Wayne Lockwood: The Future of Audience Selection: Where AI Can Take Your Campaigns

Monday 30 April 2018

The Future of Audience Selection: Where AI Can Take Your Campaigns

Where do you start when you’re building an audience for your campaigns? Job titles? Industries? Maybe company size?

There’s so much more that indicates a buyer’s likelihood of engagement. But in the modern era of marketing technology, segmentation has remained largely linear – defined by the obvious demographic criteria such as industry, company size, and yes, job title.

It’s left many marketers unable to overcome lackluster campaign results and wondering how best to maximize the success of each campaign they run.To better engage individuals with relevant content and personalized interactions, we also need to evolve how we select who receives our outreach in the first place.

We need to move from batching and blasting to AI-driven, lookalike audiences.

Last year, Marketo kicked off a multiyear alliance with Google Cloud, to migrate our entire infrastructure to the Google Cloud Platform. This means our customers can leverage big data analytics on a world-class cloud platform and deliver faster campaign performance to engage with billions of individuals in the moment, all with the security that our customers demand. Currently, the Marketo Engagement Platform manages nearly half a trillion of these interactions every year.

Introducing Marketo Audience^AI

This week, at the 2018 Marketing Nation Summit, Marketo is announcing new AI innovations that build on Google Cloud’s portfolio of machine learning technology, putting greater insights in the hands of the marketer faster. Those at Summit will get a sneak peak of Marketo Audience^AI, which will leverage Google Cloud machine learning to help to improve the speed, scale, and effectiveness of marketing campaigns on our Marketo Engagement Platform^TM.

Marketo Audience^AI uses the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to expand a marketer’s campaign reach beyond linear segmentation, to include individuals who are similar to those who have converted (lookalike audiences.) This will allow marketers to identify the right target audience, based on behaviors and patterns, that will increase the relevance, and deliver powerful benefits for organizations. Relevance leads to better conversions, revenue, and ROI, while delivering experiences that will resonate with buyers.

Six months ago, we debuted Marketo Content^AI, which applies machine learning to the content delivery process. It selects the next piece of content of interest to a customer, based on their previous choice, and can, for example, tell you the top 10 most interesting pieces for a particular audience. It does this in real-time, something that no human could possibly be able to do in weeks or even months. Plus, it learns as the customer continues to engage, getting more and more information about their preferences. This saves time, energy and more importantly, provides a more personalized and engaging experience for customers.

Marketo Audience^AI, which is still in development, will be designed to use the same concepts of audience selection, tapping into a marketer’s own data to find the next lookalike target audience. In addition, this innovation supports Google AdWords Customer Match, allowing marketers to optimize your paid media spend and get a better ROI by targeting your Marketo contacts with personalized ads across Google Search, YouTube, and Gmail. Alternatively, marketers can expand reach by targeting similar audiences with personalized ads.

Underlying this technology is Marketo’s dedication to security. The Google Cloud Platform, with its intelligent and elastic infrastructure, provides performance and trusted security our customers require for real-time engagement on a global scale. Through our alliance with Google Cloud, engagement in the moment becomes a reality worldwide, and in a way where marketers have peace of mind that they’ll do it more securely.

At Marketo, we believe in purpose-built innovation, putting it in the hands of the marketer faster. In the Marketing Nation, there’s no need for data scientist expertise and IT resources to unlock the value of AI.

Welcome to a fearless, AI-driven marketing future.

For more information on our AI technologies visit marketo.com/ai.

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