Who loves change? Not many people love change. The old saying goes If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Well, our society hasn’t been following that old adage. In fact, our society is in a state of rapid change. Not one thing in our economy is stable or reliable. Looking back over the last five years, we’ve faced a global pandemic that drove everyone to work remotely, extremely high inflation rates, a near run on banks, two international wars, and the introduction of generative AI. 

Dang that’s a lot of change. 

Yet, companies are trying to conduct business the way they did back in 2016. Remember the good old days, when you’d buy a marketing automation system and CRM, and then it was just a numbers game of converting a specific number of prospects into clients. Granted, some folks had preferred CRM or MAPs, but they basically followed the same playbook. No mention of data lakes or connecting product data to marketing, sales, or finance data. Unfortunately, we started to see the breakdown of this playback in 2021/2022. And I am not going to say it was just our go-to-market approach; it was also product pricing and some other product-driven reasons for this downturn. 

Generative AI is now flipping all that old-school playbook on its head. So, what are we going to do? It’s easy but annoying; we need to get very intentional, focused, and clear on what our products/services are addressing and who needs those services. 

How do we do that? 

1. Get focused on your ideal customer. Who is your ideal customer base? If your business has been around for some time, can you leverage financial and sales data to identify what those companies look like? Are they a large East Coast-based enterprise in the financial industry? Can you add sufficient firmographic information (annual revenue, number of employees, industry, location) to your highest accounts to identify any trends?
2. Identify the problem your solution solves for your ideal customers and focus all messaging around those solutions. Listen to the ideal customer base to confirm product/market fit. What are the big services/information they are looking to receive from your product? Remove any marketing noise that doesn’t align with your solutions.
3. Remove the noise. What we are learning with Generative AI is that we need to be clear and direct about what we need from the tool. Providing vague information results in poor outputs. Is this a big change? No. Will it be an impactful change? Yes.

Ironically, in 2019, the hit Netflix show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo might have focused on how to clean up a home and keep us from feeling overwhelmed with clutter. “Does this spark joy?” If your marketing materials, email campaigns, and web stories aren’t sparking joy in your ideal customers, it is time to remove them.

Leverage your marketing operations team to help you through this exercise. Marketing ops folks love to clean, organize, keep track of items, and create transparency. The old joke at marketing automation conferences is that we are the folks who love organizing sock draws, and jigsaw puzzles are our favorite activity. Let them help you document campaigns, automations, and other systems that are running on your systems. They can also identify which audiences have engaged with those materials, and if the majority are with the ideal customer profile. 

By leveraging AI, the marketing operations team can provide the systems with obvious direction and information from the marketing automatic systems to identify which emails, web pages, ebooks, and other campaign materials might be irrelevant to your core audience’s needs. Simple prompts that ask the generative AI to confirm the ideal customer profile, look at engagement volumes, and who engaged with those materials. You can also provide examples of materials that your ideal clients have engaged with, such as eBooks or forms they’ve completed, to illustrate the content they are interested in. Knowing what your ideal customers are engaging with, and then having the AI summarize or categorize public materials to confirm relevancy will help you quickly clear out the clutter of your campaigns.

Overall, AI will help your company be more focused, dedicated, and clear on your products and offerings. It is time to throw out those old playbooks. The work is going to keep changing, and being more focused and intentional about our messaging is more important than ever. No crystal ball will point us to the following great marketing playbook, but helping our customers understand clearly our services will position us well for the future.