Skills and Competencies for AI-Driven Marketing

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Skills and competencies for AI in digital marketing

Because AI is a complex field, marketers need to develop both their technical skills and their broader professional competencies to become proficient with the tools and, also, to see the opportunities for deploying AI to help solve practical problems or optimize marketing processes. So, achieving personal success in using AI tools and technologies in a marketing context requires a holistic approach - enhancing both your technical digital marketing skills and your professional soft skills. Let’s take a look at what this involves.

While you certainly need to find and devote some time to exploring the growing range of AI tools, the most immediate challenge is learning how to use the tools you think are most relevant to your day-to-day duties. But in focusing on this immediate hurdle, it’s easy to forget about further honing your technical digital skills. Here are some of the key technical skills that you should consider brushing up on to improve your broader competency with AI technologies:

• Data management
• Data analysis
• Testing
• Content personalization
• Marketing automation
• Process analysis and improvement

Further developing these technical skills may help alleviate some of the fear you might feel when dealing with AI. The more familiar you become with the underlying models and the technology, the less intimidating it becomes!

However, it’s also important to continue to develop your professional skills. Three areas that are particularly important to focus on in the context of new and emerging AI technology are:

• Strategic thinking
• Innovation and creativity
• Agile thinking

These critical professional skills will perfectly complement your digital and technical skills as you prepare for the AI-driven future of marketing.

Strategic thinking and data analysis

Strategic thinking is an essential skill for digital marketers. It enables you to take a long-term view of complex business scenarios and develop marketing tactics to achieve specific business goals and objectives. It looks at the root causes of problems and tries to implement long-term solutions. When you think strategically, you look beyond the immediate problem to the future state that you want to achieve.

Strategic planning in marketing

Strategic thinking encompasses a wide range of behaviors and skills, including planning and goal setting, resource allocation, risk analysis, problem solving, and performance evaluation. Successful marketing professionals require strong strategic thinking skills to conceive, plan, deploy, troubleshoot, assess, and optimize their digital marketing campaigns.

Similarly, you need to take a strategic approach as you consider how best to deploy AI to help optimize your campaigns to deliver increased ROI (return on investment). This involves having a clear understanding of the campaign goals as well as the AI tools that can best help you to achieve them while also improving your business’s ROI. If you just use AI tools to appear cutting-edge and innovative, or because it’s seen as ‘the thing to do’ and you need to respond, then you are not thinking strategically. First, decide where you want your campaigns to go, and then decide what AI tools can help take you there while also improving your team’s ROI.

Data analysis

Strategic thinking relies heavily on facts and data. Decisions are made based on the evidence. A strategic thinker listens to what the data is saying, rather than scouring the data to isolate some statistics that back up a preconceived idea. So, if you are to successfully implement AI as part of a digital marketing campaign, you need to develop your data analysis skills.

The more you develop your data analysis skills, the better you’ll be able to grasp the insights that AI can deliver. This involves further honing your skills and expertise in:

• Data collection
• Data visualization
• Data cleaning and management
• Data-driven decision-making
• Especially important these days, data protection and privacy

These data skills are critical for enabling you to set up and operationally deploy the AI systems that you need.

Innovation and understanding algorithms

Creative thinking and a willingness to innovate are other essential professional skills for marketer’s in today’s AI-driven world. It’s not always easy to generate new ideas or come up with innovative spins on tired campaigns. AI tools such as MarketMuse and Clearscope can help with idea generation. However, the most successful digital campaigns also rely on a spark of human ingenuity.

You cannot turn innovation on and off at click of a button. However, by developing your creative thinking skills, you can ensure that your mindset is open and receptive to new opportunities and uncovering new approaches to address old problems.

One way that you can use AI to nudge your creativity is by developing a good understanding of the key AI algorithms. These algorithms are basically the steps that an AI takes, or the rules it follows, to complete different tasks. Developing a deeper understanding of the algorithms, the assumptions built into them, and the underlying dataset and logic, will better enable you to see opportunities for innovation and creativity while also helping you to guard against any potential risks associated with bias in dataset or algorithm. This will enable you to identify and deploy AI models and techniques that are best suited or customized specifically for your business’s needs. Using AI and machine learning models in this way will enable you to develop more targeted, efficient, and unique digital marketing campaigns.

Applying Agile principles to AI-driven marketing

A third essential professional skill for marketers in an AI-driven world is agile thinking. Nearly all marketing initiatives today are run as projects. Agile thinking at its core involves taking a flexible approach to projects, and responding to changes as they occur. Rather than sticking doggedly to a preset plan, you adapt your approach as circumstances require.

When you apply agile thinking to digital marketing initiatives, you can break campaigns, for example, down into smaller, discrete manageable steps. This enables you to identify and achieve quick wins, and implement small changes without having to rethink the entire strategy.

Taking an agile approach to AI is essential because it’s such a new technology and is constantly evolving. As you apply AI to your campaigns, think in terms of small iterations, and test and learn as you go. As the data changes, be open and willing to change your decisions. AI makes it easier than ever to find out what your customers are saying, so use this real-time data to inform your decisions.

Mastering the balance

You don’t have to be a technical expert in order to master AI (but it helps). However, by developing both core technical skills while continuously enhancing your broader professional skills – such as strategic, creative, and agile thinking – you can foster the holistic mindset needed to succeed in AI-driven digital marketing.