Episode 78: How AI Helps Marketers, with Cathy McPhillips

Lots of experts have said that AI is transformational to business. Call me cynical, but when you look at how the average marketing team functions in 2022, it doesn’t seem like much of our work has been transformed. My guest today, a mainstream marketer who hadn’t been influenced by  all the hype, will share her appraisal of AI’s practical uses.

Cathy McPhillips is a longtime Cleveland-based marketer who has worked in corporate, agency-side, as well as owning a small business. She worked for years with the Content Marketing Institute which was led by Joe Pulizzi (who was on Episode 56 of the show). Nearly a year ago, she joined the Marketing AI institute as chief growth officer, but admittedly with very little hands-on experience with AI. 

Brought on to grow the relatively new institute in a hurry, Cathy’s gotten up to speed on how to use these tools. She’ll tell us her story, including how the way we traditionally do things has to change in order to get the benefits of AI. Cathy lists many resources and tools, which have been compiled into a table that’s in the show notes.   I hope by listening to Cathy, you’ll try some of them out, and come away as excited as she is about how AI can be a superpower for today’s marketing.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Episode Reboot:

Tools to help contentE.G. PersadoDRIFTDescriptMarketMuseWriting social posts, messages (Copy.ai, persado) Personalizing landing pagesAnalyzing what’s said on social about our brand
Tools to help mktg activitiesE.G. Rasa.ioSprinklrOptimizing ads on campaigns to get most leads for least cost-summarizing/visualizing our web visitors and prospectsUnderstand which prospects have intent to buy, are open to contactData cleanup or other repeated tasks, learning from watching you

Also check out our other AI-related episodes:

Episode 57: How AI Levels the Marketing Playing Field

If every part of your customer acquisition can be measured, you’ll figure out how to do it profitably. That premise has driven why digital marketing, and especially Pay-per-click (PPC) is managed by experienced humans. These professionals scour through data for the relationship between a company’s ads and the buyers actions; once found, budgets get shifted to achieve that optimal effect.  

A wrench has been thrown into our acquisition dreams by the ad platform titans: Google, Facebook and Microsoft (who own LinkedIn). Thanks to major AI investments they have made in the last five years, they’ve been able to automate much of the work that marketing professionals have done. In tandem with implementing their ‘smart’ software that runs autonomously, they have been restricting a marketer’s ability to manually control campaigns. 

The platforms believe their AI is smart enough to run marketing, so we can either be passive, letting them spend our money as they see fit, or we can choose to give them navigational assistance while they drive. The point is, you should have a game plan that works with the platforms’ AI. One that, over time, will generate the leads you need at the best possible acquisition cost.

I believe listening to this episode will give you that plan. It covers:

  • How marketing has become more computationally complex than humans can handle
  • What was in it for the platforms to automate PPC marketing
  • Stages of maturity for dealing with data, ending with predictive analytics
  • Why you shouldn’t fight ad platform automation, but instead use your business data to train algorithms how to market you more effectively
  • How you should integrate your in-house systems and apply data science to uncover insights

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Paper estimating how much data optimized advertising requires, authored by Randall A. Lewis of Google; Justin M. Rao of Microsoft: “A calibrated statistical argument shows that the required sample size for an experiment to generate informative confidence intervals is typically in excess of ten million person-weeks”

Quote by Chuck Heamann & Ken Burbary in “Digital Marketing Analytics”:  “If you think about all the tools we have talked about…you see that there is one common denominator: You do not own any of the data. Herein lies what we think is the biggest revolution coming to digital analytics..companies will be building internal repositories for this data.”

Episode Reboot 

Go talk to a coworker who uses statistical measurement, to understand how the efficiency it achieves in other fields can be applied to marketing.

Episode 47: AI For Marketers by Chris Penn – Summer Books

Marketers know that Artificial Intelligence is being integrated into our work, but many are unsure how they can apply it to their daily work. Our guest is Christopher S. Penn, the author of AI for Marketers: A Primer and Introduction, just out in its 3rd edition.

Our guest is an authority on analytics, digital marketing, and marketing technology. A recognized thought leader, best-selling author, and keynote speaker. He has been named by IBM as a Champion in IBM Analytics.

Chris is a cofounder and Chief Data Scientist of Trust Insights, a Boston -based digital analytics firm. He is co-host of the Marketing Over Coffee podcast. He has also run the marketing for a series of startups in the financial services, SaaS software, and public relations industries.

People, products and concepts mentioned in the episode:

Seven steps of AI Maturity:

  1. Data Foundation
  2. Measurement & analytics
  3. Insights & Research
  4. Process Automation
  5. Data Science
  6. Machine learning
  7. AI-Powered
reproduced with permission

Chris’ Social Profiles