The marketing services landscape has drastically evolved in the past two decades. In the early 2000s, digital marketing was still in its infancy, and agencies were just beginning to help brands make the shift from traditional to online platforms.
The mid to late 2000s saw the rise of CRM systems, which agencies implemented for clients to enable more targeted, personalized communication. This was a huge improvement from manual spreadsheet management, but still required substantial effort and oversight from agency teams.
The advent of social media further revolutionized the industry, opening up new avenues for customer engagement that agencies had to quickly adopt and manage for brands. Yet even with these technological advancements, the burden of manual content creation, predicting trends, and generating visuals remained largely on agencies.
Now, AI is transforming marketing services before our eyes. With capabilities like automated content creation through ChatGPT, image generation with DALL-E and MidJourney, advanced forecasting, and more, AI is not just a tool for agencies—it's an essential partner.
With around 1.6 billion monthly ChatGPT website visits, virtually every tech-savvy person in the world has used AI. In other words, AI has quickly become a must-have tool for agencies to remain competitive. By implementing AI, agencies can provide more value to clients through enhanced analytics, predictions, and insights.
Whether you're a seasoned agency veteran or a newcomer to the field, you can use AI to elevate your marketing efforts, and this eBook will explore some powerful ways to do so.
The challenges of delivering marketing services in the digital age have left agencies looking for ways to improve efficiency. Artificial intelligence offers benefits that can help agencies enhance their service offerings and reduce overhead.
AI enables automation, advanced analytics, personalized experiences, error reduction, new service offerings, and faster insights - capabilities human teams often lack the bandwidth for. With AI, agencies can provide more value to clients through analytics and predictions that would not be feasible manually.
Automation frees up time from repetitive tasks so that agencies can spend more time on developing creative campaigns and strategies to help grow their own and clients’ business.
Practically every agency has sections of the customer journey and user acquisition funnel that are brute-forced - places where conversion rates reach just high enough to make sense for the company to invest in driving more volume.
Using AI, agency owners can automatically identify the best leads for their business and route them directly to the right people and easily measure the quality of each advertisement channel and turn on and off spend automatically as the ROI approaches a critical threshold. Other roles like salespeople can focus their time and energy on the best contacts that will generate the most revenue, and account managers can automatically prepare reports – making their jobs massively more efficient.
AI makes it possible for agencies to differentiate their suite of service offerings. Historically, marketing agencies were mostly limited to a well-known set of offerings: Things like copywriting, SEO, PR, ads, and social media.
It’s difficult to stand out when every agency is offering the same set of services. With tools like Chat Explore, a generative AI technology, agencies can now offer their clients unparalleled insight into their data and find new opportunities for growth. Agencies can simply connect their data, create real-time visualizations, and make predictions, which can be embedded anywhere.
Agencies that used to spend days or weeks doing analysis and reporting can now get insights in minutes. And, with the Akkio white label, agencies can keep their branding while offering these new services.
The benefits of AI for agencies don't stop at reducing workloads: AI also helps you measure your business' success and metrics more effectively.
AI can help you optimize advertising spend by efficiently finding new customers through channel optimization and audience targeting. It identifies the ideal customers based on established patterns and tracks individual ad performance. AI facilitates the understanding of customer behavior through accurate reports generated from data gathered from customer interactions. It also alerts businesses to take action based on the data, such as targeting customers for upsells or preventing churn.
Personalization is another primary use-case of AI for agencies. AI-powered personalization will help you find the right message for your target audience on a granular level, leading to better user experiences and higher conversion rates.
AI models can make it easier for agencies and marketers to personalize content, from product recommendations in email marketing to demographic and firmographic targeted messaging on social media. With AI, agencies can create campaigns they know their customers will engage with and, as a result, reduce wasted time and money spent on unproductive channels.
By using algorithms to analyze data about customers’ decisions (ranging from their time on an e-commerce site to their purchasing history), marketers can predict which next piece of content is most likely to result in a customer making a purchase.
Identifying key patterns in your data is challenging and easy to get wrong when done manually, with potentially dramatic consequences. Drawing conclusions from manual data analysis is subject to human bias - and it is very common to use the specific lens that most supports an agenda when presenting findings. These errors in understanding and decision making compound over time and drag down your growth trajectory.
Similarly, it’s easy to make single-customer level mistakes when dealing with a huge volume of data, such as classifying customer support tickets. This can lead to presenting a solution to a customer that’s entirely unrelated to their actual problem, leaving customers frustrated and subject to churn.
Mistakes are human, that’s what makes AI such a great candidate to help. AI marketing can both surface the actual underlying patterns from business data and also automate and streamline repetitive tasks and eliminate all-too-common human error.
