Generative marketing

What is generative marketing? 

Generative marketing is the concept of applying generative AI capabilities to marketing workflows, most notably in platforms that connect marketing teams directly to the data in the data cloud. This new application of generative AI in marketing streamlines workflows by improving campaign production speed and audience accuracy.

How does generative marketing relate to generative AI? 

Generative marketing relies on generative AI to drive a range of marketing functions, such as creating goal-based customer journeys and audience-specific creative. Generative AI is an indispensable necessity for effectively implementing generative marketing strategies.

Where did the concept of generative marketing come from? 

Generative marketing has recently emerged as an approach to tackle three key challenges facing marketers today.

Bridging the gap between insights and campaign activation

The proliferation of data across various marketing tools has led to fragmented, isolated data silos. This situation incurs extra costs for data storage and requires data teams to painstakingly piece together scattered information from these platforms. This fragmentation slows campaign launches and hampers the realization of cross-channel personalized customer journeys. Generative AI's full potential remains locked within these disparate data silos.

But the rising adoption of the data cloud in recent years has unlocked many new and upgraded use cases for marketers, eliminating some of these silos. With access to their organization’s comprehensive customer data — like transaction history, website visits, and mobile app engagement — marketers can orchestrate more personalized customer experiences. 
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Generative marketing is the latest evolution on this improved marketing stack. Because it relies on the company’s single source of truth in the data cloud, generative marketing,opens up further opportunities for increased marketing effectiveness.

Meeting the demand for omnichannel personalization

The COVID-19 pandemic sparked an unprecedented surge in consumer expectations for omnichannel personalization. As consumers rapidly adapted to new shopping habits, brands faced the pressing need to deliver tailored experiences across many channels. Additionally, the number of channels consumers use continues to grow, furthering the complexity and need for increased marketing resources to meet expectations.

Generative marketing emerged as a response to the heightened expectations, enabling marketers to more easily generate personalized experiences that resonate with individuals in the omnichannel era.

Supporting the increase in campaign creation and measurement to meet personalization demands

Marketers grapple with an insurmountable math problem: They must scale teams to cope with the increasing demand for cross-channel personalization, which presents an immense challenge. 

This cross-channel personalization involves:

• Segmenting audiences into smaller groups for more precise personalization
• Crafting unique customer journeys for each segment
• Creating customized creatives to support numerous campaigns
• Conducting experiments across these journeys
• Analyzing performance across many scenarios. 

With each new campaign, product, or audience, the workload for marketing multiplies exponentially.

Generative marketing provides marketers with a partner in completing these complex tasks, offering efficient scalability and enhancing agility in response to evolving personalized marketing needs.

Use cases for generative marketing

At its core, generative marketing unlocks the ability for marketing teams to launch a greater number of personalized campaigns. 

By partnering with a collaborative AI, marketers remain in the driver's seat while creating:

More refined audience segments

Because generative marketing connects marketers with the data in the data cloud, new functionalities around audience segmentation become available. This includes goal-based audience segmentation, where a marketer describes their dream outcome for an audience group, and receives several audience suggestions aimed at achieving that goal. From there, the marketer can refine and adjust the results.

Goal-based cross-channel journeys

Once a marketer has created an audience segment — either manually or through generated suggestions —  they can harness generative marketing to craft multi-destination journeys. 

Similar to audience segmentation, a marketer can collaborate with an AI chat to describe their goal outcomes for their audience segment, select their desired channels, and receive suggestions for journeys. The marketer can review these suggestions prior to launch, and marketers can add additional experiments throughout each journey through channel-specific A/B tests to gather more results once the journey is complete.

Audience-specific creative and content

Generative marketing also brings together existing genAI capabilities to a single marketing workflow, most notably content creation. Marketers can receive generated content for every step of their cross-channel journey.

Why should I care about generative marketing?

Generative marketing is an accelerant for teams at every step of the marketing workflow.  Rather than simply automating marketing tasks, generative marketing is a collaborative process between marketers and AI. Marketers are involved at each stage — segmenting audiences, reviewing and refining suggested cross-channel journeys, and evaluating the results of completed campaigns.

Benefits of generative marketing

Adopting generative marketing presents a wealth of opportunities for marketers and the businesses they serve.

1. Enhanced marketing efficiency and productivity - By leveraging generative marketing functionality, teams can expedite the process of creating target audiences and building omnichannel campaigns. 
2. Increased personalization potential - Generative marketing empowers marketers to create more precise audience segments, knowing that they will have comprehensive support throughout the journey — –from initial segmentation to campaign launch.
3. Access to comprehensive data - Since generative marketing is powered by the data in the data cloud, marketing teams gain access to their organization’s unified data source. This date enriches generative marketing, improving campaign quality.
4. Accelerated experimentation and growth - For the first time, marketing teams have a tool at their disposal that unlocks experimentation with personalized creative for a diverse array of campaigns.

What tools do I need for generative marketing?

Generative marketing is accessible with only a few tools, many of which marketing teams already have.

Data cloud

Teams must have their data in a data cloud like Snowflake or Google Cloud BigQuery. 

Composable CDP

Generative marketing is unlocked through a composable CDP, which provides teams access to the data cloud. In this process, the composable CDP provides a generative marketing platform to support marketers at every stage — from audience segmentation to campaign launches.

How do I implement generative marketing at my organization?

If you want to incorporate generative marketing into your organization, follow these key steps:

Identify whether your data analytics team already uses a data cloud

• If your team is already using a data cloud, proceed to step 2.
• If your team is not using a data cloud, partner with a provider that offers data ingestion and preparation, or a quick-start ingestion and organization solution. 

Identify whether or not your team is using a composable CDP

• If your team is, contact your composable CDP provider to inquire about their generative marketing capabilities.
• If your team is not, begin the search for a composable CDP that offers generative marketing.

Start generating campaigns and results

• Test, measure, and iterate your campaigns to optimize performance and drive revenue.