Why AI is the Best UI for Marketing Software
A new approach to get marketers off dashboards and back to big to the big picture
A new approach to get marketers off dashboards and back to big to the big picture
It’s hard to believe that the market for marketing software has only been around for a couple of years. In the blink of an eye, brand managers went from writing memos to monitoring dashboards. Today, logging on to cloud software is the norm, but many marketers are beginning to wonder whether it’s really worth the time and money. I believe we are at the cusp a new approach to marketing software—one that uses artificial intelligence to remove chores, improve results, and allow human intelligence to be deployed where it matters most.
Some time around 2012 when Gartner declared that CMOs would spend more on technology than CIOs, a tidal wave of software as service salespeople knocked each other over to land licensing deals with big brands. Many marketers took meetings, signed deals, and began using software in hopes that it would solve their challenges: Pressure on ROI, lack of expertise, and more demands on less time. Venture capitalists fueled this wave in hopes that their startups would become “the marketer’s operating system” and lock in years of renewal profits.
Funny, I haven’t seen any CMOs getting celebrated for selecting a new cloud marketing solution. And I haven’t seen any brand managers high-fiving in the halls because their social media software unearthed a real business insight. No wonder that for all of the hype and signed contracts, the penetration of marketing software across industries sits at just 4.1%.
Process Doesn’t Promise Results
One of the most common categories of software we see in marketing is so-called work-flow solutions. These tools promise to make it easy to, say, compose a social media post, route it through the company for approvals, and turn it into a consistent message across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Something that might take five hours can be reduced to one, and reducing effort and complexity is very appealing to today’s harried marketing manager.
Unfortunately, this can lead to one of the biggest mistakes that marketers make: In the drive to create an efficient process for something new, they miss out on what really matters. On one hand, they find themselves committed to something that ends up being a waste of time. For example, many bought social software to create and manage regular Facebook posts—but organic reach is now so low that you might as well not bother. On the other hand, they miss the opportunity to see outsized gains by investing more time in areas where they can win. We frequently see companies blowing a huge opportunity on Pinterest by simply reformatting Tweets or Instagram photos as pins. Today’s social media software makes it really easy to fail.
Analysis Leads to Paralysis
Speaking of fail, are we done with dashboards yet? Yes, yes we need to know what is going on with our business and monitor sudden threats or opportunities. But when was the last time you walked through the dozens of monitors in your social media war room and really saw something worth reacting to?
Why do we love it so? Well, many of us marketers are analysis geeks. We rose up through the ranks by being the one in the meeting that pored over household panel studies and wrote the annual business review. Now, when something new comes onto the marketing scene, our first instinct is to buy an analytics solution that give us a new statistic to track. Marketers continually ask for just one more benchmark or data point. But too often this leads to indecision and paralysis by analysis. Like Henry Ford and Steve Jobs, software developers need to stop giving marketers what they ask for (analytics) and start giving them what they really need (results!)
When we first launched our Pinterest optimization software, we began talking with companies that used our competitors’ software. They asked us why we didn’t also have, say, a dashboard that showed the total number of followers of the people who followed their brand. Our answer: You don’t need that.
We lost some customers who felt like they had to have certain reports. But many more leaned forward in their chairs when they heard our strong opinion about what didn’t matter. They appreciated that we only developed tools that were proven to drive results. Meanwhile, our developers get to spend 100% of their time working on game-changing features, and 0% of the time keeping up with a competitive feature check list.
Does Your Software Say What to Stop Doing?
I was recently sitting across the table from the leader of a massive social software company. He was boasting about how his software supported 32 different social media platforms. I asked him how he felt these 32 delivered unique value for marketers, and he replied, “Oh, we’re totally agnostic…it’s up to the marketers to decide what to do with it.”
Sadly, most startup software companies around today are staffed by people who have never been in the marketer’s footsteps. They don’t know that successful marketing is about making strategic choices—to be really good at a handful of alternatives. They feel the name of the game is about adding more features, more functions, and support for more marketing tactics.
Marketers do not need more things do to, they need help deciding what they should stop, start, and continue improving upon. Despite claims that the marketing software market is already consolidated down to a handful of huge cloud winners, the field is wide open for a new wave of innovators who help marketers make better choices.
Machines Learn Better Than Marketers
Early in our company’s history we discovered that certain types of content perform better on Pinterest at certain times of the day and days of the week. Recipes with chocolate, for example, saw a 3x to 4x engagement rate starting around 8:00pm on weeknights. You might guess why this happens (cravings, anyone?), but try to monitor and adjust for millions of other word combinations.
We could have written an article about how a handful of content types perform through the day, and just given our users a tool that allows them to pick whatever day and time they think will be best. This is what some marketers say they want—that is until we tell them that we have created a machine-learning algorithm that is constantly experimenting and learning with real data in real time and adjusting itself to what days and times each pin tends to performs best. You get better results with less effort.
My co-founder, Michael—the brains behind our technology—likes to say, “AI is the best UI.” In other words, instead of giving our customers more choices and data in our user interface (UI), we must use artificial intelligence (AI) to make it easier for them to get better results.
Now we’re bringing this approach further into our software, with tools that recommend what content to pin and which words to include in a description based on software that experiments, learns and adjusts across millions of interactions while we sleep.
Marketers Need to Focus on the Big Picture
Our most successful clients spend less time logging into software, and more time looking for ways that they can connect dots across how human beings—i.e. their customers—are changing interests and preferences.
For example: They see that our optimization work on Pinterest ladders up to insights about how their customers consume content and make decisions in store. They ask us for trend data on pin performance and feed it into their new product planning process. It’s a lot more meaningful than checking the box on 32 social sites.
We believe the future of marketing software looks a lot less like a Minority Report monitor with knee-jerk reactions, and a lot more like a big green button that says “go” and handles the execution with AI-born excellence. This future path might even give marketers the chance to unplug, think strategically, and get some “real life” feedback from customers that leads to thoughtful strategy and innovative new products.
Bob Gilbreath is co-founder and president of Ahalogy, a leading Pinterest marketing company, and author of The Next Evolution of Marketing: Connect with your Customers by Marketing with Meaning. Follow him on Twitter.