While the world continues to be wowed with the wonders of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and some quarters are assuming the worst about their jobs, one thing had been made clear — marketers must now re-skill and upskill if they don’t want to be shown the door.
The latest study from International Data Corporation (IDC) — IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Chief Marketing Officer 2024 Predictions – Asia/Pacific (Excluding Japan) Implications — had summarised the thoughts of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) from around the Asia Pacific region: GenAI will take over basic marketing tasks in the coming 12 to 36 months.
According to the data from the study, at least 30% of traditional marketing tasks, such as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), content and website optimisation, customer data analysis, segmentation, and lead scoring, will be wholly managed via GenAI.
“37.8% of the CMOs surveyed had indicated that they have already begun implementing GenAI technologies. Another 51% highlighted that their top business objective for the next 12 months is to improve lead generation through improved quality of content marketing,” the IDC report noted.
As is, GenAI is already the biggest trend for 2023 and will continue to rock this year as brands are open to use GenAI for any acceleration with the marketing processes. Even if it is at the cost of backfiring, as per what happened with the new WACOM social media ad content, CMOs are willing to bite the bullet and use GenAI to optimise operational costs.
This decision is not made on a whim as the marketing landscape, a per the IDC report, showed that it is evolving towards being more data-driven. Besides having general fatigue with social media, marketing as a whole had been going through an upheaval as Big Tech phase out cookie tracking and use; audiences have become more wary of content marketing; and experiencing a shift towards open advertising ecosystems.
“CMOs need to stay updated if they want to leverage on these impactful trends and innovation-driven market transformation,” IDC added. After all, the report confirmed that GenAI, and AI as a major industry trend for 2024, will ultimately change the marketer’s role to be more cross-functional and collaborative across teams.
Based on the survey it did, IDC had also compiled the following predictions for GenAI and marketing:
- Dynamic Journey Orchestration: By 2028, businesses will use data and AI to automate 30% of all activities within the buyer journey — this changes the shifting process to sensing as the experience is dynamically delivered to buyers based on what they have chosen
- GenAI does Marketing: By 2027, GenAI will directly manage SEO, website, and lead management
- Consumer-First Targeting: Customers will have a hand in the value creation of any engagement as they are the ones providing first-party data within the open advertising environment — this will drive up hyper-personalisation and contextualised conversations
- Community and Trust-based Marketing: Hosted communities with relevant GenAI crafted content will create fans and, by extension, customers who want to be kept engaged with relevant content
- Quantum Sensing to Create Higher Value: This trend will see marketing build up contextual experiences that help them better understand the feelings, perceptions, and intention of customers — this will ensure brands can deliver customer value outcomes
“There will be a clear shift towards marketers expanding their skillets to include capabilities such as storytelling, and data analytics and greater cross-functional collaboration with other teams such as IT, sales, and operations towards the notion of a dream team. Generative AI will act as the enabler through greater automation of manual tasks such as SEO, content, and website optimization” said Lavanya Jindal, Research Analyst, CX, Martech and Value Streams, IDC.
It’s still early days into 2024 so what IDC predicted, even with its extensive data and research, may alter based on how the world reacts to the growing and influential force that is GenAI. It will be interesting to see how this growth trend will impact the global economy in the coming 12 months.