putting it in very simple and clear terms, the path to finding the magical moment in business stems from discovering your core product value. Let’s go deeper.

What is Your Core Product Value?

This is the essence of your service or product. Without the core product value, it is impossible to convert guests to customers. Identifying your product value is what can help you gain 500 million users in record time. In fact, it has been observed that a company that has discovered it core product value will outperform others in fund-raising ventures.
In summary, the core product value is much more than the practical value in that it satisfies the 6 inherent needs of the customers. These needs are;

1. Certainty
2. Surprise/spontaneity
3. Premium feel
4. A sense of community
5. Growth
6. Impactful contribution

These definitions might suffice for some while others might want practical examples. We got you covered. Below, we discuss the path some of the successful companies took to discover their core product value and how they got to their “A-HA moment”.

Facebook and Its Core Product Value

As Mark said in his speech to the Harvard graduating class of 2017, Facebook’s aim is to connect the world. And they didn’t need to start on a grand level. In fact, the a-ha moment for them was being able to get a user to connect with 7 friends within 10 days.

This was a perfect merger of product and growth in that they were building their core value while getting the largest target audience to experience it.

Twitter and Its A-ha Moment

Hear what Josh Elman, an employee at Twitter had to say on the company’s core product value.

“At Twitter, we found that if you visited Twitter at least 7 times in a month, then it was likely you were going to be visiting Twitter in the next month, and the next month, and the next month. And we decided this was enough initially to be “really using it”.

There you have it, the aim was to get the user to experience their awesome service at least 7 times, and then, boom!

Uber and Its A-ha Moment

Uber has a slogan; “my own private driver” and they have succeeded in selling this story to people all over the world. Imagine you just finished a business meeting, you pull out your phone, push a button, and within minutes, your ride shows up. Did you just say A-ha?!

It’s not just the big fish that deserve their A-ha moments. In a highly democratized digital ecosystem that rewards the individual merit of startups, every single entity has a shot at their big moment. It may be just a dawn of realization or a sudden call to action, it’s a turning point for every single startup worth their salt. And that is precisely why we at Biztruss don’t just talk the Digital 360 but Walk it. We’ll let the mystery persist for a bit more if you haven’t had the opportunity yet to check it on our website, but we’ll do the right thing let you on the 3 tips that counts for everything in building your core product value.

1. Prioritize building the core product value.
2. Ensure that the users experience the core product value as soon as possible.
3. Make sure the largest percentage of your target market get to experience the core product value in good time.

Like to talk a little more on this and unveil the mystery? We’d love to help you discover you’re A-ha moment.

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