The PR 20/20 Blog

This post originally appeared on the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute's blog. The Marketing AI Institute was created and is powered by PR 20/20. 

How do you get started with AI?

AI is a complicated subject. It’s easy to get frustrated or struggle to “get it.” It can take weeks, months or even years for some marketers to fully understand what AI is and why it matters.

Marketers have an important job that often falls by the wayside. According to CSO Insights, this important job is formalized by only a little more than half of all companies surveyed.   

What’s this job you ask? Sales enablement.

HubSpot defines sales enablement as:

The processes, content, and technology that empower sales teams to sell efficiently at a higher velocity.

No matter what content you write or what stories your brand tells, there’s a good chance a machine can help you do it better.

Artificial intelligence, despite any hype or buzz you hear, is a very real force in the marketing industry—and it’s changing the way brands and people create content.

Oh, premium content. We as marketers love our ebooks, whitepapers and infographics— they’re mutually beneficial pieces of content for both us and the downloader.

On the marketing side, we’re able to gate our content behind a form to gain rich lead generation intelligence, like basic contact information, persona type, content interests or funnel stage. Armed with that info, we can then enroll leads into future marketing programs that are most relevant to them.

If you’re just diving into the world of artificial intelligence (AI), the sheer number of terms and confusing jargon can make the subject seem totally out of reach. Machine learning and deep learning are terms that could make any marketer’s head spin.

But it’s not as confusing as you may think, and because our mission at the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute is to make AI approachable for marketers, we’ll break it down for you.

Exercising your mind, especially in the workplace, is a great way to improve key traits and characteristics needed to fuel a successful career.

One way the PR 20/20 team exercises the mind is by conducting monthly morning meetings to focus on a variety of professional development activities. Not only does this provide the opportunity to support knowledge-share and brush up on our skills, it also provides the chance to learn more about our marketing team and creates a sense of team bonding. Plus, it’s a nice way to break up the daily grind!

Some marketers aren’t afraid to take a risk on new ideas, push leadership on new technology or champion an entirely new methodology. They are often the ones that drive real, lasting change and quickly gain influence.

We call these people change agents.

In the words of a colleague, a change agent is “a visionary who looks beyond, brings vision to life, and successfully champions ideas forward.”

These marketers aren't afraid to take risks to make an impact. So, we decided to spotlight these professionals in an ongoing series, so we can all learn from their successes (and failures too).

In this spotlight, we’ve featured Ellie Mirman (@ellieeille), CMO of Crayon. Crayon provides market and competitive intelligence tools to help businesses track, analyze and act on everything happening outside their four walls. And after growing more than 300% last year, Crayon announced this week that it raised $6M in Series A funding.

Read on to see how Ellie has helped to build marketing programs from startup to scale-up.

This post originally appeared on the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute's blog. The Marketing AI Institute was created and is powered by PR 20/20. 

A lot of people suck at content strategy.

Don't worry: We're only human.

Content strategy is an art and a science, after all. Humans are great at the art part. We excel at the creative side of the process, like the creation of compelling content and telling stories that resonate with customers.

Editor’s Note: The Book Clubbin’ series recaps business and marketing related books read by the PR 20/20 team each quarter as part of the agency book club. This series will highlight key takeaways and top tips directly from each book club book.

In the digital age, marketers now more than ever are looking for ways to make their companies stand out amongst all the noise. However, doing so is often tricky without the right strategy in place.

In this day in age, 50% of Americans would choose word of mouth as their source of information.