In the current eCommerce landscape, marketers are too focused on the KPIs in the dashboard. Marketers are not robots that interpret metrics and run analyses every day.
Where has the creative marketer gone? The copywriters, remember, back in the day? When marketers mainly were brainstorming for catchy slogans and distinctive creatives? This blog will show you that AI puts this creativity back into the marketer. At the same time, AI also offers possibilities for acceleration. In 2025, no marketer will work without one!
Marketing in the 20th century
This was the time when marketing did not have that many facets! An Agency was not concerned with impressions, clicks and other metrics with complicated abbreviations. But marketers were trying to develop slogans and large posters for magazines and billboards. In retrospect, it had to be all about the return of investment; Market share gained, and the amount of profit.
I’m romanticising this a bit, but let’s be honest: the Internet wasn’t that big, and online advertising didn’t exist. You could frame it under the motto “simpler times”.
The only metrics on which you could steer your strategy was through previously conducted market research and the results of previous campaigns. “It either worked, or it just didn’t work.”
Marketers were mainly copywriters and focused on creativity, and data did not yet play a prominent role.
Marketing now
In the current marketing environment, we are focused on keeping a close eye on dashboards and at look all kinds of KPIs. We mostly sit in front of our computers and use data to analyse the best way forward in our marketing campaigns.
This is not entirely strange since marketing has gone primarily digital, and a lot is measurable because of that. But isn’t it a shortcoming of our skills?
Arriving at work in the morning, discussing the KPIs, then spending the whole day looking at the numbers again and then adjusting campaigns as a side job.
I’m not saying that KPIs are redundant or wrong to rationalise campaign adjustments. Data is the backbone of marketing, but we are not looking at data the right way.
We are not trained as analysts. We are taught to communicate with the right target audience at the right time with the best tools.
This is a big difference compared to the role of marketers in the past. The balance is now mainly leaning towards the data, which is, as explained, good but not ideal.
Complications within eCommerce marketing.
Besides being too obsessed with numbers, we all use these numbers in different ways. We can look at the same dashboard, but all come to a different conclusion.
In addition, different departments value the importance of specific metrics differently. E-commerce managers, for example, are more likely to focus on the ROAS, where someone from management has a greater interest in a favourable ROI.
Not only do people interpret data differently, but different Analytics tools do too!
For example, Shopify’s session count is not as accurate compared to the session count in Google Analytics. But the Order count is not correct in Google Analytics. As a result, both parties will show different incorrect conversion ratios.
But misinterpreting data is not the only problem we face.
Data regulations make it increasingly difficult for marketers and agencies to track target audiences via Facebook or collect website data in Google Analytics. As a result, dashboards will be incomplete and reliable conclusions can no longer be drawn.
This will ultimately be at the expense of results, which will automatically be translated into the company’s overall performance.
The future of marketing
By 2025, every company will have an AI. The benefits of AI are endless, but I’ll list the most interesting short-term changes.
1st party data targetting
AI CAN CREATE AND SEGMENT AUDIENCES because it uses self-collected data (first-party data), from a webshop, for example. In a world where tracking is becoming increasingly complex through software such as Google Analytics and Facebook, this is a crucial advantage that you can leverage with the help of AI.
Artificial intelligence is the perfect tool for marketers who want to ensure that their ad campaigns reach only those who are (expected) to be most interested. Using AI, you can create lookalike audiences based on past behaviour and target new leads.
Targeting a group that is most likely to “churn” in a month anyway? No problem!
Bid & Budget optimisation
With AI, you can get the best performance from your ads and spend less time micro-managing them. AI uses algorithms to analyse how an ad performs on specific platforms and then offers recommendations for improvement based on this data.
Some can even take automated actions (bidding and budget optimisations) to save marketers precious hours of tedious work. The time they could otherwise spend, such as increasing revenue by improving ad-copies and creatives in the marketing campaigns!
Ad copy and visual creatives
AI can give us advice about ad-copies and creatives by analysing them and drawing conclusions based on historical data. A human being cannot do this rationally without conducting significant analyses. An AI with its computing power can easily do this in just a few minutes!
This allows marketers to make data-proven decisions about creatives and spend less time A/B testing different versions of ads. This ensures that fewer resources are spent (both money and time).
To conclude
We are convinced that by 2025 all marketers will be working with an AI. We are already seeing a significant shift between the balance of creativity and data within e-commerce and digital marketing. AI will ensure that the entire company will look at data the same way. Endless analyses and staring at KPIs are a thing of the past. This will allow marketers to spend more time in the creative marketing processes!
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Till next time!
Check out our previous blog!
