Molly St. Louis, Head of Marketing at Dealtale, a Vianai Company discusses how marketers can capitalize on the benefits of AI to drive their brand’s online campaigns and journeys:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Molly – tell us about your marketing journey and more about your role at Dealtale…

My story at Dealtale is one of those full circle kind of things. I started my working life as an actor. I trained from a very young age, joined the unions and put myself through school working as a stage manager.

But after I graduated from the academy, I got a job in commercial production and got obsessed with marketing and the way we can use creative communication to drive action.

Long story short, I found myself as the head of marketing for a surgery center by the time I was 25 and built it into a multi-million dollar business mostly by using video production tactics. While I was at the surgery center, one of the doctors I represented asked “Hey, how do I get on Dr. Oz?” I honestly didn’t know. I thought it might be through an agent.

But through some investigating, I found out publicists pitch clients for that kind of thing. Given my background in production and marketing, I thought I’d probably love working in PR. So, I made it my mission to work for a publicity firm, which I quickly did, and I learned so much. And, yes, we did book people on Dr. Oz!

Some years later, my husband, who is an actor, got a project that moved us from California to New York. I started my own video and PR firm, so I could travel with him wherever his shoots were. One of my first tech clients was a company called Mintigo and the marketing director there was Ariel Geifman, who would later become the co-founder of Dealtale.

Eight years and several companies later, Ariel calls me because he’s co-created this technology that can prove the ROI of every marketing touchpoint.

The Dealtale product was exciting to me and Ariel is brilliant and I wanted the opportunity to learn from him. So I took on the role of head of marketing to help bring Dealtale to the B2B SaaS world.

We’d love to hear about some of Dealtale’s latest innovations and more about Dealtale IQ as well…

Dealtale does really deep customer journey tracking. It can actually track website visitors while they are still anonymous, based on their IP address. Then, when they become known by filling out a form, a complete picture of their customer journey is created – even if that journey to fill out a form was a year long, as it often is in B2B.

A lot can be done with this information in Dealtale. You can track your best or worst customer journeys, improve them or double down on what’s working. My favorite part is that you can confidently assign a dollar value to every marketing touchpoint. So for example, if you got a story in Business Insider, wrote a blog or produced a video, you can actually see how the traffic generated from those top-of-funnel activities turned into revenue later down the line. It’s really valuable when you’re strategizing.

That’s historic Dealtale. Now we have Dealtale IQ, our ChatGPT-like feature that allows marketers to type any question about their performance data and get the answer in a few seconds. This feature is really important to us because we found there to be a huge discrepancy in data accessibility across marketing teams. Those who work in demand generation, for example, are used to building reports and found our previous product easy to navigate. But those without data backgrounds felt a bit intimidated because they don’t know the technicalities of building reports. We wanted to eliminate that friction by letting them ask exactly what they want to know in plain English and get an answer immediately.

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How are you seeing the impact of AI change the game for modern marketers and what thoughts do you have for the future?

Marketers are usually very creative people, and no creative person wants to be stuck doing busy work. It can drain all the creativity right out of you!

My hope is that marketers will use AI as a tool to be more creative, but not lean on it to do the creative work for them.

ChatGPT is an amazing research tool that can take hours away from scanning the web for information (which can be totally draining). Also, it’s a great cure for writer’s block, as it gives a pretty good first draft. Marketers can use AI-generated information as a jumping off point to creating their campaigns.

ChatGPT-like technology for data discovery can have a similar impact on creative campaigns. Marketers don’t have to waste time trying to get data on cross-channel performance when they can get instant answers. This will help them quickly pivot their creative strategies and be optimally effective.

ChatGPT has been taking the online industry by storm the last few months, can you talk about some of the lasting effects you feel will now influence how marketers choose to use tools like this to drive output and processes?

We recently conducted a survey about how people feel about AI in marketing. We asked questions to gauge if they are excited to use it or not, whether they think it’s creepy or cool, and whether they think it will take their jobs. A lot of the answers were split down the middle – showing two very different types, which I think are: those who work to be inspired, and those who work to earn a paycheck and don’t want change.

Marketers that are obsessed with excellence will capitalize on and innovate on top of generative AI. They’re not afraid that AI will take their job because they’re up for the challenge of evolving. From these kinds of marketers, I think we’ll see a huge number of use cases for scaling creativity with AI. For example, think about the promise the metaverse holds for marketers. Imagine how much more quickly the metaverse could be built using generative AI as a base, then using real creatives to come and build out the special details that will lead to opportunities for marketing engagement.

When it comes to the state of B2B marketing today, what are some of the dominant trends that you feel will influence the industry through 2023?

Over the last couple of years, there’s been a lot of talk in the B2B world about tech companies needing to become media companies. Most of this talk has been around using new platforms for media distribution – having a single destination for video consumption, producing podcasts, working with media partners, etc.

I think we’ll definitely see most top companies moving in this direction.

But what’s more interesting is the rise of brand-funded films. Sundance has its own sanctioned event for these, usually documentary, films that speak to the ethos of the brand while telling very compelling stories.

I think that B2B audiences will get tired of reading or watching ChatGPT-generated content very quickly, and brands that really invest in telling vivid and visually beautiful human stories will rise to the top.

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A few common misconceptions about AI in marketing you’d like to dispel?

As cool as AI is, it will never take the jobs of great human marketing creatives. The job of marketers is literally to stand out from the crowd and differentiate our companies.

AI is only able to learn from what is already out there and was created by humans. If everyone starts using ChatGPT to write their ads, scripts and blogs, the work will always end up sounding the same as everyone else.

The ones who will win revenue will be the ones who see what’s out there and continuously find new angles and avenues for remarkable creativity.