Marketing has always been crucial across industries, yet achieving consistent performance and efficiency is a persistent challenge. Thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), everything’s changed — and that’s beneficial for marketers and the organizations and brands they represent.

AI-fueled products and innovations offer marketers an unprecedented opportunity to ramp up their activities. Not surprisingly, most marketing departments are taking advantage of the moment. According to MarTech reporting, more than 61% of marketers say they’re actively using AI, and a full 88% believe their companies need to bring more AI into their corporate processes. Those statistics indicate how quickly the pendulum is swinging in the direction of widespread, commonplace AI use.

To be sure, AI can be beneficial in all areas of a company from sales to service. However, marketing is often a logical place to start testing AI tools for several key reasons.

1. Allows Small Businesses to Compete With Larger Entities

It’s always been difficult for startups and smaller organizations to gain traction quickly, especially if all the employees wear multiple hats. With AI, nearly all businesses can gain visibility even if they’re trying to make their mark in a crowded space.

Take law firms, for instance. The legal space continues to be highly crowded, making it challenging to stand out digitally. Nevertheless, legal professionals can earn visibility quickly by leaning into AI. Legal marketing agency PMP explains that AI solutions like GitHub Copilot can be especially effective in helping developers build and design powerful websites quickly.

Since website design is critical to getting noticed online, being able to get a solid website up and running fast is a marketing game-changer. The quicker a website can be put into action, the easier it will be for law firms, or any businesses, to begin attracting and converting visitors through advertising campaigns.

2. Enables Personalization at Scale

Today, personalization isn’t just nice to have. It’s become table stakes in terms of marketing efforts. Consumers expect businesses to give them individualized attention. That’s a tall order, especially for organizations going through growth spurts. Fortunately, AI makes it much easier to offer consumers a taste of the personal touch at scale — and not just within the B2C market.

Broad-based personalization can be achieved within B2B companies, too. Research from data management portal CDP.com shows that for B2B marketers, AI-powered customer segmentation solutions can help push out pertinent messaging to all stakeholders in the often-complex B2B buying workflow. However, there’s just one catch: The data being fed into the AI tool needs to be squeaky clean.

How can marketers make sure the data they’re using is as pristine as possible? Start by systematically identifying and addressing gaps in data sets, enhancing the structure of the data, and implementing data set standardization. Many of these tasks can be efficiently managed with the help of AI products, which can automate data cleaning, provide real-time insights, and improve overall data quality.

3. Extrapolates New Information From Historical Data

Plenty of marketers are sitting on mounds of unused data. Until recently, they couldn’t hope to sift through all of it or leverage it to make predictions about customers or their potential behaviors. AI removes the roadblocks to making sense of historical data so it can become a sort of “crystal ball” into the future.

In a recent article, online incubator FasterCapital notes that extrapolation opens the door to seeing formerly hidden patterns and trends. Once pinpointed and highlighted, those insights can inform a marketing team’s next moves. The article adds that data extrapolation can be vital for improving real-time pricing models as well.

As AI and machine learning (ML) become stronger and “smarter”, marketers will be able to gain deeper knowledge from their stores of data. Not only will this help them achieve better results, but it may assist them in uncovering, and appealing to, untapped customer pools.

4. Enhances Customer Engagement via an Improved CX

When Zendesk studied general customer experience (CX) trends for 2024, the customer service leader made a few important discoveries. Among them was that almost two-thirds of people in CX leadership roles think that AI is essential to staying strategic within their marketplaces.

For instance, AI chatbots have changed the CX support realm completely. Although marketing and customer service occur in different departments, they both benefit from AI-driven self-service support. When customers can find answers through the guidance of a chatbot, they’re more satisfied. Case in point: Around half of the respondents in Zendesk’s survey said they wanted the option of interacting with a chatbot when they had questions or problems.

In other words, customers who feel engaged and heard during the service process tend to have a better CX. In response, they may be more open to receiving future messaging and making repeat purchases. And the more customers who become loyal buyers, the higher the company’s customer lifetime value (CLV) metrics can climb.

It’s safe to say that marketing has entered into an incredibly exciting period. With so many AI products available — and more AI innovations being announced all the time — marketers have new ways to make inroads with customers, as well as reach their goals rapidly and affordably.