Modern marketers rely heavily on data to make informed decisions and predictions.
Behind dozens of dashboards, however, could be blind spots that prevent you from seeing additional business and time-savings potential.
With so much data at your fingertips, it can be difficult to identify unexpected changes in real time when they're hiding in these blind spots. Sometimes, those changes could mean huge revenue-boosting opportunity or a red flag that could cost significant time down the road.
But AI has the capacity to sift through mountains of data at incredible speed, giving marketers the important notifications that help them make better business decisions.
We sat down with Jennifer Ellard, VP of Marketing at Outlier, to learn more.
In a single sentence or statement, describe your company.
Outlier discovers unexpected changes and patterns in your data automatically.
How does your company use artificial intelligence in its products?
Outlier uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically identify unexpected changes across business data so that marketing, data scientists and analysts can make more informed decisions quickly. Outlier works with customers across industry segments to apply machine learning to automatically serve up business-critical insight exactly when those insights are needed.
By automatically delivering these insights, it saves our customers millions of dollars in otherwise lost opportunities and hours of time every day by removing blind spots in their business. Those blind spots hide behind modern dashboards, but don’t hide from Outlier.
What are the primary marketing use cases for your AI-powered solutions?
Outlier works with marketing departments to analyze opportunities and risks across all marketing channels, including these example use cases:
- “Outlier discovered activity from a social media campaign was greatly spiking and led us to investigate further. We were able to link fraudulent activity to that campaign, which saved us months of man-hours.”
- Identified product interest increase for online retailer, Jack Rogers, resulting in a 30% year-over-year sales increase.
- Pointed out a direct relationship between a web promotion code and customer support tickets for Zillow.
- “Outlier analyzes all of the drug prescription and information to identify shifts in prescription rates and insurance payment rates. These insights fuel business strategy, sales tactics, and overall business planning.”
What makes your AI-powered solution smarter than traditional approaches and products?
Adding more dashboards to monitor your business is yesterday’s approach.
Today, customer behavior and market patterns change frequently. Organizations need a way to know what’s going on in their businesses immediately, but simply don’t have time to consolidate data and perform deep analysis.
Outlier automatically identifies unexpected changes across business data so that marketing, data scientists and analysts can make more informed decisions quickly. As an Automated Business Analysis platform, Outlier discovers hidden patterns and relationships that are impossible to find manually without artificial intelligence algorithms.
Marketers that use Outlier are automatically alerted of areas of opportunity and risk for their marketing campaigns, which saves them time, optimizes their marketing spend and allows them to be data-driven in their marketing decisions.
Are there any minimum requirements for marketers to get value out of your AI-powered technology? (e.g. data, list size, etc.)
No, we can analyze billions of data points so customers can spend more time focusing on their business.
Who are your ideal customers in terms of company size and industries?
Currently, most of our customers are marketing or data analytics teams at companies that are 250+ employees. Our product can be applied to most industries, but we are currently working with retail, CPG, finance, insurance, and pharmaceutical companies.
What do you see as the limitations of AI as it exists today?
AI dashboards are not clear nor are they focused on a path to optimization. AI dashboards also do not offer more actionable insights; they just report on KPIs.
The data analysis AI produces needs to be presented in a way that is clear and does not confuse any stakeholder, regardless of whether or not that person is a data scientist.
What do you see as the future potential of AI in marketing?
AI can quickly help empower marketing teams to take advantage of new business opportunities based on existing data.
Any other thoughts on AI in marketing, or advice for marketers who are just starting with AI?
AI in marketing can help marketers make more informed business decisions quickly, which will allow them to more accurately know where they should direct their scare marketing resources so as to have the most impact on their business.
Paul Roetzer
Paul Roetzer is founder and CEO of Marketing AI Institute. He is the author of Marketing Artificial Intelligence (Matt Holt Books, 2022) The Marketing Performance Blueprint (Wiley, 2014) and The Marketing Agency Blueprint (Wiley, 2012); and creator of the Marketing AI Conference (MAICON).