How AI-Powered Experimentation Will Drive Digital Marketing Innovation in 2024
The internet is a fast-moving ecosystem. Trends rise and fall in weeks or days, minting new quasi-celebrities and relegating once-relevant personalities into obscurity.
Marketing trends come and go just as quickly. Today’s innovative digital marketing strategies are tomorrow’s cringe-worthy has-beens. If brands are slow to adapt, they risk sounding tone-deaf or unaware, making it especially difficult to connect with their target audiences.
To succeed in the fast-paced marketing world — and maintain a sense of relevance with your audience — it’s vital to stay ahead of them.
Hubspot
This is easier said than done.
Staying ahead requires more than responsive agility. It demands that brands actively and intentionally drive change.
Experimentation is how it happens.
Here’s how your brand can experiment with the purpose of continually pursuing digital marketing innovation that generates leads, converts sales, and optimizes relevance across every channel.
Unlocking Innovation With Experimentation
Experimentation-as-a-service (EaaS) offers digital marketers and the brands they serve a framework for leveraging experimentation to unlock innovation.
EaaS, a systematic approach to assessing the efficacy of marketing tools and techniques, isn’t a new concept. For decades, brands have leveraged randomized control experiments through A/B testing to identify the strengths and weaknesses of new products, services, and messaging.
To be effective, brands analyze several components of their marketing campaigns, including content, design, user experience, and channel strategies.
These experiments often begin in a controlled setting before gradually expanding to larger user bases. In MIT’s comprehensive analysis of the practice’s implementation across tech and business sectors:
Along the way, the new version might be updated to incorporate learnings from earlier iterations or scrapped if it significantly negatively affects business metrics.
MIT
In 2024, companies will have more signals to evaluate than ever as more people come online, spend more time on their devices, and engage more with their favorite digital platforms. All this information isn’t necessarily making digital marketing more effective.
Overwhelmed by a deluge of data, just 24 percent of executives say they successfully created a data-driven organization, an eight percent decline since 2019.
HBR
So far, more information, including experimentation data, isn’t enabling real-time, data-driven decisions.
However, this process has fresh relevance in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), making experimentation more efficient, effective, timely, and impactful.
As a result, brands can proactively shape their marketing strategies rather than always reacting to the latest trends, which often feel elusive and just out of reach.
Measuring the Impact of Constant Innovation
An EaaS approach to digital marketing innovation allows for continuous iterations, adapting to the fast-paced digital world and ensuring sustained growth and revenue optimization.
Take this example from our team: a leading European solar energy company looking to enter the US market struggled to scale its lead generation efforts within a limited timeframe. The company needed a digital marketing strategy to acquire more high-quality leads to meet its ambitious growth targets by the end of the year.
The solution was implemented in two parts. First, the company had to transform its homepage from a static website to a dynamic lead generation presence with long-term implications for customer acquisition opportunities.
At the same time, the company partnered with a digital marketing agency with expertise in paid advertising, which refined the company’s lead funnel design and implementation, creating an integrated approach to customer acquisition.
EaaS allowed these efforts to be successful.
For instance, market research data provided key demographic insights, allowing the brand to target the right audience with the right messaging at the right time. When coupled with A/B-tested copywriting frameworks, including headline modifications, and the exploration of diverse ad creatives, and strategically designed landing pages, the company identified the most persuasive messaging that elicited a resonant response from our designated target audience.
One notable experiment involved comparing two distinct approaches: one centered around implementing a lead-capturing form, and the other focused on encouraging potential customers to request a free estimate of potential cost savings by transitioning to solar energy as a viable alternative to traditional utility companies.
By running additional ads on Instagram and X to separate landing pages focused entirely on testing bid caps and creative copy, the brand generated enough traffic per variant to inform an educated decision pressed by time constraints.
AI and ML are key to unlocking these insights. Even as they navigate a well-documented hype cycle, their data aggregation and analysis capabilities are unquestioned, producing actionable outcomes that would otherwise be unavailable to brands.
Experiment to Drive Innovation
The expansive online ecosystem will continue to evolve at breakneck speed, producing new trends and demanding fresh approaches to digital marketing that capture consumers’ interest and invite them to take the next steps in the customer journey.
With the average person already encountering more than 1,700 online ads every month, brands will undoubtedly need to become even more personalized and engaging than ever before.
EaaS presents a framework for achieving this, enabling businesses to make informed, real-time decisions that fuel sustainable growth and market impact.
In other words, EaaS creates an opportunity to make data useful again, giving every brand the ability to intentionally drive change in digital marketing initiatives.
Related Martech Zone Content
