AI Agents for Marketing

Content creation and distribution has long been a pain point for marketers. New research from the Content Marketing Institute found that 54% of B2B marketing respondents lack the resources to produce quality content at scale. A similar problem exists in the B2C space: marketers are so busy churning out content that they can’t make their work repeatable, consistent or scalable. Marketers also have to manage resources to make campaigns as efficient and successful as possible - all while engaging customers in ways that separate them from the competition. So what’s the solution for these issues? Marketing AI agents, which use data and AI to help create, manage and optimise campaigns.

According to Salesforce’s 9th State of Marketing Report, 71% of marketers plan to use both generative and predictive AI within the next 18 months.

This article will introduce you to how marketing agents, such as those in Agentforce, can help you to win customers while also making your internal teams more productive and cohesive.

AI agents for marketing are powerful software systems that can automate a variety of marketing tasks. They're often used to improve customer engagement, convert sales and generate leads with AI. These agents can handle tasks like interacting with customers through chatbots, delivering personalised content and adjusting prices in real-time. They work based on predefined rules and algorithms and they can learn and adapt from user interactions over time.

There are a few key differences between agentic AI for marketing and generative and predictive AI for marketing. Agentic AI focuses on making decisions and taking action, like responding to customer enquiries, managing campaigns and executing strategies. Generative AI, on the other hand, is used to create new content, like text, images and videos. Predictive AI is used to forecast future trends and behaviours based on historical data. While generative and predictive AI provide valuable insights and content, agentic AI actively engages in the marketing process to achieve specific goals.

If you’re new to working with AI, it’s worth taking a moment to explain what a marketing agent is and the mindset shift these features will bring to your approach to campaign delivery.

Marketing agents form part of a broader suite of AI virtual assistants. These assistants work with humans to use data to build and execute plans. They analyse and understand the full context of what a human is asking, then reason through decisions on the next steps. In the marketing space, these tasks may include generating content, optimising campaigns, analysing results and more.

These AI agents act as partners to humans within the customer experience. AI agents help you in the flow of work by taking on time-consuming tasks, allowing you to focus on high-value activities.

For marketers, this means spending less time trying to source your data and more time acting on it. It means less time creating multiple versions of content and more time strategising ways to be more targeted and personalised.

Let’s dive into features and explore how agentic AI for marketers can help you build, launch and track campaigns.

Marketing Cloud’s AI functionality, Einstein, already monitors your data and tracks progress against your goals, then provides you with contextual recommendations for where you should focus to better achieve those goals. Marketing AI agents take this a step further by turning that static recommendation into an action.

This might be adjusting an existing audience or campaign or building an entirely new campaign you hadn’t considered before.

When you need to build a new campaign, you need to start with a brief. Marketing AI agents can now build this brief for you, with all the context of your organisation’s goals and marketing guidelines.

Marketers can prompt agents in simple language to create a brief in seconds, which they can then refine until it meets their needs. With Agentforce Campaigns, the brief is already embedded in Salesforce, making it easy to share with stakeholders for approval.

With your brief approved, it’s time to create some content. Marketing AI agents can take that next step by generating emails and landing pages based on your brief and the brand guidelines pre-configured on the platform.

For example, agentic AI for marketers will generate subject lines, body copy and calls to action across email and landing pages, all within a branded template. You can then refine the content using natural language prompts to ensure that it fits tone of voice and campaign strategy.

If you’re not the content expert in your organisation, enlist your creative team for help. As a specialised team, they may be better placed to shape your marketing agent’s pre-configured guidelines and the final outputs.

You might not be an SQL expert, but you definitely know the kinds of customers you want to target. Marketing agents allow everyone to build an audience.

You can use natural language prompts to describe the target audience you want and the agent will translate that into the appropriate segment attributes.

Successful campaigns are activated through intelligent, multi-channel journeys where personalisation is integrated into every step. Marketing agents help you to activate and scale your campaign automatically by building a full journey flow from the original brief.

Using a natural language prompt, autonomous agents for marketing will configure a draught journey with all your campaign content that you can further refine, approve and activate.

Marketers have been constrained by how many content variations they could produce within a given timeframe or budget. Marketing agents can now generate multiple content versions in seconds.

Take advantage of this capability by strategically planning for hyper-personalised content in your brief with a marketing AI agent doing the heavy lifting. For example, the agent can automatically generate different content for high-value customers versus those who are new to the brand versus more seasoned fans.

Many organisations rely on specialised data science teams for segment creation. These teams are often at capacity, limiting the number of segments a marketer can request. With marketing agents, you can build segments on your own, allowing you to explore more nuanced audiences.

For example, you can use a virtual agent to build separate churn segments based on engagement scores, age, location or past purchase behaviour with a simple natural language prompt.

Testing often falls low on a marketer’s priority list due to time constraints. Marketing agents automate the build of your journey flow, making it easier to embed testing into your campaigns.

This is a game-changer as you can now incorporate continuous testing and learning into every campaign without significantly increasing time spent.

Agentforce Campaigns is generally available in Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions for small businesses. Learn more about how the technology works.