“Generative AI tools can help significantly optimize marketing campaigns and provide a competitive edge in today’s dynamic business landscape” – Mr. Gyanendra N Pati, Global Head of Marketing and Communications at Acuity Knowledge Partners

In a competitive market, how do you position yourself as a key differentiator when it comes to marketing strategies? 

A perpetually competitive market and volatile macro environment is presenting significant challenges in front of marketers to deliver incremental value on the marketing spend.

Carefully crafted marketing strategies play a significant role in creating and maintaining brand leadership, drive growth and business expansion goals, execute thoughtful PR and Communications programs, help meaningfully amplify key initiatives such as CSR and DEI, and supports hiring and recruitment marketing plans. Therefore, marketing and brand communications strategies must be systematically aligned to these corporate objectives and these strategies should be aided by required technology and tools for efficient execution and systematic measurement.

At Acuity, the Marketing and Communications team has created a unique position as a value creator and growth driver for the business. Our marketing strategies are tuned to help various business lines grow in our addressable markets. We play a pivotal role in active client acquisition and help expand into new markets and newer customer segments.

Systematic and disciplined execution of these strategies has helped us contribute over 15% of total new sales annually and we consistently deliver the highest number of new logos to the business year after year. Not just sporadic growth, we are acutely focused on maximizing customer lifetime value and maximizing ROI on marketing investments, year after year.

Beyond growth objectives, our marcom strategies have helped Acuity create a strong brand identity and visibility as the world’s leading provider of tech-enabled be-spoke research and analytics solutions provider to the global financial services industry. Our thought leadership and content marketing strategies, which is an integral part of the overall marketing priorities, have helped us establish our rich domain expertise and engage with senior decision makers, effectively.

We have grew exponentially over these years, and we did that in a responsible manner by giving back to the society where we operate and by focusing on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs across our locations. Marketing continues to play a significant role in expanding our DEI ecosystem, amplifying our corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives and translated our employee volunteering programs into meaningful storytelling helping Acuity to become a truly respected brand and a great place to work.

Role of tech in Marketing – What is the future of Generative AI in Marketing?

From a CMO’s point of view, tech is not just an enabler, it works as an accelerator to generate greater value for marketing and at the same time elevates customer’s overall experience of the brand. Along those lines, Generative AI has the potential to further compliment key CMO priorities – which is value creation and customer delight. I will specifically highlight five areas which will see significant adoption and impact of Generative AI in marketing.

One, Personalization – with various AI models and tools, marketers can create hyper-personalized and engaging content. Growth marketers can expect greater campaign efficiency, boost productivity of demand generation campaigns and execute highly targeted and effective campaigns across channels such as email campaigns, social media posts, or even product recommendations on e-commerce platforms.

Second, Segmentation – marketers can now get better at predicting consumer behavior and read customer preferences more accurately, leading to better customer segmentation and tailored advertising strategies. Hyper-targeted advertising can be used to target ads to specific groups of people based on their interests, demographics, and even past purchase behavior.

Third is Creativity – in a world where UX is already playing a decisive role in consumer buying behavior, we are already seeing tons of evidence of the magic generative AI can create using simple prompts and these were previously unimaginable. AI can create compelling visuals, videos, and written content. With the power of AI, we expect lower human dependency and minimal interventions which significantly saves time and resources. This could help businesses to create more engaging and visually appealing marketing materials.

Fourth, Campaign efficiency – Generative AI can automate many campaigns related tasks such as creating content, keywords, and audience, identifying target accounts, suggesting demographics, and generating reports.

Last yet important, I will talk about Chatbots which is already seeing heightened adoptions across industries and customer segments. With well trained models, companies are already seeing the AI powered chatbots delivering outstanding personalized experiences, enhancing customer satisfaction and retention with tasks such as customer service, and product recommendations.

Discuss the importance of using Generative AI in organizations to optimize marketing campaigns?

Generative AI tools can help significantly optimize marketing campaigns and provide a competitive edge in today’s dynamic business landscape. Let’s look at some of the finer details.

Generative AI can create compelling ad copies by analyzing past successful ads and identifying patterns that resonate with the target audience. This helps marketers generate engaging and relevant title and description of ad copies, that drives higher conversions.

