How marketers can make the most of AI – and keep their jobs

An important part of my job is keeping a close watch on where marketing is headed, and seeing how our customers adapt to the ever-shifting marketing landscape.

That’s why I regularly attend conferences and meetings where the future of marketing is being charted and explored.

What I saw and heard at two recent gatherings – the Salesforce Connections conference in Chicago and the Think Summit by Moveable Ink in New York – made me realize that technology has changed marketing more profoundly than many of us realize.

That change, driven by AI, has happened very quickly. And it’s far from over.

Should marketers be worried?

No.

But they have to change their mindset, and change it fast.

How?

By focusing their energies on creative tasks, and letting AI do the technical, repetitive stuff.

Marketers don’t know what technology can do for them now

Email was a big topic at both conferences. And because Knak exists to make email marketing easier, it pleased me to see that for marketers, email is alive and well.

But I was perplexed by the popularity of a session at Salesforce Connections where email developers were teaching marketers to code HTML.

I could not believe there were so many people interested in learning how to code.

The reality is that we live in a world where coding is less and less of a requirement.

Knak is and has always been a no-code platform. We were created specifically so that people – marketers in particular – would not have to know how to code to create emails and landing pages.

And as AI develops it will reduce, if not eliminate, the need for coding in other aspects of marketing.

So why was the learn-to-code session so popular?

I can only conclude it’s because too many people don’t know what technology can do for them. They don’t know how much technology has progressed. They don’t know what’s available today, without them having to learn to code.

Instead of learning to code, they should be learning what no-code tools they could be using to make their jobs easier.

People don’t realize how fast – and how much – marketing has changed

At the Salesforce Connections conference, I co-hosted a session with Andrew Eberting, Head of Global MarTech & Campaign Operations at Amazon.

We launched it by opening a big gold box up on stage.

In amongst the packing peanuts we found a time capsule that contained a five-year-old job description for a marketing position at Amazon.

When I read it, I nearly fell off my chair! Even though it was only five years old, the job description seemed completely out of date. Like it was from another era.

We did a side-by-side comparison of the requirement for an Amazon marketing job today, and the requirements for the same marketing job five years ago.

So much has changed, we might as well be talking about two completely different jobs!

Back then, coding was a valuable skill for marketers. They needed technical knowledge. In fact, the number one requirement for a marketing job at Amazon five years ago was experience coding HTML and CSS.

And high up on the list of requirements was five-plus years of technical knowledge of various platforms; in other words, they wanted marketers to be experts in more than a dozen different technologies.

It was tough to find people with that skill set. Most marketers are not technical people. Nor, in my opinion, should they have to be.

So what’s changed in marketing over the last five years?

Marketers are not doing technical, repetitive things anymore. Now, they are much more strategic.

They are impacting revenue.

They are driving strategy.

They are conducting experiments and pushing the envelope.

Those are the kinds of skills companies like Amazon want today.

And that is as it should be. Because these things play to marketers’ strengths.

Marketers should be learning how to be more strategic; they should not be learning HTML!

Being strategic about AI will let marketers keep their jobs

We all know that artificial intelligence is shaking things up.

If marketers want to make sure they stay one step ahead of AI, they need to think strategically about where its impact is being felt.

AI is very good at repetitive tasks like coding.

But AI is not good at being creative or driving strategy.

So in my opinion, it makes no sense at all for marketers to learn how to code. Coding jobs will be replaced by AI. In fact AI has already taken over, or will very soon be able to handle, that long list of technical requirements on the five-year-old job description.

But AI can’t replace creativity or strategic thinking.

So this is where marketers today need to be careful.

They need to take a serious look at what they are doing day-to-day.

It’s highly likely that any repetitive tasks on their list can already be replaced by AI.

And they need to have a conversation with their boss about how to hand over those tasks to AI so that they can focus on adding value by doing more creative things.

That was the message from the Moveable Ink conference: Creativity and storytelling are what connect you to your audience – not technology or streamlined processes. You want to inform and entertain.

There are two sides to storytelling for marketers.

On the one hand, they need to be able to use storytelling to connect with the audience. That connection needs to lead to engagement by proving to customers that you provide value for them.

On the other hand – and this is often overlooked – marketers also need to be skilled at communicating with the senior leadership team in the company they work for. Storytelling isn’t just for customers or prospects; it’s also a necessary skill set for communicating internally, inside the company. (This was one of the things Amazon now stresses in its job descriptions for marketers.)

The stories won’t be the same for internal and external audiences.

But the skills required to create and tell those stories will be.

So let AI handle coding.

It will free marketers up to be creative, and tell good stories that connect.