These benefits together add up to faster decision-making. Using the power of automation and algorithms, agencies can implement changes more quickly, stamp out process inefficiency and, most importantly, maximize revenue capture.
While the potential applications for artificial intelligence are limitless, one of the essential aspects of any AI endeavor is to ensure that any predictions it makes are aligned with the values of your agency and of society. This is just as instrumental in the future of digital marketing.
There are also considerations surrounding data quantity and quality, consent and privacy, bias, white labeling, and technical details that need to be taken into account when developing marketing automation systems or applications.
The world of SEO content is fiercely competitive, with millions of articles published daily, and websites vying for the top positions on search engine results pages (SERPs). In this competitive landscape, producing high-quality content alone is not enough. Agencies must also ensure that their content is optimized for search engines, addressing factors like keyword targeting, on-page optimization, and backlinks. This optimization process is often resource-intensive and time-consuming, leading to inconsistent performance that frustrates clients and hinders the success of content marketing campaigns.
Tools like Akkio can help digital marketers and SEO specialists build AI to target high-performing keywords more accurately, and vastly improve their content rankings on search results. Learn more about how marketing agency, Ellipsis, was able to 4x their clients’ SEO results with Akkio.
Agencies can white label tools like Akkio's AI analytics platform to provide a new service offering to their clients. With a white labeled solution, agencies can brand the platform as their own and provide cutting-edge AI capabilities to customers. For example, using Chat Explore™, Akkio’s chatbot for data, an agency can provide a custom link to their client on advertising data, and the client can chat directly with their data to pull the exact insights they need, without having to request a full report.
White labeling Akkio enables agencies to deliver client self-service analytics, faster insights through natural language, and easy embedding into websites/apps. Agencies can showcase their expertise while leveraging Akkio's AI to scale their services.
With augmented lead scoring, agencies can effortlessly discover which sources are generating leads with the highest leads and new customers both internally and for their clients.
This enables agencies to adjust their strategy and spend quickly and efficiently, rather than waiting for infrequent and out-of-date reviews and recaps. Akkio makes lead scoring simple by enabling marketers to upload CRM data through a spreadsheet, or connect directly to their Hubspot or Salesforce. From there, you can train and build an AI model in minutes, without technical expertise, and start predicting the scores of future leads. Ultimately, this lets both marketing and sales teams prioritize the most important leads.
Many agencies have large sales funnels that allow them to expansively capture leads and nurture them into more sales. With the wealth of customer data available, it’s possible to customize the entire process based on previous purchase history. Many businesses are using AI in marketing to take customers through a personalized journey down the sales funnel.
Sales funnel optimization (SFO) is a great way to make your sales job easier, find sticking points in the funnel, and ultimately close more deals. Companies armed with AI-powered SFO will naturally have an advantage over their competitors that are stuck using inefficient manual or often incorrect rules-based methods.
Predicting what and when your customers will purchase helps with your planning at all levels of an agency. This level of foresight allows you to focus your business accordingly.
Traditional forecasting takes a lot of time-consuming manual work, data engineering, and needs statistical expertise. AI makes forecasting effortless, even for non-technical teams, allowing marketers to plan ahead, predict campaign performance, and build better budgets.
With Akkio’s forecasting, sales and marketing teams no longer need to guess what sales will be for the next year. You can quickly understand patterns, analyze influential factors, and make a time series model to predict future results.
With access to more data than ever before, it’s easier than ever for agencies to track campaign performance and optimize return on ad spend. But compiling reports and finding insights manually requires extensive analyst time and leaves ROI optimization lagging.
AI empowers agencies to instantly analyze campaign data, measure true return on ad spend, and continuously optimize based on performance. By building custom models, agencies can evaluate impression-level performance across their clients’ channels and audiences. And by connecting campaign data directly to Akkio, optimization becomes real-time.
With Chat Explore, you can have a natural conversation with your campaign data to understand what's driving ROAS and how to optimize it.
Simply give commands in plain English like “show me return on ad spend by channel.” The AI will instantly analyze the data and provide clear, actionable answers to guide your optimization strategy.
This enables agencies to adjust campaign targeting and spending for maximum ROI automatically, rather than waiting for delayed analyst reviews. With AI-powered analytics and ROAS tracking, agencies can maximize performance for clients’ campaigns.
Traditional artificial intelligence software solutions require a lot of time and technical expertise. With Akkio, agencies get access to cutting-edge technology in an easy, affordable way. Now, even non-technical agencies can grow their businesses with AI beyond what they ever thought was possible.
AI helps agencies power their data operations with AI so they can work more efficiently, offer new services to their clients, and ultimately boost their business, keeping them on the cutting-edge.