Streamlining Marketing Workflows with AI: Examples and Strategies

AI tools in the marketing domain for enterprise teams are at an interesting crossroads. On one hand, you have the marketing hype that is creating a sense of urgency to adopt these tools and use these tools effectively. On the other hand, you have the practical applications that actually deliver measurable ROI for enterprise teams. Somewhere in the middle is the truth.

AI adoption in marketing operations is still at the beginning stages of the journey. Enterprise adoption of AI tools faces a few pain points, things like time constraints. These tools take longer to deploy than we may initially think. Resource limitations and just a general idea of how to apply these tools to your day to day workflows.

There's a juxtaposition of flashy gimmicks versus back end processes where AI can actually crush bottlenecks. To move forward, we need a framework for evaluating where AI makes strategic sense in your marketing workflows.

In this blog post, we're going to take a pragmatic approach to this and see how AI can be used in marketing workflows for marketing operations teams.

The Strategic Value Assessment Framework: Determining Where AI Belongs in Your Marketing Stack

Measuring reality up to the hype can sometimes be a daunting task. That's not to say that AI tools don't have a strong role to play in your marketing operations and workflows. It's just to say that we need to be pragmatic and focused on understanding where we can get immediate value.

Far-fetched or highly advanced use cases may catch our eye when we're scrolling social media feeds. But what is actually going to provide us with pragmatic value today? As a first order of business, I think that we need to do a time sink audit. This is where you take a look at repetitive manual tasks that could potentially be automated or handled by AI.

There are so many different tasks that take time from our day-to-day work that are great candidates in general for using AI, things like data cleansing, helping with creating campaign briefs with technical requirements for design teams, or even just small content wins where we can use this to fill in values that are important but often are redundant or repetitive.

Having a strong idea of the ROI calculation, being able to measure the time saved versus the implementation costs across your marketing operations is critical. This is particularly true if you're developing custom applications using AI, which may take a bit of time to set up. You can always ask yourself, is it better to do this manually or is the time required to set up a workflow using AI really worth it. In many cases, it will be.

In that case, then you can do a quality impact assessment, determining where AI enhances versus potentially diminishing the output quality. While it's nice to automate key processes, we need to also understand the limitations of AI tools, their propensity to hallucinate, and their overall directive to provide us with a pleasing answer.

We also need to consider how AI solutions can handle enterprise level complexity and volume. The number of data points at a small startup versus an enterprise team with a global presence can literally be orders of magnitude difference. And in this case, we want to consider the integration complexity, how AI tools can connect with existing marketing platforms, things like marketing automation platforms like Marketo or CRMs like Salesforce.

While AI adoption is often driven by a top-down approach, this approach is often built off of enthusiasm versus the day-to-day application of these tools. You could make a case for a bottom-up approach where the use cases and the benefits from those doing the work every day could be used to help innovate and create real cost savings and efficiencies for your business.

Content Creation and Refinement: Small Time-Savers with Major Impact

AI-powered assistance for microtasks in the content world, particularly for campaign creation, can represent a big impact on your overall quality of work and the time to market.

Important pieces of content in your campaign flow, like subject lines, preview text and alt text generation are critical. They help you boost your open rates as well as ensure your content is accessible to all audiences. A clear win.

AI is powerful at getting through first drafts and content that needs to be "good enough." This allows you to reserve human ingenuity for strategic initiatives. This has been Knak's approach of adding AI to our platform incrementally.

Knak AI allows you to craft subject lines, preview text, and alt text using AI tools to help you rapidly put the finishing touches on your emails. When considering how to apply this, take a look at the time analysis. Quantify how small tasks can accumulate into significant workflow bottlenecks for enterprise teams. For instance, personalizing subject lines for each region can be highly redundant over time and take quite a bit of effort. Having AI help with this can rapidly speed up this content task.

At a broader level, consider a tiered content system where certain parts of your communication protocols are generated by AI and evaluate those that should not be evaluated or created by AI. Placeholder content or pieces of the landing page or email that have utility but may not need much creativity may be great candidates for updating your AI workflows.

Real-World AI Marketing Workflow Transformations: Case Studies and Examples

We can get some unique insights about how to apply AI into our marketing operations workflows by looking across various different industries to see what innovations are doing. Here are three examples to help get some ideas flowing.

Adore Me's AI-Powered Product Descriptions

Product descriptions are often mundane but still necessary marketing tasks. Adore Me transformed a 30 to 40 hours monthly bottleneck into a 1 hour process using AI for enterprise teams. This helps to demonstrate the power of applying AI to microtasks that consume disproportionate resources.

The dramatic time savings—a 97% reduction in hours spent—provides a compelling metric for enterprise decision makers who want to justify their AI investments. It also helps exemplify the principle of reviewing simple wins by looking at repetitive tasks that are occupying your team, and that could be easily handled by AI.

