One of the greatest challenges marketers face is creating campaigns that can both scale and are unique to the person viewing the content. Its where the premise of ABM originated; it’s how marketers get the most bang-for-their-buck. It is undoubtedly accurate that a well-tailored campaign that speaks directly to the reader at the exact time they need to hear the message will convert better than a generalized message using the spray and pray method.

One of the greatest challenges marketers face is creating campaigns that can both scale and are unique to the person viewing the content. Its where the premise of ABM originated; it’s how marketers get the most bang-for-their-buck. It is undoubtedly accurate that a well-tailored campaign that speaks directly to the reader at the exact time they need to hear the message will convert better than a generalized message using the spray and pray method.

Enter AI into this mix and it combines the best of both worlds – AI in marketing at scale while allowing for micro-targeting of verticals, groups of people, or those with very specific attributes. It also allows marketers to ask better questions, and questions that haven’t been considered yet, to discover new attributes that could be relational, which helps to scale marketing campaigns.

In this episode of AMP UP Your Digital Marketing we meet Dr. Ian Howells, Vice President and Head of Marketing at Sage Intacct, an accounting software. He speaks to tailoring their marketing approach to allow for scale while creating an unparalleled level of micro-targeting to their target markets. In this discussion, he challenges the way marketers think about verticalization and grouping together industries just because they share a common thread, and how to leverage AI to influence them better.

Transcript:

Glenn: Welcome back to the show. Today we’re speaking with Ian Howells. Ian, welcome to the show.

Ian: It’s great to be here.

Glenn: Ian, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Ian: Yeah, I’m the VP head of marketing at Sage Intacct. We’re a cloud financials company that was acquired by Sage for just under a billion dollars two-and-a-half years ago.

Glenn: Oh, very nice. And that must have been interesting, just going through the acquisition. In terms of some of the areas that you’ve been focusing on lately, what’s the area that really pops up for you, what’s got you most focused or passionate about right now?

Ian: Just it’s interesting really the space that we’re in has driven the approach that we’ve taken. So, we sell cloud financials, we have cloud budgeting and planning, cloud HR and people and analytics. And Gartner kind of characterized the market really well in 2018, it called it the largest enterprise software category at about $37 billion going through a generational shift to the cloud.

So, what you have is this ginormous cloud market really shifting from on-premise to cloud. And each vertical is shifting at a different pace in each geography. So, kind of the key thing that drives what we do is normally you’re looking for opportunity, but here the opportunity is so large, you’re looking at where do you start? And there are three core things that we do. We kind of break the world into what we call the micro-verticals, and we use AI at scales to kind of personalize the scale.

Glenn: So, okay, so AI means different things to different people. And so, just give us some context here. How would you define AI in this? And then, I mean, is it just machine learning, is it – how far do you go down that path and how do you do it?

Ian: Yeah, absolutely. So, if you look at the key problem we’re trying to solve, to give you the context to the AI approach,