Darby Sieben, Chief Product Officer at Unbounce catches up with MarTechSeries to discuss the impact AI is set to have across modern marketing norms:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Darby, tell us about yourself and more about your role at Unbounce…

Thanks for the opportunity to speak to your readers!

Currently I am Chief Product Officer for Unbounce and I have been with the company since June 2022. Prior to joining Unbounce, I was with Royal Bank of Canada leading RBC Ampli Inc., a consumer focused cashback application which is now being rebranded as Ampli by Avion Rewards. Prior to RBC, I led the digital transformation of Yellow Pages Group in Canada as we transitioned from a print directory to one of Canada’s leading digital sellers of websites, search and digital advertising focused on the SMB segment.

Switching back to Unbounce, I usually get the question – why Unbounce? First, Unbounce is an iconic brand when it comes to the landing page space. Second, as I learned more about the company, I really started to appreciate its dedication to helping marketers. Their vision for how they’re leveraging their data to build AI-powered products was really exciting.

Unbounce’s mission from day one was to pair marketers with tools that help them drive better performance. The foundation of this thinking was grounded in the belief that a dedicated landing page can outperform a static website. We proved that over the years. Today, the product organization is thinking about all the new tools we can use to continue to push this mission forward. Unbounce was an early adopter in using ML with our first release of Smart Traffic back in 2019. Today we’ve expanded our portfolio to include Smart Builder – our AI-powered landing page builder. It is safe to say that within our product stack, the question of how we pair AI tools with marketers permeates our thinking.

Unbounce is in a very unique position to make this happen since we have over 2 billion data points and growing on what drives conversions, and can pair this with various use cases to give our clients a real competitive advantage.

We’d love to hear about Unbounce’s newest AI powered feature and how it changes the game for end users?

We are really excited about what we are building. The foundation of our AI products is our wealth of conversion data. To give some context, over the past number of years we have seen  20+ billion visitors pass through our landing pages and have generated 2+ billion conversions. That is a lot of data that can be used to provide insights, benchmarking and recommendations for marketers. Our mission, even before AI came on the scene, has always been to build tools that help marketers generate their highest performing campaigns as possible. As a company we have been using AI for a number of years, but with the latest advancements in AI, it has allowed us to accelerate at a faster pace and do things today that were not possible before.

Our AI journey started with reimaging traffic routing. Before Smart Traffic our clients had to leverage A/B testing which is powerful but has limitations, especially if you try to test a lot of variants. With Smart Traffic our marketers can deploy as many variants as possible and our tool can segment which ones work for a specific set of traffic conditions. This is incredibly powerful and the results speak for themselves. On average, our clients see a 30% lift in their conversion rates when using Smart Traffic.

The second AI product is our Smart Builder. We see this builder as the intersection between a great user experience and giving a machine eyes to help us really understand the relationship between copy, headlines, images, placement and conversions. Pair this with Smart Traffic and we have an incredible one-two punch when it comes to driving performance. Finally add to that insights, benchmarking, reporting and recommendations and we see Unbounce as a critical partner for any marketer.

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How is AI in your view driving greater impact across modern marketing and advertising operations and what do you feel about the future impact of this emerging tech?

AI is going to have a lot of impact in the marketing and advertising space from ideation, to content creation, to performance optimization, to in-depth stats and reporting to name a few. We probably have not seen a technology this powerful that can literally impact all aspects of the marketers journey since perhaps the early days of programmatic advertising.

For marketers, I think it is important to get on the bandwagon. Start playing with these tools. They are going to be part of your mix either today or tomorrow, but I can’t foresee a future where some aspect of AI is not being used. I think the challenge today for marketers is how to sift through all the noise related to AI. What is really impressive is how quickly the use cases are being discovered and socialized. For companies building AI tools this is great to see, as the conversations around what use cases AI can be used for are in abundance. For marketers it is important to understand what companies are doing within the use cases they want to solve, how they are integrating with AI models and what data sets those companies have that are unique.

What best practices do you feel B2B marketing teams should follow when implementing AI powered tools as early or first time users?

Before adopting any new AI tool, it is important to frame the problems you are trying to solve in order to level-set on your objectives. Those problems could mean many things to different marketers. The way we think about a marketers challenge at Unbounce generally falls into 4 buckets – Building on Brand Content, publishing faster, delivering performance and giving you insights and recommendations on improving your campaign.

As a marketer, I think there are two important considerations:

1. What is your objective? It is hard to imagine, especially, in the marketing space, a use case where AI could not be an advantage. However, the challenge is that every day new tools are popping up and it can be easy to fall in love with the tools instead of falling in love with the objective. A clear objective will really help a marketer cut through the noise.
2. Horizontal or vertically focused tools. With the advent of ChatGPT, the horizontal nature of AI came into the mainstream. What we are seeing now, and will see more of, are the vertical solutions trained on specific data sets built more specifically to drive results against certain objectives.

The last comment I would encourage B2B marketers to consider when looking at AI tools, is to simply start using them.

AI tools are going to be a competitive advantage and an accelerator. I think the companies that start to adopt these tools, use them, and understand what they mean for their customers and their business operations are going to be ahead of those marketers who may be initially resistant.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the ‘’AI will take your job’’ debate and what top thoughts you’d share with the industry based on it?

In general we don’t think AI will take marketers jobs, however, those jobs will change. There are aspects of AI that will be a massive accelerator, for example generating a first draft of content, generating an initial landing page quickly, or spinning up variants in real-time matched to a particular audience. The exciting part, from my perspective, is that this should allow the marketer to spend more time thinking and executing on higher end complex problems as opposed to more mundane tasks.

One way we are thinking about this internally is that AI won’t be better at all aspects of your job today, but you will be better at your job with AI. We still strongly believe that pairing a human marketer with incredible tools is a winning formula.

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