Cassy TrussellWhere would we be today without our precious stack of martech tools? The introduction of the tools themselves revolutionized how marketers streamlined their processes, creating all new techniques for measuring customer interactions and making the most informed decisions to meet company goals. But with all of this measuring comes a ton of data, and until recently, there wasn’t all that much we could do with it. The future, and the need to analyze and understand all this readily available data, is coming faster than we ever imagined. Those who don’t keep up will be left in the dust.
These days, competition is fierce and there is a tool available for every marketing whim you could ever envision. I predict that within just a few years, we will see a cull of this bloated and highly competitive space, and only those harnessing the power of AI will remain to dominate the industry. The companies able to launch sophisticated solutions will survive, leading the transition into the fourth industrial revolution.
Some martech providers are ahead of the game already. We rounded up five we think are top of the class:
Lucy
Lucy knows all, sees all, understands all. Cloud-connected, a universe of data is at her fingertips. Trained in natural language processing, she can be asked questions just like a human teammate. Capable of machine learning, she improves at her job the more she does it. Just don’t call her software– it really hurts her feelings.
– Lucy Marketing Team
First there was Watson, the 4 billion dollar artificially intelligent brain child of IBM and first commercially recognized AI system. Watson secured a place in our collective conscience when he famously beat everyone’s favorite (human) Jeopardy champ Ken Jennings.
Now there’s Lucy, Watson’s ‘daughter’, built off of her predecessor (father?) to organize data, analyze brand mentions, offer suggestions and make the life of the marketing professional all the much easier. Lucy quickly digests and organizes your marketing data in order to deliver market research, persona profiles, budget allocation suggestions and other tasks that would take a human much longer to accomplish. With this kind of assistance, marketers can spend more time focusing on attracting leads and less time crunching numbers.
SalesForce Einstein
Einstein is like having your own data scientist to guide you through your day. It learns from all your data, and delivers predictions and recommendations based on your unique business processes. In some cases, it even automates tasks for you, freeing up time for you to connect with your customers.
– Einstein Marketing Team
Salesforce chose a big name for their machine learning algorithms, and word on the street is they’re delivering. With a team of 175 data scientists behind him, Einstein uses deep learning, natural language processing, and computer vision to help users across multiple applications in the Salesforce cloud. Integrated directly in the Salesforce environment, Einstein can lend a hand to sales, marketing, customer service, developers and anyone in between through insights, predictions, and data-driven recommendations.
For example, Einstein can take a peek at your Salesforce data and decipher which leads are most likely to convert, while simultaneously alerting you when a lead is considering competitor products or services, thus improving the process and helping the team focus on customer success.
MailChimp, Omnivore
Omnivore, MailChimp’s abuse-prevention initiative, keeps our system clean by gathering information from billions of emails and predicting bad behavior in campaigns before they even get out the door.
– MailChimp Marketing Team
MailChimp is no stranger to one of the most hated internet activities: email spam. But the rate that spammers replicated, and the amount of abusive emails they produced every second, was no one-man job. Enter Omnivore, the smart email abuse prevention system hungry for questionable email content.
Filtering out billions of offers from generous Nigerian princes and suspiciously effective weight loss pills alike, Omnivore’s machine learning algorithms work like a sieve that catch dubious activity long before the campaigns even have a chance to launch. Because the algorithms are constantly learning from billions of addresses and email content, Omnivore is able to stay on top of the latest deceptive tactics and act accordingly. This kind of technology keeps spammers at bay, while also improving email systems and gathering actionable data for legit marketers.
Conversica
Conversica provides an automated sales assistant powered by artificial intelligence software. The assistant works just like a human sales assistant, reaching out to every single one of your leads and engaging each of them in a human conversation. People love it because the assistant is personable, friendly and responsive, connecting them quickly with a human that can help.
– Conversica Marketing Team
Initial contact with customers is an important, but often a time consuming and not always fruitful step in the sales process. Conversica uses the power of machine learning and natural language processing to make this first contact on behalf of the company in a convincing way, saving real sales and marketing teams time to focus on quality leads.
When someone expresses interest in the company in a variety of ways (ex. downloading an eBook, requesting more information, etc) Conversica’s artificially intelligent assistant contacts them to get the process started. If the lead seems viable, the smart system knows they are worthy of being handed off to a human salesperson to finalize the deal. That way the human salespeople can focus all of their energy on converting the leads that are ready to be converted.
Acquisio
Acquisio Turing is a set of 30 high frequency predictive algorithms working together to ingest campaign data across platforms. Data such as seasonality, times of day, times of week, location, positioning and more allow Acquisio Turing to self-learn and make smarter bid and budget decisions all day long, in real-time. The results speak for themselves.
– Acquisio Marketing Team
You may have noticed that we’ve been talking a lot about the launch of Acquisio Turing, the new name for our suite of long established machine learning algorithms. We recently released a report about the incredible results our clients have been achieving with Acquisio Turing, and we want everybody to know about it!
Acquisio Turing was built in Montreal, the now globally recognized hotspot for artificial intelligence research and development. Built to improve the lives of paid search marketers everywhere, Acquisio Turing learns and self-improves with every bit of processed data on a scale no human could ever achieve. With our machine learning algorithms, you can easily optimize bids and budgets, automate spend control and pace budgets throughout the month to avoid overspending or underspending.
This type of innovation allows campaign managers to focus on strategy, instead of spending precious time trying to keep up with constant market fluctuations. As we recently described in a related blog post:
The outcomes of our machine learning technology in the marketplace have been significant. Campaign managers see better campaign performance, even for low budget or volume spends. Our technology also automates workflows, offering dramatic improvements to operational efficiency. We’ve also proven that it can decrease OPEX, increase LTV, lower customer churn rates and improve customer satisfaction. Most importantly our machine learning technology gets our customer’s accounts more clicks and conversions for less money.
The Revolution Has Begun
From email marketing to lead gen to SEM, the martech platforms above are leveraging artificial intelligence as we know it today to deliver better results than humans could ever accomplish on their own. Each is a piece of the marketing puzzle working together with a unique purpose for better performance.
If you’d like see how machine learning has dramatically improved the results our clients are getting, download a copy of the 2017 Acquisio Turing Performance Report and prepare to be amazed!
Image Credits
Feature Image: Unsplash/Iker Urteaga
All screenshots by Cassy Trussell. Taken September 2017.
Image 1: Screenshot from Lucy.
Image 2: Screenshot from SalesForce Einstein.
Image 3: Screenshot from MailChimp Ominvore.
Image 4: Screenshot from Conversica.
Image 5: Screenshot from Acquisio.
Arnav Patel
Patrick Foster
Chandal Nolasco Da Silva