Carrefour Marketing Studio Implementation

One of the promises of AI is to help to create dynamic, ultra-personalized campaigns. That's exactly what Carrefour did with an AI-powered marketing studio. They help to allow them to deploy personalized campaigns across social networks.

They use a phased approach in their AI implementation. Interestingly, it was a cross-platform optimization, so helping AI, or having the AI help in adapting content for different social media platforms. Notable is the speed of execution being able to bring these innovations to market quickly.

Outcomes Rocket's Content Personalization System

While many of the results that we see in the smaller, mundane tasks that we can automate and use AI for are measured in time savings or cost savings, sometimes we just want some impressive results to share with our stakeholders. Outcomes Rocket's AI content personalization did exactly that. It resulted in a 65% increase in email engagement and 28% rise in conversion.

AI can help bridge the gap between data availability and actionable personalization strategies. This is a key component of personalization. While we may have lots of great ideas of how to personalize messaging for audiences without robust data sets behind the scenes, it can be very difficult. Outcomes Rocket did both exceptionally well.

Global Scale with Local Relevance: AI-Powered Localization

One of the most common challenges facing global enterprise marketing teams is localization. Localization can be time consuming, costly and result in poor quality results, one would hope, for the investment required.

AI translation capabilities are transforming the economics and speed of global campaign development. This is such a valuable feature, Knak has added it to its platform. Having translation services available for all users to be able to quickly localize their marketing campaigns.

One unique thought about localization where AI can be useful is this concept of creating locally and then scaling globally. So creating assets locally in your specific market, measuring the results and determining if it's effective or not. Then being able to bring those successful experiments and results and applying them to global marketing efforts.

This can allow your team to have a spirit of experimentation and optimization while developing a center of excellence of what works in local markets and what can be translated to the global stage. Enabling this content experimentation and sharing learning can be a huge boon to your organization, whether you're taking central assets and distributing them locally or having successful local assets inform global strategy.

Implementation Roadmap: Building Your AI-Enhanced Marketing Workflow

As we stated at the outset of this blog, the gap between hype and reality can sometimes be daunting. We all know that AI tools are going to "revolutionize" the marketing space. However, being a revolutionary yourself requires having an implementation roadmap. There's many different ways that you can approach this. Probably the most incremental or the best approach would be an incremental, phased approach.

In each phase, you take progressively bigger steps while having a deliberate rollout phase for your AI solutions. For example, in phase one, you can start taking a look at single point solutions for immediate workflow gains. How can you optimize things like your alt text or preview text or help to augment a workflow with data enriched by an AI agent.

In phase two, connected AI workflows. This could help you connect the dots from multiple different systems, playing a strong role in automating processes that take time. One that comes to mind is the process from campaign brief to content creation. Marketers make campaign briefs to request assets for a campaign, the AI then could translate that into technical requirements and help along the way with the project management and the construction of those assets.

In the next phase, you can start taking a look at comprehensive AI enhancement across your marketing operations. Building upon the small wins and successes in the previous stages to help ideate on what could be coming next.

It's important to note that incremental capabilities build up over time. There's a necessary process of trial and error, feedback loops, and having a strategic vision that you're acting against. A phase zero could look like a quick win program to pilot efforts over 30 days, keeping things simple and tackling a single automation or workflow.

One thing that I think individuals underestimate is the knowledge required to scale these things up. Having AI systems in place isn't a magic wand. It's another process, it's another technology that you can apply. Developing a center of excellence on how to apply that, what works and what doesn't and how to measure those results is a key to long term success.

Future-Proofing Your Marketing Operations: Balancing AI and Human Creativity

Marketing operations has made a habit of being on the bleeding edge of the cutting edge when it comes to new technology. Marketing operations is about figuring out how to make workflows and processes run smoother and more effectively. There is a question of why do we want to have such efficiency? Obviously, the cost and cost savings, and the benefits are huge.

Another aspect which I think is underplayed is the role of human creativity. By having strong processes and workflows, we reduce the need for manual effort and repetitive tasks. This frees up our marketing teams to be able to apply their creativity in novel and new ways.

AI is another tool that works alongside your Martech stack. The challenge facing us today is how to seamlessly integrate this tool with the holistic marketing stack. In some ways, AI feels like a genie in a bottle. We can ask it questions, but sometimes the responses to our wishes are not exactly what we expect.

Developing a center of excellence on how to work with AI tools can allow us the ability to be effective in how we apply AI to our work, save time and unlock the full potential of human creativity. This happens in the beginning by applying smart, small scale AI workflows to our process. AI features that help to remove redundant or repetitive tasks such as subject line generation, alt text generation, or even translation can have a massive impact on your bottom line.