4 Ways AI is Changing Go To Market Strategy

AI has made the handling of big data manageable so companies can analyze Big Data and craft an effective go-to market strategy.

Technology has made it easier for bright ideas to come into fruition, what with the available online tools and software that you can download and use even in the comfort of home. Selling that idea, however, is not as easy, and this is where some startups fall short.

There are many considerations after transforming a great idea into something tangible for your target market. Not least of which is how a business can deliver the right product or service to the right market at the right time. This is where a go-to-market strategy comes into play. Once you have a product, it’s time to start thinking about how you can sell it.

AI Through the Years in Defining Market Strategy

Through the years, marketing strategies have had to change and adapt to the call of the times. Digital marketing, in particular, has seen vast improvements with the help of AI (artificial intelligence) and machine learning. B2B companies have started leveraging current AI technologies to provide solutions for efficient gathering and analysis of data.

The prevalence of AI has led to a trend referred to as AI marketing, which aims to enhance the customer journey through the use of cutting-edge technology. This relies on the analysis of big data to help boost the return on investment (ROI) of marketing campaigns. With the insights gathered from this data, businesses can eliminate the guesswork in customer behavior and interaction and create a more data-driven approach, especially when it comes to getting their product or service to market.

One of AI’s biggest benefits for any business is automation. Automating routine tasks that formerly had to be done by humans minimizes the margin for “ human” error and allows businesses to focus manpower on other more important endeavors. Nowadays, tasks such as web design and content generation can be left in the hands of AI applications that can be customized according to the needs of a business.

In some countries, especially those offering digital government services, AI has been adopted to provide an easier link to government agencies and make the procurement process quicker for everyone. This is further proof that AI might be here to stay and play an important role on how we do business—regardless of industry.

How AI is Changing Business

Automation has always been the big promise of AI, and with the rise of big data, AI has become a catchphrase for businesses that handle large amounts of data. Almost all forward-thinking businesses rely on data, and according to the International Data Corporation (IDC), worldwide data will grow to as much as 175 zettabytes by 2025. To date, 37% of organizations have integrated AI into their business in some form—a big leap from 10% that was four years ago.

AI has crept into almost all emerging technologies because of the reliance on big data, which can be quite complex and very challenging to handle. The insights that can be gathered from this data, however, is rewarding, empowering businesses to reasonably predict customer behavior and market trends.

In 2019, the AI use cases that saw the most investment (as per IDC) were automated customer service agents ($4.5 billion worldwide), sales process recommendation and automation ($2.7 billion), and automated threat intelligence and prevention systems ($2.7 billion).

AI in the COVID-19 Era

In the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic, AI has proven beneficial for some countries. AI-assisted imaging technology is helping in speeding up the diagnosis of patients with COVID-19 pneumonia.

This has also been the thrust in other countries in efforts to combat and curtail the spread of the coronavirus. According to Dorothea Koh, chief executive and founder of Bot MD, an app that uses AI to extract clinical information from large amounts of content originating from various data sources, AI applications are comparable to Google Assistant or Apple Siri but designed for busy healthcare professionals. They are there to answer urgent, pertinent questions such as those relating to hospital-specific protocols or other safety precautions.

In light of the decline in sales and shopping activity due to COVID-19, AI-powered solutions have shown promise in alleviating the sales dilemmas of businesses most affected by the pandemic.

According to Chris Colley, principal of customer experience at Medallia, a customer experience management platform, “Having insight into what their customers think and want has always been a key priority, but the COVID-19 pandemic has made this understanding even more critical.” He added, “As it’s no longer possible to eat out, they’ll be ordering online deliveries. The same pattern is being replicated in sectors across the board. This shift is creating a ton of new, unstructured data, which can be hard to make sense of.”

If businesses are to stay afloat, there is a need to adapt sales and marketing strategies to the new normal. They need to deliver an excellent product or service where customers can access them easily—and right now, the most accessible avenue to reach customers is online.

AI and Go-to-market Strategies

Market strategies must change and adapt to the call of the times, and this is vital in the current circumstances. In the face of uncertainty, it would benefit businesses to base decisions on a data-driven approach. Below are 4 ways AI has shaped go-to-market (GTM) strategies through the years.

• AI has made big data actionable.
  AI applications use real-time data and visual analytics to automate market analysis so stakeholders can make sound business decisions on their feet and discover new markets.
• AI is gradually making traditional GTM strategies obsolete.
  Traditional GTM strategies were focused on pushing the product or service to customers through advertising and mass media. In today’s business landscape, it would benefit companies to instead pull prospects into making your brand their brand of choice. AI has made the handling of big data manageable so companies can analyze larges sets of these data and craft an effective GTM strategy.
• Customer experience is key.
  In today’s business environment, customer service is the most active department for AI deployment. This activity is predicted to increase in 2022, with sales and marketing departments following closely. Chatbots are a common feature used by eCommerce sites to increase the efficiency of customer engagement. Personalized experiences are also vital to increase intimacy and make customers feel better about your brand.
• AI allows for more creativity.
  Although AI can’t replace human input, it has reached a point where it can automate mundane, repetitive business tasks. AI can help businesses get a deeper understanding of customers and market trends, but it can’t interpret subjective, meaningful experiences on its own. This codependency—humans relying on AI for interpreting big data and AI relying on humans for creativity and understanding subjective experiences—eliminates the guesswork and allows for the prediction of customer behavior.

AI today has made leaps and bounds compared to where it was before, and it’s a very promising future, to say the least. However, it should be acknowledged that AI is a slave to data, and it will only be as strong and useful as the data you feed to it.

Today’s data-driven environment calls for the use of AI as leverage to understand aspects of marketing and business never thought possible before, but this should be tempered with human intuition, experience, and creativity to make it effective and successful.