The value generated by Large Language Models and AI in audience targeting is even greater. It is particularly beneficial for marketers pointedly leaning on LinkedIn ads where the job titles, seniority levels and types of companies that needs to be targeted are suggested based on the advertiser’s product. AI has the capabilities to make the targeting process nimbler by analyzing the product and helps identify the most relevant audience segments.

For those who are great fans of Google ad platform and Amazon-sponsored ads, AI tools can materially add value to the campaign teams with suggested keywords for target search terms for a given product or service. Those who know how campaigns technically work, Generative AI tools are significantly handy to suggest negative keywords to prevent irrelevant clicks and improve ad relevance and campaign efficiency.

I want to touch a little on the additional fire power Large Language model bring on to the table for Content Creation that help build brand, attract customers, create superlative selling propositions and not to miss, help brand tell a great story. Marketers can smartly and creatively use Large Language Models and Generative AI to automate the content generation process, producing a wide range of visuals and video assets quickly, which is helpful content for a wide range of digital and social media platforms.

What are the challenges marketers face while using AI?

While AI and Large Language Models presents numerous benefits for marketers, it also comes with its fair share of challenges. To put things in perspective, AI models heavily rely on data for training and accurate predictions. Insufficient or poor-quality data can lead to biased results and inaccurate insights, hampering the effectiveness of AI-driven campaigns. Therefore, marketers must be prudent about the data quality and quantity they are feeding to the model.

While data privacy and information security are already a perpetual focus for marketers; AI has taken the focus on data privacy and security to a whole new level. Marketers and allied teams handling vast amounts of customer data raises privacy and security concerns. Marketers must be even more vigilant and mindful as they navigate strict regulations and ensure data protection policies and infrastructure are in the right place to maintain consumer trust.

Then comes Interpretability and Explainability challenges. Complex AI models like deep learning can be difficult to interpret, making it challenging for marketers to explain the reasoning behind AI-generated recommendations to stakeholders. Not everyone’s cup of tea, I suppose.

The last one I will probably mention is on the Domain Expertise of AI models. Large language models and AI tools may not be fully ready to understand the nuances of specific industries, markets, and customer segments. Human expertise and interventions are critically essential for contextual understanding and refining AI-driven strategies.

We acknowledge the current challenges, but AI is rapidly evolving. As Generative Technology matures and begin to address questions around explainability, privacy, security, ethics, and their propensity for ‘hallucinations’. As we move ahead, I am optimistic that they will become a key tool in supporting Marketers generate even greater business value and outcomes.

Briefly share Acuity’s key engagement strategies to connect with the audience.

We run various integrated marketing programs to connect with our audience.

We leverage both online/digital and off-line channels. We have an engaging website which is central to our digital presence. We focus on producing best-in-class client focused thought leadership content such as topical blogs, whitepapers, surveys and trend reports, podcasts, newsletters, videos, and other content assets.

We have a strong social media presence and followership, which we are extremely proud of, and we have leading presence across all important social platforms. We focus on events too. We have our own large and small format events that we run in the US, European and Asia Pacific markets. Our webinars are widely attended for it brings industry leaders, practitioners and client speakers to discuss most relevant topics and issues impacting the financial markets. Physical and in-person third party events are back in relevance since late 2022. These events, albeit expensive are a great platform to demonstrate thought leadership and meet and interact with potential customers and clients.

For recruitment marketing, employer branding and alumni programs, we create distinct and differentiated content then that of customer focused content and the choice of digital and social media channels varies too. For example, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are apt for recruitment marketing.

What are the planned marketing initiatives of Acuity Knowledge Partners for 2023-24? 

For 2023-24, we will continue to focus on customer-centric, solution focused and geographically aligned marketing strategy and go-to-market programs. Considering Acuity is still a young brand, we will continue to focus on building the brand globally and regionally. To drive this strategic objective, we plan to align our resources and focus on impactful PR & Communications, run events, and content marketing programs. Growth marketing will always be a key focus and we will continue to explore new demand generation programs and channels to maximize our reach through 2023-24 and beyond. To boost marketing productivity, efficiency and effectiveness, marketing technology and tools will play a significant role. We expect to try new tools and technologies, including Large Language models and Generative AI tools in relevant functions within marketing.